Streetsblog New York City

Next Wednesday, February 15, is the date for Council Member Peter Vallone’s hearing on traffic safety.

Responding to some 2,500 letters collected by Transportation Alternatives following the hit-and-run death of Brooklyn cyclist Mathieu Lefevre, Vallone announced that his public safety committee would address NYPD traffic enforcement. The hearing will be co-chaired by transportation committee chair James Vacca.

“It’s encouraging that the two chairs are treating this as a public safety concern, and are taking a long look and showing leadership,” says Juan Martinez, general counsel for TA.

In addition to crash prevention, Vallone and Vacca are expected to delve into how NYPD conducts crash investigations, an issue that is making headlines thanks to the Lefevre family’s pursuit of information from the department about the crash that killed their son. Says Martinez, “They have serious questions about the line — that in New York if you want to kill, do it with a car — whether that’s actually true.”

Anyone who wants to testify at next week’s hearing may send an e-mail to Martinez by the evening of Monday the 13th, with the subject line “Feb. 15.”

Many of Albany’s biggest transportation issues this year — the bloated and transit-free Tappan Zee, the unfunded MTA capital plan — will be decided by Governor Cuomo. But transportation advocates also have a slate of bills they hope to see make it through the legislature. Last year, the complete streets bill passed after a few prior attempts. Here’s what’s on the table for 2012.

Transit Lockboxes

Last year, lockbox legislation sponsored by Assembly Member James Brennan and Senator Marty Golden passed the legislature unanimously, only to have Governor Cuomo “eviscerate” the bill by amendment. The sponsors have vowed to try for the original language again.

The politics of the lockbox could be different this year if downstate legislators team up with their colleagues upstate. Buffalo Republican Mark Grisanti has introduced his own lockbox meant to protect dedicated funds for the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority. He is amenable to working with those hoping to protect the MTA. “If we can get the upstate folks talking about a lockbox bill in the same breath as the MTA, then maybe that sends a louder message to the governor,” said Nadine Lemmon, Albany legislative advocate for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

Speed Cameras

Assembly Member Deborah Glick’s legislation to allow speed enforcement using automated cameras hasn’t gone anywhere in the past, but advocates have declared it a top priority for this year. “It’s speed cams all the time when it comes to Albany,” said Juan Martinez, general counsel for Transportation Alternatives.

The bill has support not only from transportation advocacy groups, but the New York City DOT and public health organizations. “There is a good coalition that’s gotten around it,” said Lemmon. That said, the bill still doesn’t have a Senate sponsor, an indication of how much work is left to be done.

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The City Council is again looking to placate scofflaw drivers. This time, Council Member David Greenfield of Brooklyn wants to limit cases in which the city can tow vehicles belonging to drivers who have racked up hundreds of dollars in unpaid parking fines. DNAinfo has the story:

“Any driver who has been towed knows that a trip to the impound lot can be one of the most frustrating experiences in New York City,” Greenfield said.

Under the new legislation, instead of towing, vehicles would be locked with devices called “boots,” which prevent drivers from moving until they call in and pay their outstanding fines, plus a $50 processing fee. Once paid, drivers receive a code that allows them to unlock the boot and drive away, as long as they return the boot.

Cars left booted for 72 hours could be towed under the bill, as could cars parked in tow zones, bus stops, crosswalks, fire hydrants or driveways.

Greenfield said the bill comes after numerous complaints from residents who accused the city of unfairly targeting them to make cash.

Drivers whose cars are towed under the current system have to schlep to an impound lot and then pay $185 in towing and $20 in storage a day, in addition to tickets, Greenfield said.

“This bill would give drivers a chance to pay their debts to the city without wasting an entire day trying to retrieve their vehicle,” he said. “It’s a simple and fair way for the city to enforce its parking laws without excessively punishing drivers.”

Retrieving a car from impound has got to be a frustrating ordeal, which is pretty much the point. Not that the boot itself isn’t a deterrent, but if nothing else this is further evidence of a City Council preoccupied with making life easier for motorists who believe laws should not apply to them.

Of course this is old hat for Greenfield, whose obsession with loosening parking regulations seemingly knows no bounds, and who a year ago went online to rant about the city clearing snow for safer walking and biking. Yet when reckless drivers inflict serious injury and death in his district, Greenfield has nothing to say.

Greenfield’s bill has been referred to the transportation committee, with support from council members including Brad Lander, Tish James, Lew Fidler, Robert Jackson and Ydanis Rodriguez.

The Village Voice reports that Peter Vallone, chair of the City Council’s public safety committee, is planning a hearing on traffic enforcement.

Responding to the Transportation Alternatives probe into how NYPD handles crash investigations, announced after a year that saw reckless motorists face little to no repercussions for taking lives, Vallone said, “They have some legitimate concerns. Clearly, more has to be done.”

