Streetsblog New York City

It barely made news and we didn’t hear a peep about it from any elected, but at least three children were seriously injured by drivers in Brooklyn and the Bronx late last week.

On the morning of Thursday, May 2, a 12-year-old boy was hit by a motorist at Bath Avenue and 24th Street, near Bath Playground and Joseph B. Cavallaro Junior High School. According to the Post, the child suffered head trauma, and was “expected to survive.”

At around the same time, another 12-year-old boy was hit by a school bus driver while riding his bike on 12th Avenue at 40th Street in Borough Park. From the Post:

Witnesses said he was struck by the rear tire while the bus was making a wide turn.

She Rosenbaum, 38, said the child stopped in his store to buy a soda before the accident, and then got on the bicycle.

“I saw the kid’s leg under the bus. I called the Hatzollah ambulance,” said She Rosenabum, 38. “He was screaming and yelling in pain.”

Rosenbaum said the child’s mother came to see him, and was distraught. “She was definitely crying ‘what happened? What’s going to be? I want you to live’,” he said. “He comes here every morning.”

On Saturday, a 7-year-old boy was struck by a driver on East Gun Hill Road at Decatur Avenue in the Bronx. News 12 reported that the child exited a double-parked van before he was hit. He was hospitalized in stable condition.

Traffic crashes have for some time been the leading cause of injury-related death for children in New York City. According to the latest report on child injury deaths from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene [PDF], 144 kids aged one through 12 were killed in crashes from 2001 to 2010. Of those victims, 93 — or 65 percent — were pedestrians.

Since January 2012, no fewer than 11 kids aged 14 and under have been killed by city motorists, according to crash data compiled by Streetsblog.

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After local residents and community organizations began organizing to bring bike lanes to East New York and Brownsville last year, NYC DOT is developing a plan to stripe the first bike routes directly through these neighborhoods, and more could be on the way.

The process underway in eastern Brooklyn offers an intriguing glimpse at how the city can develop neighborhood-scale bike plans — especially promising for areas with high rates of chronic disease, where safer biking and walking can encourage more physical activity.

About 20 people gathered at the YMCA on Jamaica Avenue yesterday evening to discuss what’s holding East New York residents back from biking more, and to share ideas with DOT and the Department of Health about how to improve local cycling conditions. They heard from DOT about two bike routes that are in the works and hashed out where they think more bike lanes should go.

The Department of Health is taking an active role in East New York because residents have higher-than-average incidences of chronic diseases like diabetes. According to department surveys, local residents report lower than average levels of physical activity, and DOH has identified street design as a major factor. Currently there are no bike lanes in the neighborhood, and many street crossings pose a challenge for pedestrians.

Working with local organizations like the Brownsville Partnership, the Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, and the Pitkin Avenue BID, DOH and DOT put on a group ride around the neighborhood last October and distributed surveys to find out how local residents want to improve local biking conditions.

As a result of those surveys, DOT identified two routes to serve as the backbone of the neighborhood bike network: a north-south route on Mother Gaston Boulevard and an east-west route on Pitkin Avenue. Both would consist of painted bike lanes between the parking lane and traffic lane where the streets are sufficiently wide, and sharrows where the streets are narrower. DOT has also mapped out locations for bike racks, which are currently very scarce in the neighborhood. The tentative plan is to show the bike routes to Community Board 16 this fall in preparation for spring 2013 implementation.

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Every year, the Department of Health releases a report on the injuries that kill NYC children [PDF]. And every year, the grim statistics show traffic to be the single largest cause of injury-related death among kids.

Between 2001 and 2009, 1,681 children under 13 years old died in New York City, 324 of them from unintentional injuries. Of those, 41 percent — 134 children — were killed in traffic crashes. Most of them were on foot when they were hit by a car or truck driver.

“Unintentional motor vehicle traffic accidents contributed the most to child injury deaths in NYC overall, with more than three quarters of deaths occurring among pedestrians,” the authors write.

The first report in this series focused specifically on traffic crashes, detailing specifically how motor vehicles kill New York City children. Last year’s report examined the massive racial inequalities in traffic fatalities; though 26.6 percent of New York City residents are black, black children make up 46 percent of all kids killed by cars.

This year, the Department of Health expanded the scope of its research to include serious injuries as well as fatalities. Between 2001 and 2008, 4,944 children were hospitalized with injuries from traffic crashes. Again, most were walking when hit. Traffic crashes are not the leading cause of hospitalizations among kids — about twice as many are caused by falls.

