The city's first 20 miles per hour slow zone, in the Claremont neighborhood of the Bronx, uses "gateway" treatments to slow drivers entering the zone. Neighborhoods across the city want to be the next to get the new safety treatment. Photo: Noah Kazis

The deadline to apply to NYC DOT for a neighborhood slow zone is tomorrow, and groups from many different corners of New York are making their case for bringing a 20 mph speed limit and traffic calming measures to their neighborhoods.

“We are hearing from people applying for zones all over the city,” said Lindsey Ganson, Transportation Alternatives’ safety campaign director.

One exciting application comes from the Bronx Helpers, the team of middle and high-schoolers who have been fighting for safety improvements near their school at 172nd Street and Townsend for two years. The group started by asking just for a stop sign, collecting over 1,000 signatures from their neighbors. When DOT rejected their request without explanation, the group teamed up with TA, measured speeding with radar guns and counted pedestrian volumes, and changed their request to emphasize traffic calming.

Now the Bronx Helpers are working through DOT’s new slow zone program to try and get neighborhood-wide safety fixes. “We thought it was a great opportunity to expand and make the whole area more pedestrian-friendly,” said Bronx Helpers staff member Molly Berman.

The group applied for the entirety of the Mt. Eden section of the Bronx, located between 174th Street, 170th Street, the Grand Concourse and Jerome Avenue. With four schools, two daycares and a senior center in the area, it’s a neighborhood with lots of pedestrians who need safer streets.

Signing on in support of the slow speed zone are a slew of neighborhood groups and some prominent political figures. Three school principals wrote letters of support, as did a tenants’ rights organization, Bronx Community Board 4, and the Deputy Borough President, Aurelia Greene.

Also writing in support of the proposal is Public Advocate Bill de Blasio.”I believe it is clear that their proposed Slow Zone — from 10th to 174th and Grand Concourse to Jerome Avenue — is based on strong stakeholder engagement and presents compelling evidence of the need for greater pedestrian safety,” de Blasio wrote in a letter to DOT.

In Rego Park, Queens, Council Member Karen Koslowitz is championing the neighborhood’s slow zone application. The Rego Park Green Alliance submitted the bid for the triangle between Woodhaven Boulevard, 63rd Drive and the Long Island Railroad tracks. In addition to writing DOT, Koslowitz promised to bring the department on a tour of the neighborhood, said Yvonne Shortt, who has helped lead the push for the slow zone.

“I applied because on December 22, I saw a girl almost killed by two cars speeding and traveling in opposite directions on the narrow streets of Alderton,” Shortt told Streetsblog. “That was the last straw.” Residents and local businesses alike have signed her petition showing neighborhood support for slower speeds. Shortt argued that her neighborhood’s residential character makes it a good fit for the 20 mph zone. “Cars don’t realize how narrow the streets are. They’re already going too fast.”

The Fort Greene Association has perhaps the most ambitious proposal, asking for not one but two separate slow zones. “It didn’t seem fair to exclude one neighborhood,” explained Laura MacNeil, a member of the association’s livable streets committee.

MacNeil said that the genesis of the slow speed zone requests came in a survey she sent out to neighborhood residents last fall, asking about their transportation priorities for the neighborhood. Traffic calming came in at number one, both among residents on larger avenues and smaller residential roads. ”The slow zone seemed like a great way to systematically address a lot of the concerns that were mentioned,” MacNeil said. In a follow-up survey specifically about the slow zones, MacNeil heard from a number of residents asking for the slow zone to extend out to their block, but not from a single person opposed to the idea.

Among local leaders, too, the slow zone has significant support. City Council Member Letitia James, Assembly Member Joseph Lentol, and the Myrtle Avenue BID have all signed on in favor of the slow zone, as have a number of block associations.

In other neighborhoods, groups that want to apply have had a difficult time working within the rules governing this first round of slow zones. The Brownsville Partnership, for example, almost didn’t submit its application for a slow zone since it is neither a civic association, BID, or community board, said Nupur Chaudhury, who is managing the Partnership’s “Creating Healthy Places” project. Today the organization secured the local community board as a partner, and will file a joint application for a Brownsville slow zone, she said.

On the Upper West Side, it was the geography of the neighborhood that proved challenging. DOT is looking for areas roughly five blocks by five blocks, with clear geographic boundaries inside of which are only residential streets. On the Upper West Side, where most of the north-south streets are busy commercial arterials, such a location was hard to find, said Upper West Side Streets Renaissance organizer Lisa Sladkus.

Given the nature of the neighborhood, said Sladkus, her organization is pushing instead for a neighborhood-wide 20 mph speed limit, as was reported by the Columbia Spectator. That kind of change would fall well outside DOT’s current practices, but Sladkus is hoping to build support among schools and senior centers and then the community board.

Slow zone applications have been submitted or considered in at least three other neighborhoods, according to TA’s Ganson. David Sheppard, whose fiancee Sonya Powell was killed by a speeding driver, is working on an application for the Wakefield neighborhood of the Bronx, where she was hit. You can sign the Prospect Heights Development Corporation’s petition supporting their slow zone proposal here. And at a Park Slope Civic Council forum on slow zones, 90 percent of people were in favor of installing one on their street.

“These zones will have a dramatic impact on safety in the selected communities and will raise awareness about the dangers of speeding citywide,” said Ganson. “The demand for them in just the first year of the program has been extraordinary.”

An exhaustive report published in the British Medical Journal found that traffic injuries declined in London's 20 mph zones and, to a lesser but still significant extent, on the streets immediately adjacent to the zones. Image: British Medical Journal

The Brooklyn Paper ran one of its trademark neighbor-vs.-neighbor stories today, turning a weekend public workshop about implementing a 20 mph zone in Park Slope into an occasion for more conflict-driven reporting:

Greenwood Heights activists claim drivers heading south on Sixth Avenue already speed up once they cross the Prospect Expressway and hit a five-block stretch between 20th and 25th streets with no stop signs.

“It’s already treacherous,” said resident Sarah Raskin. “This would divert unsafe driving from one neighborhood to another.”