Accepting Vallone’s statement at face value — that his committee will indeed focus on pedestrian and cyclist safety, rather than personal gripes — this is welcome news. Here are a few questions we’d like to see the Vallone committee ask the brass at NYPD:

• Is the Accident Investigation Squad dispatched to all cases involving death or serious injury? If not, why not?
• Why must victims’ families resort to the courts to obtain information pertaining to fatal crashes?
• Why isn’t NYPD making use of new state laws intended to hold dangerous drivers accountable for injuring and killing vulnerable street users?
• Does NYPD track rates of traffic violations, the same way it tracks other crime? If not, why not? If so, where is the data?

With mainstream media outlets picking up the story of Mathieu Lefevre’s family suing to get information from NYPD, and papers including the Voice questioning how so many deaths and injuries can go unpunished, might the council finally be ready to address the shortcomings of the city’s traffic justice system? We’ll see if Peter Vallone will pick up the slack for his colleague James Vacca.

Last month we noted that Ray Kelly’s NYPD made a highly visible show of bike enforcement in Prospect Park in response to a pair of crashes where cyclists injured pedestrians. Normally, police don’t react so decisively to locations with high crash rates, but in Prospect Park, the 78th quickly handed out more tickets to cyclists at one spot than they do to speeding motorists in the whole precinct in an average month.

If only NYPD targeted the most dangerous intersections with similar vigor. Streetfilms’ Clarence Eckerson and Streetsblog publisher Mark Gorton went out to Canal and Lafayette, which saw 13 crashes in the month of August alone, to see how traffic is being policed. Here’s what they found.

Walk out on any New York City street and you’re likely to find rampant disregard for traffic laws. Pinpointing exactly who’s speeding requires special equipment, but for many offenses, you can track the level of lawlessness with the naked eye.

A team of Transportation Alternatives volunteers did just that over the course of October on the block of Jay Street between Willoughby and Johnson Streets, a major approach to the Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge in downtown Brooklyn. Over the course of eight weekday rush hours, the volunteers tracked three easy-to-catch violations: Bike lane blocking, bus stop blocking, and illegal U-turns.

On that one block, 49 drivers parked in the bike lane every hour, 18 parked in the bus stop, and another eighteen made an illegal U-ey. You can do your own count in the video above.

Brooklyn cyclists, transit riders, pedestrians and motorists hoping for a safe and easy commute shouldn’t look to the NYPD to clean up Jay Street, either. In an average hour, three of the drivers parked in the bike lane, five parked in a bus stop, and two of the U-turners were cops, according to T.A.

In other words, police officers made as many illegal U-turns on this block in a single hour as the number of summonses NYPD issued for illegal U-turns on the same stretch in the entire month of September, according to T.A.

“The police aren’t paying attention (and are breaking the law), so drivers think they can get away with anything,” said T.A. Executive Director Paul Steely White in a statement. “With so little enforcement against the many drivers who blatantly ignore the rules of the road, everyone on this street is in harm’s way. Police Commissioner Kelly needs to get his department in order and make traffic safety a priority.”

The Manhattan Borough Board passed a resolution last Thursday endorsing the use of automated cameras to catch speeding drivers. Earning the support of 10 Manhattan community boards and four City Council members — with no votes in opposition — the resolution was a strong show of support for better traffic enforcement on New York City streets.

As the borough board notes in the resolution, if a driver hits a pedestrian at 40 mph, the victim has a 70 percent chance of being killed, but is someone is struck at 30 mph, she has an 80 percent chance of surviving. With the NYPD stretched thin, camera enforcement is a proven way of consistently enforcing the speed limit.

The only Manhattan community board to abstain on Thursday was CB 9. All the others voted in support of the resolution (CB 3 was absent from the borough board meeting, but had previously voted in support of speeding cameras, according to Transportation Alternatives Safety Campaign Director Lindsey Ganson). No council members voted against or abstained from the resolution. The four voting members with representatives in attendance — Dan Garodnick, Jessica Lappin, Gale Brewer, and Robert Jackson — all voted in favor of the resolution.

Ganson singled out Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer for his influence in getting the borough board resolution passed. “Having his leadership really made all the difference,” she said. Stringer is a long-time supporter of stepped-up speeding enforcement, including through the use of cameras.

Outside Manhattan, Ganson said that the speed camera legislation has earned endorsements from Brooklyn CBs 7 and 9, Queens CB 8, Staten Island CB 2, and from committees at Bronx CB 4 and Staten Island CB 1.

These local shows of support could build momentum in Albany for legislation sponsored by Assembly Member Deborah Glick authorizing the use of speeding cameras, which is necessary for the city to install them, Ganson said. “Having both the borough board resolution and resolutions from individual community boards makes a huge difference when you have a meeting with a state senator or state assembly member,” she said. “It shows them that people in their own district, at the most local level of representation, support this.”

The text of the resolution and the roll call vote are available in full below:

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Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of the adoption of Hayley and Diego’s Law, which established the charge of “careless driving” in New York State and gave police and prosecutors a new tool to hold motorists who injure pedestrians and cyclists accountable. Unfortunately, says Transportation Alternatives, over the past 12 months the law has gone largely unenforced by NYPD.