As preventable as these injuries are, and as much as these numbers need to come down, the rate of traffic injuries and fatalities suffered by NYC kids is lower than other American cities. Because New Yorkers extensively ride transit and walk rather than drive, child traffic deaths are three times lower per capita than the national average. New York’s far safer transportation system saves enough lives that it is the primary reason why the overall mortality rate for local kids is 30 percent below the national average.

In addition to urging parents to buckle in their children properly and teach them to cross the street safely, the Department of Health repeated its call for Albany to authorize camera enforcement of the speed limit on dangerous streets. Legislation to that effect went nowhere in the state legislature this spring.

Last Friday, Transportation Alternatives kicked off a new phase of its campaign for safer streets with the Stop Speeding Summit, bringing together doctors, elected officials, transportation advocates and engineers to outline the high costs of high vehicle speeds and plot a course toward slower traffic.

We’ll be bringing you a series of posts from Friday’s event and wanted to let Thomas Farley, the city’s health commissioner, start things off. Farley laid out the public health argument for 20 mph traffic at the summit and offered to send Health Department staff to community boards and other public meetings to lend some lab coat gravitas to livable streets arguments.

Farley made clear that building safer streets is a top priority for him as a health professional. “We are living in the era of chronic diseases and injuries as the top killers,” he explained. Nearly all the top killers in New York are chronic diseases, with heart disease topping the list. “Accidents,” a category which includes traffic crashes, come in at number four.

That means promoting physical activity is a public health necessity. “Even just taking transit as opposed to driving could make a substantial reduction in heart disease deaths,” Farley said, adding that walking or biking for longer distances would improve health even more.

Because obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other conditions correlated to the lack of physical activity are so widespread, Farley said that New York needs to address them by redesigning the city, not through individual conversations with doctors. “The way that we have an impact on the entire population is change the environment in which they live,” he said.

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The city's Department of Health has made encouraging physical activity, which can help prevent obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other ailments, a top priority. As part of promoting healthy lifestyles, the Department's Brooklyn District Public Health Office spent last summer studying cyclist behavior in Bedford-Stuyvesant to learn who in that neighborhood travels by bike, and how, so as to better be able to promote cycling in the broader North and Central Brooklyn area. The recently released results [PDF] provide a rare neighborhood-scale look at who cycles, how they ride, and what they think of biking conditions. 

DOH studied cyclists on four blocks with bike lanes. Two, DeKalb Avenue where it crosses Throop and Bedford Avenue where it crosses Fulton Street, had buffered lanes. The others, Tompkins at Putnam and Franklin at Myrtle, had unbuffered painted lanes. The researchers gathered most of their data on cyclist behavior using video cameras, and also conducted more than 300 surveys. 

During the 10 recorded hours at each intersection, spread across the week, over 2,400 cyclists rode through the study areas: more than one per minute at each crossing. Most cyclists -- 89 percent -- rode in the bike lane, and those riders were obstructed by an illegally parked or idling car fully 10 percent of the time captured on camera. 

Demographically, 80 percent of the cyclists were men, with 40 percent identifying as black, 39 percent as white, 15 percent as Hispanic, and two percent as Asian. They tended to be regular commuters, with 65 percent reporting biking for half an hour or more at least five days in the previous week, and most lived in the area.

The survey also underscored the need for further bike safety improvements across the city. Of the cyclists surveyed, 27 percent had been involved in a crash in the last three years alone and a full 74 percent had felt unsafe on their bike. 

One reason that DOH survey is particularly important is the lack of decent data about biking behavior outside Manhattan. DOT's screenline count tracks only the crossings into the Manhattan CBD while a Department of City Planning study from last year looked at Manhattan bike lanes between 2001 and 2008. Census data covers the entire city, but is believed to undercount cycling by ignoring non-commute trips. These Bed-Stuy numbers may only be a one-year snapshot of a single neighborhood, but it's all part of painting a fuller picture of New York City cyclists. 

New York's public transportation keeps children alive. New York City traffic kills them. Those are the fundamental facts that explain injury fatality rates among the city's children, according to the Department of Health.

Last week the health department released their fourth yearly report on children's injury deaths [PDF]. As in past years, motor vehicles are the leading cause of death due to injury among children. Between 2001 and 2008, 1,535 children died in New York City, 445 from injuries. Of those, 106 were killed by motor vehicles. The overwhelming majority of these victims were walking at the time they were fatally struck, while a few were in cars themselves or on bikes or scooters. The first report in this series focused more closely on traffic crashes and offered a more detailed look at how cars kill children.