Sounds like streets in Greenwood Heights need traffic calming too. And in fact, the Greenwood Heights residents quoted in the Brooklyn Paper seem to be saying they’d welcome a slow zone that encompasses their neighborhood.

It would be great to see a blanket 20 mph speed limit — pioneered by NYC DOT in the Bronx neighborhood of Claremont — extend to many neighborhoods at once. But if Park Slope gets a slow zone before Greenwood Heights, or if Greenwood Heights gets a slow zone before Park Slope, research suggests both neighborhoods will still be better off.

The definitive piece of research on 20 mph zones was published in the British Medical Journal in 2009. Reviewing 20 years of data, researchers found that London’s 20 mph zones, a patchwork of neighborhoods that expanded gradually over many years, prevent 27 traffic deaths and serious injuries annually. Within the zones, serious traffic injuries and deaths fell 46 percent, and children sustained 50 percent fewer casualties.

Significantly, the authors reported that the data “suggests that casualties inside 20 mph zones are not being displaced to nearby roads.” And on top of that, they found a spillover effect, with traffic injuries and deaths declining eight percent in areas adjacent to the slow zones (within 150 meters, or about two NYC blocks).

Adding slow zones is not a zero-sum game.

Last October, two drivers traveling at high speeds crashed at the corner of Lafayette and Vanderbilt, jumping the curb. Photo: Fort Greene Patch

There’s still a long way to go before an official redesign moves forward, but Cohen and Loxton’s impressive organizing has revived the idea of redesigning Lafayette, and it’s a great case study in how to mobilize for safer streets.

Cohen and Loxton both live in Fort Greene and bike, walk and drive on Lafayette with their kids. They told the CB 2 committee last night that the street feels like it’s geared more toward fast-moving cars than people, with two eastbound traffic lanes and two parking lanes. The galvanizing moment for them came last October, when two drivers crashed at high speeds at the corner of Lafayette and Vanderbilt Avenue, jumping the curb outside a packed church.

The next week, they started gathering signatures supporting “traffic calming and a bike lane” on Lafayette. Their regular sign-up spot was the farmers market by Fort Greene Park. Since the weekend of the New York City marathon in early November, 1,500 people have signed the petition in writing and another 100 have signed it online.

“You would just say ‘Lafayette’ and people would want to talk to us,” said Loxton. “In the cold, they would stop.”

Cohen said petition-signers described Lafayette as a “notorious speedway,” and parents shared fears of letting 10-year-old kids cross the street alone. On a recent Friday evening, she clocked drivers routinely exceeding the speed limit by 7 – 10 mph.

Under the banner “Make Lafayette Safer,” Cohen and Loxton propose extending the Lafayette Avenue bike lane from Fulton Street to Broadway, preferably on the left-hand side of the street, and adding sidewalk extensions and more prominent crosswalks at intersections. In addition to providing a useful new link in the bike network, especially for cyclists heading east from the Manhattan Bridge or neighborhoods on the other side of Flatbush Avenue, striping the bike lane could curb speeding by reducing excessive capacity for car traffic.

Following the committee vote, there will probably be another vote at the full Community Board before DOT puts out a plan to redesign Lafayette. (“If we hear a lot of support from the community, that could move things forward,” said DOT’s Chris Hrones last night.) There may also be some action at Community Board 3, which covers Lafayette east of Classon Avenue.

While “Make Lafayette Safer” has the backing of City Council Member Tish James and the Fort Greene Association, a Lafayette redesign is no gimme. Most committee members who spoke last night seemed to be open to change, but there’s more apprehension on the board than the final vote lets on. Committee member Nancy Wolf questioned why a bike lane was needed to calm traffic: “There are a lot of ways to do that that don’t involve a bike lane.” And Board Chair John Dew framed the potential conversion of a motor lane to a bike lane as a loss: “Downtown Brooklyn has changed so much, with a new park, new condos, a new arena. We’re not getting any more streets. We’re losing streets.” (Replied one committee member: “It makes it more urgent to look at issues like this to slow traffic and makes streets safer.”)

Supporters of redesigning Lafayette for greater safety made a strong showing last night too, crowding the room and speaking extensively about their experiences on the street. It will take a few more evenings like that before the vision of a safer Lafayette reaches fruition.

An intersection redesign at Ocean and Parkside Avenues will close a Prospect Park entrance to automobiles. DOT predicts the change will prevent ten people from being injured every year. Image: NYC DOT

After years of neighborhood activism, the Department of Transportation plans to install much-needed safety improvements at the dangerous intersection of Ocean Avenue and Parkside Avenue, at the southeast corner of Prospect Park. By closing a park entrance to automobiles, DOT will simplify the intersection and shrink the space dedicated to traffic, preventing an estimated ten injuries per year [PDF].

On average, 20 people are injured every year at the corner of Ocean and Parkside, placing it in the top two percent of the most dangerous intersections in Brooklyn, according to the Department of Transportation. The juncture of two wide avenues is complicated by the further intersection of a park drive entrance. The five-point intersection is right next to a subway station; thousands of people cross the street to get to the train every say.

Neighborhood residents have been pushing for a safety fix for years; Streetsblog first covered their campaign in 2008. Now, the redesign is set to be put in place by July, 2012, according to local activist Carrie McLaren, who attended a meeting about the project with DOT Tuesday night.

The key to the safety improvements is closing the park drive entrance to automobiles. That shift allows DOT to create some new pedestrian space and realign the heavily-traveled crosswalks. By putting the crosswalks closer to the points where drivers execute their turns, the redesign should make motorists more aware of people walking across the street. That should help reduce the incidence of dangerous failure-to-yield violations: More than half of the pedestrian crashes at the intersection took place when the pedestrian had the walk signal.

All told, the redesign will shrink the space between the crosswalks from around 6,900 square feet to 3,400 square feet. DOT is predicting big safety gains: By their estimate, the number of crashes and injuries should drop by half, preventing ten people from being injured every year.

“I’m thrilled with the plan because it closes off the park entrance to cars, shrinks the intersection, and makes it much easier for everyone involved to travel safely,” said McLaren.