Intended to demarcate a middle ground between moving violations and more serious criminal charges, Hayley and Diego’s law prescribes that drivers who caused injury “while failing to exercise due care” be required to take a drivers education course and be subject to fines of up to $750, jail time of up to 15 days, and a license suspension of up to six months. But a law is only as effective as those who enforce it, and TA has found that applications of VTL 1146, the statute that includes Hayley and Diego’s Law as well as Elle’s Law, are as rare as ever.

T.A. filed a Freedom Of Information request in May with the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles and found that the number of applications of VTL 1146 has remained more or less steady for the last few years. T.A. estimates that there will be approximately 77 citations of the statute in 2011 based on a total of 32 citations issued as of June this year, while 97 tickets were issued under 1146 in 2010, 87 in 2009, and 92 in 2008.  These statistics show that a year after these new penalties meant to protect New Yorkers went in effect, they are barely being applied.

“Our family worked hard for these laws to deter motorists from dangerous and lethal behavior,” said Wendy Cheung, Hayley Ng’s aunt. “Nothing can undo the crash that took Hayley away from us, but we can prevent tragedies like this from happening to other families. And we can hold someone who breaks the law and takes a life responsible for their actions. We hope the police will use all the tools at their disposal to bring justice to our streets and protect others from the pain of losing a loved one to traffic violence.”

It should be noted that, in the city, VTL 1146 is enforced by NYPD and the Department of Motor Vehicles and, while district attorneys may advise police to apply it in certain cases, it does not fall under DA purview except for repeat offenders.

Streetsblog has a message in with NYPD regarding TA’s findings.

Had to share this message from Daily News reader Ken Douglas in response to the opinion piece I wrote with Dr. Linda Prine about the health and safety benefits of complete streets. Our essay focused on the engineering side of the street safety equation — street designs like bike lanes and curb extensions that are under NYC DOT’s control. Ken wrote in to point out that better enforcement and education will also prevent pedestrians from getting killed and seriously injured.

I drive a van as part of my duties as a utility worker, and I’m appalled at the lack of courtesy and regard for human life displayed by many drivers.

Given that NYPD has issued 16 times as many tickets for failing to wear a seatbelt as for failing to yield to pedestrians so far this year [PDF], and that retaining a New York state driver’s license is now treated like a basic human right, not a serious responsibility, he makes some good points.

Here’s Ken’s letter, which has been edited and formatted for clarity. The proposals he outlines probably go farther than what many Streetsblog readers would suggest, but there’s no doubt that the principles are sound and would save lives if applied. Keep in mind that driver error causes more than 78 percent of the thousands of crashes that kill or seriously injure New York City pedestrians each year, and that failure to yield contributes to 27 percent of those crashes, according to NYC DOT’s landmark pedestrian safety study.

Dear Mr. Fried,

All the proposals outlined in your article, which appeared in the Daily News on September 26th 2011, are great ideas that need advancing.

Unfortunately, all the sidewalk extensions, pedestrian islands and complete streets are not enough to erase the savagery that takes place on our streets. The fate that met Ms. Renard is not unique, it is sad that she was killed, but on a daily basis I see many near misses, many citizens narrowly escaping injury and possibly being killed just like Ms. Renard.

I drive a van as part of my duties as a utility worker, and I can tell you that I’m appalled at the lack of courtesy and regard for human life displayed by many drivers.

In their rush to nowhere, drivers are not yielding to pedestrians in the crosswalks — even when it’s a mother with a stroller. You can’t stop this callous behavior unless you change the driver’s way of thinking. If they can’t get the message, then we have to hit them in the pocket and hit them hard.

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We’ll overlook the number of contortions performed by the Daily News to make today’s report on the success of red light cameras look like a “he said she said” story. It’s simply not a surprise when the city press corps assigns comparable weight to the wishes of motorists to break the law with impunity and the right of pedestrians and cyclists — and, in this case, other drivers — to reach their destinations in one piece.

So while the News and other outlets (the story made the AP wire) howl over $52 million in fines issued to “unsuspecting motorists” for running red lights in 2010, here’s the real news: a lot of drivers are running red lights. The fact that, in the course of a year, just 150 cameras caught a reported 1,053,268 drivers potentially putting lives at risk is a pretty good sign that the actual amount of red-light running is off the charts. (Is Komanoff in the house?) One can’t also help but conclude that the 2010 figures represent about 1,053,268 drivers who, if not for the cameras, would have gotten away with it.

But that’s not much of a surprise either. What jumped out at us, again, is the show of support for red light cameras from James Vacca. An avowed skeptic of other traffic-taming infrastructure and promoter of unfettered parking access, the City Council transportation committee chair has remained consistent in his condemnation of reckless driving. Said Vacca to the News:

“People who run red lights can kill people. These cameras go a long way towards making this a safer city.”

“I hope we get to the point where these cameras do not raise revenue and there is compliance with red lights,” he said. “Stop means stop.”

Granted, this is no big lift, and it’s exactly what the council transportation chair should be saying. But with more red light cameras, along with speed cameras, on the agenda, Vacca’s ongoing vocal support could be a big help in prodding Albany to allow the city to deploy additional life-saving, and popular, traffic tech.