In this year's report, the Department of Health focused on disparities in fatalities, and the unequal burden of traffic couldn't be clearer. For instance, 26.6 percent of city residents are black, but black children account for 46 percent of the transportation injuries that claim the lives of New Yorkers age 12 and under.

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Lappin imagines the office creating a citywide response to unsafe streets, combining design improvements with better enforcement, education and research. The Office of Road Safety would host monthly meetings with all the relevant government agencies: DOT, NYPD, the Health Department, and the vehicular crimes unit of all five district attorneys' offices. Family members of victims would be present at every session to meet with officials.

"By working together and making road safety a priority," Lappin said, "our city agencies can save lives."

The idea comes from Transportation Alternatives' report "Executive Order," and TA has endorsed the bill. "Every time these agencies have sat around the same table, it has yielded huge gains for street safety," said TA Executive Director Paul Steely White. "We need to institute and formalize this coordination."  

Other council members have also signaled their support. Although they haven't yet signed on as co-sponsors, council members Jimmy Van Bramer, Daniel Dromm, Gale Brewer and Robert Jackson have issued strong statements in favor of the Office of Road Safety. As for hearings and moving the bill forward in committee, Council Member Lappin is expected to meet with transportation committee chair Jimmy Vacca soon.

What resources the Office of Road Safety would have at its disposal is an open question. According to a Lappin spokesperson, details like funding and staffing will be hashed out once the bill gets a committee hearing. Dedicated staff could spell the difference between a valuable monthly gathering with limited authority and an office with some bureaucratic heft.

City officials, architects, planners, and public health advocates crammed into the Center for Architecture last night for the unveiling of New York City's Active Design Guidelines.

Heralded as a first-of-its-kind collaboration between four city departments -- Health, Transportation, Design and Construction, and City Planning -- the effort underscores that New Yorkers, as much as we like to think of  ourselves as a city of walkers, need to live healthier lifestyles.

The statistics touched on last night (included in the manual’s opening chapter), reveal that the majority of adults in New York City are either overweight or obese. More alarming, perhaps, is that 43 percent of elementary school children are overweight, and the rate is rising.

As sobering as those numbers are, Health Commissioner Thomas Farley stressed that the city’s effort "is not just about lowering obesity rates, but also about addressing diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis, depression, and cognitive decline.” Such chronic diseases, he stated, are exacerbated by how we currently design the built environment and may be quelled with even the most moderate amounts of exercise, whether it be from walking, bicycling, or even climbing the stairs.

To this end, livable streets activists will find much to applaud in the pages of the Active Design Guidelines. Inside, many elements of the city's new Street Design Manual are further substantiated with research indicating that safer streets will translate to a markedly healthier city. From mixing land uses to -- yes -- addressing the supply and location of parking, the guidelines focus on the role urban design should play in making New York City a healthier place to live.

While this is a far-reaching and impressive document that other cities should seek to emulate, it is, in the end, only guidelines. The hard part, as always, is executing the wisest policies and enacting the right recommendations.

The NYC Department of Health announced the results of a citywide survey today [PDF] assessing the health benefits of regular walking and biking. Based on telephone interviews with more than 10,000 New Yorkers, the health department reveals that people who incorporate walking and biking into their daily routine are significantly more likely to report good physical and mental health than those who don't. The report concludes with recommendations to encourage walking and biking, including steps like building safer infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists.

There's a lot of interesting numbers to comb through, including some geographic data with big implications for New York City neighborhoods. First off, here are some of the major takeaways:

• Sixteen percent of New Yorkers incorporate walking, biking, running, or skating into their daily commute.*
  
• Eighty-three percent of adult New Yorkers who regularly walk or bike for transportation report excellent, very good or good health, compared to 70 percent of those who do not.
• The correlation between better health and frequent walking and biking is significant, regardless of income level.
• Only 10 percent of New Yorkers who regularly walk or bike report frequent mental distress, compared to 14 percent of those who do not regularly walk or bike.
• Men are significantly more likely to bike to work in New York City than women.

So in nerve-fraying NYC, getting around using your own muscle power can help alleviate mental stress. And walking and biking improves your chances of living in good health, no matter how much money you make. Chalk up more data to support Elana Schor's coinage from earlier this year: "Transportation reform is health reform."

But the cycling gender divide is real, and it's not the only significant discrepancy revealed by this report. Geographically, there are major variations in the percentage of New Yorkers who walk and bike regularly. Follow the jump to see the DOH map.

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