The city doesn’t expect closing the park entrance to increase congestion. Currently, the entrance is only open to traffic for two hours on weekday mornings, and only 360 vehicles use the entrance on a given day. That’s just one percent of all the traffic passing through the intersection in a day; DOT doesn’t project significant traffic disruptions as a result.

To put it a different way, in the same two hours that 360 cars enter the park at that corner, 1,300 pedestrians walk across the intersection of Ocean and Parkside.

In addition to making safety improvements, DOT is also reworking curbside regulations on Parkside Avenue to make room for a larger bus stop and delivery space for a supermarket.

The "gateway" treatment at Longfellow Avenue and 167th Street marks the lower speed limit with prominent signage and stenciling on the street. A new speed hump is just visible in the background. Photo: Noah Kazis

The city’s first “neighborhood slow zone” officially opened this morning, bringing a 20 mph speed limit and new traffic calming treatments to the residential Claremont neighborhood in the Bronx. Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, joined by Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., City Council Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca and local District Manager John Dudley, announced that the 20 mph zones would soon be coming to neighborhoods across the city. Starting today, residents and community boards can apply for their own slow zone.

The new Claremont zone covers the roughly 35 city blocks bounded by 167th Street, 174th Street, Southern Boulevard and West Farms Road/Boone Avenue. At each entrance to the zone, street signs flank the road announcing the 20 mph limit and that it is a residential area. Inside the zone, stencils and street signs continue to trumpet the lower speed limit. Nine new speed humps have been added to five already in place, which Sadik-Khan said makes the zone largely self-enforcing. In London, slow-speed zones incorporating traffic-calming treatments are preventing dozens of deaths and serious injuries each year.

Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., City Council Transportation Committee Chair Jimmy Vacca and District Manager John Dudley announced the opening of the Claremont neighborhood slow zone. Photo: Noah Kazis

“To some people, this neighborhood is nothing more than a shortcut,” said Sadik-Khan. That attitude, she noted, has had deadly results. In the last five years, 46 people were killed or seriously injured in traffic crashes in the larger community district between 2006 and 2010. The slower speeds would restore the streets to the community, she said. “Our streets are for New Yorkers. They’re where we live, where we play, where we shop.”

“The slow zone is now one where pedestrians will feel safe,” said Diaz, who said he’d been hearing complaints about safety in the area since he served in the state Assembly. Diaz touted the fact that the program would be expanding to other neighborhoods. “This is not going to stop at Claremont,” he said.

Vacca, too, celebrated the safety improvements. “They will save lives,” he declared. In addition to the speed bumps slowing down cars, he urged motorists to respect the speed limit voluntarily. “Look at your speedometers and see how fast you’re already going, and then slow down,” he said.

The form to get your own neighborhood slow zone is already live on DOT’s website, where the agency lays out the characteristics that will lead to successful applications. DOT is looking for zones that include schools, daycare centers, senior centers, and mostly residential uses, taking up an area roughly five blocks by five blocks and set off by clear boundaries, such as parks or major roads. The city wants to keep the slow zones separate from commercial areas, bus and truck routes and hospitals and fire stations.

Applications must come from community boards, business improvement districts, civic associations or elected officials, and are due by February 3. The first round of slow zones will be selected in March, according to DOT, and installed over the course of next year.

More photos of the slow zone below:

New speed humps are paired with closely spaced signs announcing the bumps and the speed limit. Photo: Noah Kazis

Even where speed bumps weren't placed, striping narrows travel lanes for drivers and stencils remind them of the lower speed limit. Photo: Noah Kazis

Londoners are asking their mayoral candidates to expand 20 mph speed limits from neighborhood zones and onto streets citywide. Photo: Stephen Kelly/PA via Guardian.

Across London, 20 mph zones combine a lower speed limit with physical street engineering and camera enforcement to create pockets of safety across the city. According to the British Medical Journal, serious traffic injuries and fatalities have fallen by 46 percent within the zones; 27 fewer Londoners are killed or seriously injured each year because of the zones. Now, street safety advocates are looking to join those neighborhood-sized zones with signage-only 20 mph speed limits on connecting streets.

While the physically calmed zones can be installed by neighborhood-level officials, the new push requires mayoral support. With London holding an election for mayor in May, 2012, street safety activists are hoping to make lower speeds limits a campaign issue. A coalition of public health, environmental, and transportation advocates have launched a letter-writing campaign to each of the mayoral candidates, asking them to commit to instituting a 20 mph speed limit. Though the major-party candidates have not yet signed on, Green Party candidate Jenny Jones, whose party won about three percent of the vote in 2008, has promised to institute 20 mph speed limits if elected.

Here in New York City, our next mayoral elections will take place a year after London’s. The race is already well underway, though. With a crowded field for the Democratic primary, candidates are jostling for support wherever they can find it. So what’s one thing would you ask the New York City mayoral candidates to commit to?

After the jump, a reminder of Prospect Park West’s prior incarnation as a three-lane speedway…

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard is a wide-open speedway with lanes wide enough to meet standards for interstate highways. Despite the death toll on the street -- nine pedestrians who have been killed there since 2006 -- many influential participants at a safety workshop this week said pedestrian conditions don't need major improvements.

Big ideas were in short supply at a workshop held Wednesday night to develop a badly-needed safety plan for Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard. This year alone, three pedestrians have been killed in traffic crashes along the 100-foot wide avenue, but many of the workshop participants seemed focused on making it easier to drive through Central Harlem, not on saving lives. In an area where fewer than a quarter of households even own a car, more voices need to be brought into this discussion.

Between 2005 and 2009, 830 people were injured in traffic crashes on Adam Clayton Powell. That puts the street in the most dangerous 10 percent of streets in Manhattan, according to DOT. Crashes have claimed the lives of nine pedestrians since 2006; their average age was 62.

ACP Boulevard is among the most dangerous streets in New York City. Map of pedestrian and cyclist injuries and deaths: CrashStat

The avenue is dangerous in large part because it is a speedway. Its 12-foot wide lanes — three in each direction, separated by a planted median — are as wide as standard highway lanes. Between 20 and 66 percent of drivers on the street are speeding, depending on the time of day, according to DOT.

