Traffic deaths surge despite de Blasio’s assurance

NEW YORK — Ghostly white strollers were parked outside City Hall in lower Manhattan to mourn a 3-month-old girl killed in her stroller on a Brooklyn sidewalk in a crash that the authorities say was caused by a reckless driver.

The strollers — accompanied by bouquets of yellow flowers and lit candles — were a stark rebuke to Mayor Bill de Blasio.

When de Blasio took office nearly eight years ago, one of his most ambitious promises was to tame New York City’s deadly streets, where nearly 300 people had been killed in traffic deaths just the year before. “We refuse to accept the loss of children, parents and neighbors as inevitable,” the mayor declared in 2014. “We are focusing the full weight of city government to prevent fatalities on our streets.”

The city has not delivered on its pledge. As de Blasio gets ready to step down in January, the streets are more dangerous than they were when his tenure began. Traffic deaths have surged this year to their highest level in nearly a decade.

Every three days on average, a car kills another pedestrian.

At least 189 people — including 87 pedestrians and 12 cyclists — have been killed by crashes on city streets through Sept. 14, up nearly 26% from the same period last year and the highest number of deaths in that period since 2013, according to city records.

“It’s a real failure of leadership that his final year in office is ending with more traffic deaths than the first,” said Danny

Harris, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group.

The carnage has devastated families and friends, unleashed a torrent of anger directed at City Hall and the Police Department, and fueled an endless succession of candlelight vigils.

The surging traffic deaths, street-safety experts say, have been propelled by more speeding and reckless driving as people have become emboldened by lax enforcement and emptier roads in some parts of the city during the pandemic.

But the city has also come under fire for not moving aggressively enough to carve out safe spaces, including more bicycle lanes. There are also many more cars on the city’s roads, increasing the possibility of crashes. From September 2020 through the end of August, the number of newly registered vehicles soared by more than 120,000 compared with the previous 12-month period, according to state records.