A long vision on traffic safety
Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of New York City’s Vision Zero initiative to reduce traffic crash deaths to that ideal number, as Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez wrote in these pages. As an Editorial Board, we are strongly in favor of traffic calming measures like speed cameras and red light cameras and a lower speed limit, all wrongly dependent on the whims of Albany (but such state micromanagement of the city is for another editorial).
However, our interest in safer streets goes back much longer than a decade. In April 1920, less than a year after our founding on June 26, 1919, we wrote an editorial with the headline “Catch the speed fiends now.”
“The police ought to begin now to discourage the practice of killing people under automobiles.
“Last year there were twice as many cars in the streets of New York as the streets could comfortably accommodate.
“This year there will be three times as many. “Even under carefully regulated traffic conditions New York is not safe for pedestrians. Unless the police begin immediately to impress upon reckless drivers that they, as well as the pedestrians, are endangered by careless driving, the mortality due to automobiles will approximate the mortality due to influenza.” That was during the Spanish flu pandemic, the last one before COVID.
And we were very tough: “Dismissing intoxicated drivers with fines is nothing short of criminal. A driver caught drunk at the wheel should never again be permitted to take charge of a car.”
“If they proceed as usual the life of no pedestrian will be safe.”
On Thanksgiving Day in 1922, we began printing the Daily News Platform for New York each day above this column. That first platform said: 1. A Seat for Every Child in the Public Schools; 2. Stricter Fire Laws and Their Enforcement; 3. A 5-cent Fare and Better Service; 4. Improved Traffic Conditions on the Streets; 5. A Bonus for Ex-Service Men; 6. Stricter Regulation of the Sale of Pistols.
With the exception of the bonus for WWI vets, our 1922 concerns for public schools, fire prevention, transit, safer streets and gun control have remained unchanged more than century later. And while during those early years when we printed the Daily News Platform for New York, planks would be added and removed, street safety always remained on the list.
Our cartoonist, C.D. Batchelor, cared deeply about preventing unnecessary deaths which is what Vision Zero is all about. He began his numbered “Inviting the undertaker” cartoons about traffic safety on July 10, 1937, a few months after he won a Pulitzer Prize, the first for The News.
“Inviting the undertaker (No. 1)” instructed a man seeking death to “walk to the right with cars coming at your back.” The acronym ITU came into parlance and Batchelor’s Connecticut license plate was ITU. Batchelor kept at it regularly for more than three decades until his retirement, with his last installment on Sept. 9, 1968, with “Inviting the undertaker — No. 1,306.”
ITU No. 1,306 showed a panel with a long-ago fortune teller and a gentleman customer, with the caption: “Nina’s reading of the lines in grandfather’s palm may have warned him of danger.” The other panel was a car on a curving road: “but grandson if he is wise, pays more attention to the lines on the highways.”