Wednesday’s workshop was the beginning of a community process jointly sponsored by the Department of Transportation, Community Board 10 and the Manhattan Borough President’s office to develop safety improvements for Adam Clayton Powell. Roughly a dozen DOT officials were in attendance, including Manhattan Borough Commissioner Margaret Forgione, Bicycle Program Director Hayes Lord and Assistant Commissioner for Education and Outreach Kim Wiley-Schwartz.

DOT officials briefly presented statistics showing the need for safety on Adam Clayton Powell and laid out the toolkit of safety devices that could be employed. Participants then broke into four groups to discuss particularly dangerous locations and what could be done to fix them. Pedestrian countdown clocks are already slated to be installed on the street this year, but the department was looking for additional suggestions from the community.

In those groups, however, the appetite for effective interventions to improve pedestrian safety was weak.

“I’ve never had a problem crossing Adam Clayton Powell,” claimed Richard Toussaint, a former chair of the Riverton Tenants Association, in defiance of the demonstrably unsafe conditions. Toussaint admitted that he mostly drives to get around. His major proposals were to make Third Avenue two-way so that it’s easier to drive south off the Third Avenue Bridge, and to cut more streets through Harlem’s superblocks.

Henrietta Lyle, the acting chair of Community Board 10, repeatedly spoke in favor of maintaining high-speed conditions. When Thomas Lunke, the director of planning for the Harlem Community Development Corporation, said that “the lights are timed to make it a speedway,” Lyle responded, “As a driver, I like that.” Lyle also claimed she found it frightening and unsafe to drive at 20 miles per hour. Lyle primarily called for the addition of turning lanes and signals on area streets.

Harlem residents discuss safety on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, one of Manhattan's most dangerous roads. Photo: Noah Kazis

That isn’t to say that no participants were interested in improving safety. “As a city, as a borough of Manhattan, we’re supposed to be the most walkable,” said Deputy Borough President Rose Pierre-Louis. “We need to be sure that for seniors, for children, it is.”

Enmanuel Rosario, a police officer with the 28th precinct, called for a simplification of the triangle intersections created along the length of St. Nicholas Avenue, which he called confusing and dangerous for pedestrians. Most people supported extending the existing median, which currently ends just short of crosswalks, to serve as a pedestrian refuge island at intersections.

One of the four breakout groups called for neckdowns where Adam Clayton Powell intersects with major streets like 116th or 135th. That same group was also the only to endorse a DOT suggestion to narrow the traffic lanes to less than 12 feet, but even they specifically said that removing a lane would not be acceptable.

Hanging over the discussion, at times, was DOT’s last proposal for traffic calming on Adam Clayton Powell, a buffered bike lane that would have replaced a traffic lane. Though that lane earned the unanimous endorsement of CB 10′s transportation committee, the full board voted against it in 2009.

Bike lanes were not part of the toolkit presented by DOT, though they’ve been clearly shown by the department to improve pedestrian safety. When a Harlem CDC employee brought them up on her own, the DOT facilitator cut off the discussion as off-topic.

Bright blue signs in the roadbed will inform drivers that they are entering the city's new 20 mph zone in Claremont. Image: NYC DOT

Last month DOT announced plans for the city’s first 20 mph zone, located in the Claremont section of the Bronx. The agency’s presentation to the local community board is now online [PDF], so you can see how DOT plans to implement the slow zone strategy in what could be the first of several neighborhoods. The approach is low-cost but should be effective: Every entrance to the area will be marked with a highly visible “gateway” announcing the reduced speed limit, and the neighborhood will be blanketed with regularly-spaced speed humps.

A number of factors led DOT to select this quarter square mile of Claremont for the city’s first slow zone. There are five schools in the area, and the streets are relatively dangerous — the number of injuries per mile is higher than almost three-quarters of NYC’s streets. The DOT presentation also notes that Claremont has clearly defined boundaries, with an elevated train on the west and the Sheridan Expressway on the east, making it easier to set the zone apart from the other city streets.

When drivers enter that zone, it will be immediately clear that they are meant to slow down. At each entry point, large signs announcing the 20 mph zone and surface markings narrowing the right-of-way will replace one parking space on each side of the street. Compare the rendering above to a typical school zone treatment, where the signs don’t figure so prominently within the motorist’s field of vision:

School zone signs on Lorillard Place in the Bronx. Image: Google Street View

Within the borders of the slow zone, DOT will add speed humps at regular intervals to physically enforce the 20 mph limit. Near the five schools, the speed humps will be spaced to keep traffic moving even slower, at 15 mph. Between the speed humps, markings on the street will regularly remind drivers of the speed limit.

The 20 mph zone approach has proved enormously successful in London. There, more than 400 slow zones have been put in place, covering 11 percent of the road length of the city. In some of them, speeds are controlled with physical traffic calming measures, and in others, cameras enforce the 20 mph limit. The total number of serious traffic fatalities and injuries has fallen by 46 percent within London’s slow zones, according to the British Medical Journal, preventing an estimated 27 deaths and serious injuries each year.

The gateway to a 20 mph zone in London, including a raised crosswalk. Photo: ITDP Europe/Flickr

New Yorkers are killed in traffic crashes at a far higher rate than residents of peer cities. Bringing New York's traffic safety into line with Berlin or Paris would save more than 100 lives per year. Image: Transportation Alternatives

Traffic deaths need to be treated as an ethical imperative to save lives, said representatives from Transportation Alternatives, the Drum Major Institute, and the medical community today at the public release of the new report, “Vision Zero” [PDF].

“It is simply unacceptable for people to die in traffic,” said T.A. Executive Director Paul Steely White, who called for the number of fatalities and serious injuries caused by traffic crashes in New York City to be brought to zero by 2030.

New York City has made impressive gains at improving traffic safety over the last decade, and has the safest streets in the United States. Yet compared to international leaders, the city still lags. In New York, 190 people are injured in traffic crashes on city streets every single day. Ten of them suffer life-altering injuries, losing a limb, perhaps, or receiving traumatic brain damage. Every 35 hours, someone is killed.

“These are all preventable injuries and preventable deaths,” said Mt. Sinai pediatrician Michael Chatham Stevens. “As the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] says, this is a winnable battle.”

To save lives and prevent as many serious injuries as possible, the report authors argue, New York City needs to first comprehend and then communicate the moral implications of allowing violent traffic crashes to continue, when available solutions have already been demonstrated and proven. While dramatic reductions in traffic deaths are within reach, the necessary changes require a coordinated response — including engineering, enforcement, and legislative actions — that cannot succeed without widespread public understanding and buy-in. At a time when local electeds are mobilizing against proven safety measures, the Vision Zero report suggests that the moral necessity of stopping preventable deaths and injuries should guide a campaign to capture the public imagination and sustain political commitment.

The report calls for the mayor to make a high-profile speech committing the city to a “vision zero” policy where traffic deaths are no longer tolerated. Right now, said White, life-saving traffic redesigns are routinely weighed against the convenience of an additional parking space. “By adopting Vision Zero,” he said, “we put this on a moral plateau.”

More New Yorkers died in car crashes over the last decade than were murdered with guns.

The Vision Zero approach earned the support of many members of the medical community. “Street safety is a major public health concern,” said Dorian Block of the New York Academy of Medicine. In addition to saving lives directly, said Block, safer streets would help promote physical activity, reduce chronic diseases, and make it easier for New Yorkers to age in place.

Vision Zero would mark a radical acceleration of the city’s street safety goals. While the city is currently committed to halving the number of traffic deaths by 2030, White called for eliminating deaths and serious injuries entirely by that time. Halving the number of traffic deaths should happen in the very near future, said White.

Cutting the number of road deaths in half is an eminently achievable goal, the report shows. Cities like Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo already have achieved traffic fatality rates half of New York City’s. “The cost of inaction is 100 lives a year,” said the Drum Major Institute’s John Petro. “We need to accelerate the schedule.” Paris cut its traffic fatality rate in half in only six years, pointed out Petro.

“We can in fact achieve Vision Zero,” said White. While certain interventions have had dramatic results (20 mph speed zones reduced road deaths and injuries in London by 42 percent, according to the report, while speed detectors reduced fatal crashes by 65 percent where installed in France), the goal of zero serious injuries in traffic crashes has not been achieved elsewhere. After Sweden launched Vision Zero as a national campaign in 1997, traffic deaths fell 34 percent by 2009. The country has pushed back its initial goal of achieving zero deaths, shifting the target date from 2020 to 2050.

After the event, White said that Vision Zero could serve as more of an ethos than an achievable goal. A good model, he said, might be construction site safety or air travel. When people are killed while repairing a road or in an airplane, said White, “heads are rolling, there’s an investigation.” Vision Zero might not eliminate serious traffic injuries, but it can mean that no serious injury is ever again considered acceptable.

“No family should have to endure the pain and sorrow that myself and others have had to suffer,” said David Shepherd, whose fiancee was killed by a speeding hit-and-run driver while walking in the Bronx in 2009. “We need the mayor.”

Two years ago, the Bronx Helpers decided to take action about a dangerous intersection in their neighborhood. The team of middle and high-schoolers, participants in a community service group run by the New Settlement Apartments, routinely crossed the street at 172nd and Townsend. They all could recount traffic crashes they’d seen at the corner, with some cars coming dangerously close to hitting their friends. The intersection sits between two schools, an afterschool program, and the students’ homes, but doesn’t even have a visible crosswalk, much less a design prioritizing safety.  With another school under construction at Jerome and 172nd, the need for safety is only going to get more urgent.

As part of a program that teaches civic engagement, the Bronx Helpers started to organize. Asking at first for a stop sign at the corner, they collected 1,039 signatures from their neighbors, presented the petition to Bronx Community Board 4, and wrote a letter to the Department of Transportation.

The youth’s impressive organizing didn’t lead to any safety improvements, however. DOT sent them a letter promising to conduct a study on the stop sign and provide the results within 12 weeks. When their request was rejected six months later, the students asked for the details of the study, which DOT refused to provide.

The teens didn’t give up. In December, they teamed up with Transportation Alternatives to add some traffic safety expertise to their efforts. With radar guns and surveys, they tracked unsafe driver behavior in the neighborhood and mapped it against pedestrian volumes.

They also changed their request from a stop sign — which may not actually improve pedestrian safety — to more effective physical traffic calming measures like curb extensions, daylighted intersections, and speed bumps. In March, DOT promised to study a wider array of traffic calming measures in a second 12-week study.

While DOT performs its study, the Bronx Helpers are keeping up the pressure. On May 11, they threw a party for the kids in their neighborhood to raise support for the traffic calming measures. “Safety first, before the worst,” they chanted during a rally at the event, which you can see in the video above.

Hopefully, when DOT’s study comes out, it will recommend a robust set of safety improvements for 172nd and Townsend.

The original plans for 44th Drive included a painted median instead of bike lanes. Image: NYC DOT

When DOT presented plans for traffic calming along Long Island City’s 44th Drive in March, the department chose to put the four lane street on a road diet, using some of the reallocated space for a painted median. That still left enough space in the extra-wide parking lanes for a bike lane, however, a fact which Queens Community Board 2 pointed out at the time.

DOT appears to have taken the community board’s argument to heart and revised the plan to include space for cyclists, according to reports in the Queens Gazette and the Long Island City/Astoria Journal. Painted bike lanes would run in both directions, according to the articles. The revised plan won overwhelming support from CB2, with only four board members voting against it.

The community board also discussed how to ensure that the truck traffic running down 44th would be able to make deliveries, given that double parking would now block an entire direction of traffic. DOT Queens Commissioner Maura McCarthy and CB 2 Chairman Joseph Conley recommended that businesses request that parking spaces be replaced with loading zones if necessary, according to the Gazette.

We have requests in with DOT about why the bike lanes were added to the plan and what the precise street layout will be in the final design.

Separately, the Journal article quotes a ringing endorsement of bike lanes from Council Member Julissa Ferreras, who represents Corona. “People are getting hurt in my district, both pedestrians and cyclists,” said Ferreras. “We need to find a solution that works, and if bike lanes are the answer then that is a plan we need to get behind.”

Ferreras’s district was singled out as a particularly strong candidate for more cycling infrastructure in the recent Hunter College report on increasing the equity of the bike network.

Update: CB 2 transportation committee member Evan O’Neil writes in with the inside perspective on the addition of the bike lane:

In response to my request for a bike lane on 44th Dr. Commissioner McCarthy confirmed with Joe Conley that we did indeed want one. He said yes, she said great, happy to do it. Then she came back to the full board a week later to present the updated plan including the bike lane and the board voted yes.

Dov Hikind rails against pedestrian safety measures at a CB12 hearing last fall.

The central Brooklyn rep announced today that he’s trying to force the Department of Transportation to remove pedestrian refuges from Fort Hamilton Parkway, threatening what looks to be a copycat lawsuit modeled after the anti-bike lane case filed by well-connected opponents of the Prospect Park West redesign.

Hikind’s office says he plans to file the lawsuit in the next 10 to 14 days, under the same state provision, known as article 78, employed by the PPW plaintiffs.

The Fort Hamilton Parkway refuges were installed last year as part of DOT’s citywide effort to improve street safety in areas with high proportions of senior pedestrians. The project [PDF] targeted a stretch in Borough Park with a grisly record of traffic violence, as local City Council Member Brad Lander wrote in the neighborhood newspaper Hamodia last fall:

On December 31st, 2009, a 74-year-old woman was hit by a truck and killed as she crossed Fort Hamilton Parkway at 49th Street in Boro Park. In April of this year, a 55-year-old person was killed crossing Fort Hamilton just a few blocks away. Nearby, several other pedestrians have been struck by cars. In 2008, when a car collision at Fort Hamilton and 44th Street killed two people, a local resident called it the “corner of death.”

Hikind’s announcement omits all mention of these fatalities. In a press release replete with scare quotes around the phrase “senior safety,” his office announced the delivery of 1,100 petitions to DOT Brooklyn Borough Commissioner Joseph Palmieri seeking the removal of the refuges. Hikind characterizes the refuges, which give pedestrians safer crossings and cause drivers to take turns more carefully, as “absurd islands.” A project to prevent deaths and injuries is, in Hikind’s view, part of “Sadik-Khan’s crusade against vehicles and motorists.”

Hikind, repeating arguments from a rant he delivered at Brooklyn Community Board 12 last year, hides behind a familiar argument against traffic calming projects all over the country: that streets designed to improve safety impede emergency response, in this case for vehicles en route to Maimonides Medical Center. Streetsblog noted in December that these claims are divorced from public health and safety research, which show that life-saving benefits accrue from traffic-calming, while no correlation exists between patient mortality rates and the time it takes to transport patients to a hospital. From a safety perspective, there is no reason to think that a Fort Hamilton Parkway without pedestrian refuges would do anything except put people at greater risk.

As Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt has written, using the emergency response argument against traffic calming measures entails a fundamental miscalculation:

Designing roads to meet some supposed emergency response criteria, for that dramatic last-second rescue, actually helps raise the risk of dying in a much more common way: In traffic.

Dov Hikind’s crusade against pedestrians will only cost lives. All he is seeking is to do is make Fort Hamilton as dangerous as it used to be.

Photo: Brad Aaron

The speed limit will be reduced from 30 miles per hour to 20 miles per hour in the Claremont neighborhood of the Bronx, Mayor Bloomberg and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced today, fulfilling a promise laid out last year in the city’s pedestrian safety action plan to pilot a 20 mph zone in one New York City neighborhood. Similar slow speed zones in London have been proven to save lives and prevent injuries.

Bloomberg and Sadik-Khan were joined by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon at a press event today announcing the UN’s Decade of Action for Road Safety, which will call attention to the 1.3 million people killed and 20 to 50 million people injured in traffic crashes each year worldwide.

We’ll have a full report on the announcement later today. According to a press release, Claremont was selected based on several factors, including crashes per square mile, number of schools and subway stops, and the location of truck routes.

The addition of pedestrian refuge islands and bike lanes narrowed Brooklyn's Vanderbilt Avenue, slowing down speeding traffic and improving safety through changes to street geometry.

When faced with the question of how to fix a dangerous street, the first instinct of many New Yorkers is to call for the most familiar symbols of regulating cars: the stop sign and the traffic light. Nothing, they think, could more effectively force dangerous drivers to stop speeding through their neighborhood than these familiar red symbols. Just this month a community group in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn asked the city to remove a bike lane and zebra stripes from Oriental Boulevard — measures that have a real traffic-calming effect — and add a new traffic signal where the road intersects with Falmouth Street. But stop signs and traffic signals are usually ineffective, even counterproductive, if the goal is to make streets safer.

Sometimes, the demand for traffic control devices is driven by good intentions, as when City Council Member Karen Koslowitz urged the city last year to stop treating Queens Boulevard “like it’s a highway” and instead make it a “pedestrian-crossing street.” Koslowitz was calling for a new traffic light at the intersection of Queens Boulevard and 80th Road.

Residents of Manhattan Beach know they have a speeding problem, but some mistakenly think that replacing this bike lane with new traffic signals will solve it. Photo: Qaptain Qwerty

Other times, it’s part of an attack on more effective traffic calming measures. During Dov Hikind’s epic tirade against NYC DOT at a Brooklyn Community Board 12 hearing last December, the assembly member contrasted the construction of pedestrian refuges on Fort Hamilton Parkway with his long campaign to get a traffic light installed elsewhere in his district. “You know, because you live there, you know how dangerous that corner is. I had a situation on East 4th and M, where people died, and the Department of Transportation turned down the traffic device four times,” said Hikind. Eventually he prevailed and a traffic light was installed at the location.

These fights — which local politicians apparently relish — can last years. Together, Peter Vallone Sr. and Jr. fought for a traffic signal at 21st Street and 30th Drive in Astoria for 41 years before a light was installed in 2008. Requests for stop signs or traffic lights are so common that the City Council recently passed a law requiring DOT to explain to community boards and Council members why it rejects them.

Each case is different, but in the aggregate, the reason traffic control devices aren’t installed more frequently is quite simple: They tend to make streets less safe, not more.

Reid Ewing, a professor at the University of Utah, literally wrote the book on traffic calming — the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ Traffic Calming: State of the Practice. “They’re good for traffic control,” said Ewing of stop signs and traffic lights. “They’re not so good for traffic calming.” In other words, they help make traffic flow in a more orderly fashion, but not necessarily in a safer one.

“We kind of panned stop signs as a traffic calming measure,” continued Ewing. “They don’t do a lot for speeding, because there’s a tendency for drivers to make up for the lost time.” That can lead to increased speeds midblock. Ewing did say that with enough stop signs, drivers will avoid a street altogether, reducing the number of cars but not the danger of each one.

This Queens Boulevard intersection, circa 2001, has plenty of traffic signals, but that doesn't mean it was safe. Signal retiming helped some, but a major change to the street geometry would do more. Photo: Jeff Saltzman

Sam Schwartz, the former New York City Traffic Commissioner, explained another problem with using stop signs as traffic calming devices. Schwartz said that if a stop sign doesn’t seem to belong in a location, some drivers will ignore it. “It may result in people crossing thinking they’re fully protected, when some driver thinks a stop sign doesn’t belong there and drives right through,” he said. “Putting the wrong traffic control device in can be a mistake, sometimes a fatal mistake.”

Similar problems arise if you install a traffic light where it doesn’t belong. “You’ll find the side street speeds actually increase,” said Schwartz. “When cars see the green light, they may floor it.”

Schwartz recalled a study he worked on while at DOT. A number of traffic signals that did not meet federal guidelines had been installed when local residents demanded them. “Statistically, crashes went up when traffic signals were introduced as a result of political pressure rather than the warrant,” said Schwartz. According to that report’s executive summary, crashes rose by 65 percent where unwarranted signals were installed.

In limited situations, however, retiming the signals at existing traffic lights can improve traffic safety. “Traffic signals can be timed in those few cases where you have the right spacing for a slow progression,” explained Ewing, who cautioned that “you have to have very special conditions where the signals are spaced just right.”

Schwartz pointed to Queens Boulevard, where he said signal retiming has helped pedestrians make it across the so-called Boulevard of Death. “It can work,” he said. Even on Queens Boulevard, though, Schwartz said a change to the design to the street’s geometry would have been preferable. Signal retiming also carries drawbacks like potentially increased traffic congestion and more rear-end crashes, said Schwartz.

Neckdowns, like this jumbo-sized one at the corner of Smith and Bergen, narrow pedestrian crossing distances, force drivers to turn more carefully, and send visual cues to slow down, providing real traffic calming and safety benefits. Photo: Ben Fried

NYC DOT posts similar reasoning on the FAQ section of its website. “In some areas where speeding is a problem, residents believe that a traffic signal is needed to address the speeding problem. In fact, traffic signals sometimes result in greater speeds as drivers accelerate to try to get through the signal before it turns red.” With regards to stop signs, DOT writes, “Studies made in many parts of the country show that there is a high incidence of intentional violations where stop signs are installed as ‘nuisances’ or ‘speed breakers.’ While speed is reduced in the immediate vicinity of the ‘nuisance’ stop signs, speeds are actually higher between intersections than they would have been if those signs had not been installed.”

Instead of stop signs and traffic signals, street safety advocates suggest physically altering the street to slow down traffic. “Because traffic signals and stop signs are not self-enforcing — they don’t come with a physical component that requires drivers to slow down — they can easily be ignored by drivers, especially if there isn’t visible enforcement by the police,” said Transportation Alternatives safety campaign director Lindsey Ganson. “Traffic can be calmed and pedestrian safety improved with other treatments, like speed humps or curb extensions, that are physically self-enforcing, treatments that force drivers to regulate their traveling speed.”

Acknowledging that many concerned citizens will nevertheless request stop signs or traffic signals, Ganson said that “when communities request safety improvements from the DOT it is most important to emphasize the problem and the overall need for safety improvements rather than request a specific solution.”

What’s a road diet? Quite simply, traffic-calming expert Dan Burden told Streetfilms, “A road diet is anytime you take any lane out of a road.”

The first time people hear about a road diet, their initial reaction likely goes something like this: “How can removing lanes improve my neighborhood and not cause traffic backups?” It seems counterintuitive, but taking away lanes can actually help traffic flow smoother while improving safety for everyone.

Road diets are good for pedestrians: They reduce speeding and make vehicle movements more predictable while shortening crossing distances, usually through curb extensions or center median islands. They’re good for cyclists: Many road diets shift space from car lanes to create bike lanes. They’re good for drivers: Less speeding improves safety for motorists and passengers, and providing left-turn pockets allows through traffic to proceed without shifting lanes or waiting behind turning vehicles.

And here’s something to keep in mind during this era of lean budgets: Road diets are a highly-effective infrastructure improvement that can be implemented quickly and at low cost.

Streetfilms would like to thank The Fund for the Environment & Urban Life for making this series possible.

What’s the most effective way to make city streets safer? As Chicago Alderman Mary Ann Smith told Streetfilms, “Signs don’t do the job, even having police officers on the corner does not do the job.” To prevent traffic injuries and deaths, you need to change how the street functions and make it feel slower for drivers. You need traffic calming.

Traffic calming takes many forms and can describe any measure taken to reduce traffic speeds, improve safety, and make using the street a better overall experience. The most effective traffic calming measures are those that influence drivers to “behave in a civilized manner,” as Smith put it.

Changes like curb extensions, neck-downs, and bike lanes are all traffic calmers that save lives by sending the signal for drivers to slow down. In this Streetfilm we highlight some exemplary traffic calming projects from cities across the country.

Streetfilms would like to thank The Fund for the Environment & Urban Life for making this series possible.

DOT plans to create four parking lanes along 48th Avenue in a novel design presented last night. Image: NYCDOT.

DOT presented plans for two Long Island City street redesigns to Queens Community Board 2′s transportation committee last night. One, a standard road diet, would calm traffic on 44th Drive by replacing one moving lane in each direction with a painted median and left turn bays [PDF]. The other, a novel design for a single block of 48th Avenue, manages to make four of six lanes into on-street parking [PDF].

The traffic calming plan for 44th Drive is part of DOT’s commitment, laid out in last year’s pedestrian safety action plan, to install safety improvements along 60 miles of the city’s most dangerous corridors. This short stretch of 44th, from Vernon Boulevard to Thomson Avenue, is in the 92nd percentile for pedestrian crashes according to DOT and intersects with multiple subway stations.

“Right now, 44th Drive the volume is so much lower than what it could handle which is why there’s so much speeding and scary driving,” explained transportation committee member Emilia Crotty.

Under DOT’s proposal, 44th would have one parking lane and one travel lane in each direction, with a painted median and left turn bays in the middle. Currently, 44th has two travel lanes and one parking lane in each direction.

DOT compares its design for 44th to a similar redesign of Brooklyn’s Gerritsen Avenue. There, they say, all crashes causing injury decreased by 46 percent and crashes involving pedestrian decreased by 57 percent after the redesign.

The transportation committee raised the question of whether bike lanes should have been included in the road diet, according to Crotty. Talking with DOT, they reached the conclusion that one wasn’t necessary. “The wide parking lane is going to serve just like Bedford Avenue, where they took out the bike lane but it’s really still a bike lane,” she explained.

Another debate ensued over whether two moving lanes were necessary to accommodate the large amounts of double-parking in front of the Citigroup building. Many board members argued that such an accommodation was necessary, said Crotty, but ultimately the committee decided to stick with the DOT plan and push for more enforcement of double-parking.

On 48th Avenue, the goal appears to be adding more parking. Currently, the block of 48th between Vernon Boulevard and 5th Street has two moving lanes and one parking lane in each direction, with a painted median in between. The redesign would take away one moving lane in each direction and replace it with a second parking lane adjacent to the median. A similar design, though with a concrete median and bike lanes, can be found on this stretch of Carlton Avenue.

This would create 40 new parking spaces, a popular move in the neighborhood. “It’s a real concern for many residents in that neighborhood, both that residents need longer-term parking and that businesses need metered parking for more turnover,” said Crotty.

Interestingly, the parking adjacent to the curb would be metered in the new set-up while the mid-street parking lanes would not be. According to Crotty, DOT’s current plan is to make the median parking lanes truly long-term parking, with neither meters nor alternate side regulations. The committee worried that would cause people, including many from outside the neighborhood, to simply store their cars there forever without some reason to move them, so will join DOT in asking the Sanitation Department to implement alternate side parking along that lane.

That section of 48th Avenue is marked as a planned route on the city’s bike map, a point which was raised in the committee meeting. “It didn’t sound like something DOT was going to make arrangements for,” said Crotty.

The redesign could have a traffic calming effect, as it does narrow the space for moving traffic. DOT also plans to paint new or expanded pedestrian refuges on either end of the block and improve the crosswalks in both redesigns. Crotty said that the community board will ask the Parks Department to make those painted refuges into planted Greenstreets in the future.

The generally supportive committee did not formally vote on the two projects, said Crotty, but rather asked questions of DOT and tried to figure out the next steps for the streets.

A plan to put the Bronx's Macombs Road on a road diet won unanimous support from CB 4 last night. Image: NYCDOT

DOT’s plans to improve pedestrian safety along the length of the Bronx’s Macombs Road [PDF] received a unanimous vote of support from Bronx Community Board 4 last night, according to District Manager José Rodriguez. The plan puts Macombs on a road diet and reconfigures dangerous diagonal intersections that lead to drivers taking fast turns across the crosswalk.

Currently, Macombs is a wide road with low traffic volumes, a recipe for high speeds. To make matters worse, the curvy road is characterized by irregular intersections that allow turning drivers to remain at high speeds; at some, the gentle angle makes turns more like full-speed forks in the road.

The redesign will slow cars turning from Macombs onto Cromwell Avenue. Image: NYCDOT

As a result, 102 people were injured in traffic crashes along Macombs’ roughly ten blocks between 2005 and 2009: 69 motor vehicle occupants, 26 pedestrians, and 7 cyclists. One person was killed in 2008 at the intersection of Macombs and Goble Place.

DOT’s proposal would remove one lane of traffic from Macombs in each direction. That extra space would go toward a new median (sometimes a physical island, sometimes painted stripes), as well as wider parking lanes.

At certain intersections, DOT will add additional features. At Cromwell Avenue, for example, DOT will install a new pedestrian triangle to slow turning cars and shorten crossing distances. A neckdown will also force drivers traveling southbound on Macombs to actually make a turn onto Cromwell, rather than simply heading straight onto it at speed as Macombs turns left.

A new triangle will also be added at Featherbed Lane, where drivers have a similarly free right turn.

As you may recall, many years ago I shot a Streetfilm taking about what winter weather can teach us. In many ways the snow acts like tracing paper on our streets and records people’s movements: at each intersection, the spots where the snow piles up can show us where people drive and walk. It’s a great natural experiment that costs no money and lets anyone observe the new street geometry like a traffic engineer.

After New York’s last big snowfall, I noticed some of the most dramatic examples of “neckdowns” and “curb extensions” made out of the fluffy white stuff — which had hardened like concrete and brought a real sense of calm to crossing some streets in Jackson Heights, Queens. Drivers didn’t seem to be having any problems with them. They just took the turns a bit more slowly and carefully as they should 365 days of the year. I’ve seen delivery vehicles, garbage trucks, EMS, and buses all have little problem navigating them (although admittedly did not observe any firetrucks).

The January snow is mostly gone from NYC streets, but if you ever want to make your block safer, get out and take some photos next time it snows. It can bolster your arguments when you make your case to your neighbors who might not be familiar with traffic calming concepts.

If you like this Streetfilm, you can also check out how chicanes naturally occur in New York.