REIMAGINE STREETS NOW

A spate of traffic fatalities in the city

The killing of 3-month-old Apolline Mong-Guillemin last Saturday in Brooklyn was not a “tragic accident.” It was a choice. Baby Apolline. Rachel Gandel, a grandmother pushing a stroller down Myrtle Ave. Chumei Pan, a senior, crossing 16th Ave. near 85th St. Hiromi Tamy, a 6-year-old girl crossing with the light in Dyker Heights.

These deaths are not just a shame, but a result — a result of elected leaders whose willful capitulation to the status quo keep New Yorkers unsafe from car drivers on the streets.

First the facts: 2021 is the bloodiest year in Mayor de Blasio’s signature initiative, Vision Zero. Despite seven-plus years of a stated desire to reduce road deaths to a big goose egg, 189 people have died in crashes through Sept. 15. That’s 38 more people than during the same period last year, on track for a year with the most deaths since before de Blasio launched Vision Zero in 2014.

It didn’t have to be this way. When de Blasio announced the initiative on Feb. 19, 2014, the original press release promised “a comprehensive roadmap to drastically reduce traffic-related deaths” using “the full weight of city government.”

There have been many Vision Zero successes: lowering the default speed limit from 30 to 25 mph; vastly expanding automated enforcement; completing 675 street improvement projects; building 136 miles of protected bike lanes. It’s more than any prior mayor has done.

The vision is there, but the zero is not. That will be the work of the next mayor. And here is what he will need to do (beyond merely visiting Amsterdam):

A PUBLIC SPACE REVOLUTION

Our roadways represent our most important public space. Yet in almost all communities, both curbside lanes are set aside for the storage of privately owned property: people’s cars.

But free parking isn’t truly free; it’s a subsidy for owning a car that encourages more driving. It’s also a theft of public space by one resident of the block from his or her neighbors. With an estimated 3 million free parking spaces in New York City, it’s no wonder there were an estimated 140,000 new car registrations this year, as Crain’s recently reported.

Don’t listen to gripes from car owners. It’s actually too easy to park in New York City: You just buy a car and righteously demand that the city provide a space for it. Counter that with parts of Japan, where a would-be car owner must first prove he or she has a place to store the vehicle, outside the public right-of-way.

New York’s policy of providing free car storage causes demonstrable degradation of our public space and promotes anarchy on our streets — including the “trash Arabesque” that pedestrians must perform every afternoon when buildings leave out their garbage on narrow sidewalks, the congestion caused by local delivery trucks that double-park because all the curbside space is occupied by stored cars, and the basic white flag put up by the city every year when it announces its dozen or so “Gridlock Alert Days.”

We don’t need to surrender; we need to control our streets.

Transportation Alternatives has promoted a plan to reclaim 25% of the city’s roadway space from drivers, and, in doing so, create roughly 13 Central Parks’ worth of public space. Its flaw? No specific streets have been identified, meaning that the next mayor would have to fight each battle at the community board level.

A NEW OFFICE

That’s why the city needs to rethink public space entirely, with a new office, perhaps called the “Office of Public Space Management.” More bureaucracy? No, just better bureaucracy.

Currently, multiple agencies have overlapping control of public space: the Department of Transportation oversees the roads; the Parks Department controls parks and many plazas; sidewalks are controlled by a hodgepodge of private landowners; a growing number of Business Improvement Districts manage large commercial districts; the Sanitation Department, the Police Department, the Department of Finance and several other city agencies also exert their authority.

Those agencies aren’t focused on individual local streets. As a result, simple improvements, like long-sought bike corrals on chaotic W. 56th St. between Fifth and Sixth Aves. can be made easily instead of playing out this way: Everyone grumbles for years before finally organizing a block association, which then has to advocate to local councilmembers, who then have to take it up to some agency, which then has to study the issue and then hold public hearings, and then put in a requisition that will take years to be completed. If that block of W. 56th St. were in a Business Improvement District — which is like a mini version of an Office of Public Space Management — the unsafe conditions would have already been fixed.

TRULY REIN IN CARS

The city needs to undertake vast pedestrianization of roadways in residential and commercial districts to create a safe and business-friendly network.

Car drivers will scream, “We’re not Europe,” but Europe wasn’t Europe until it became Europe.

You don’t think such a transformation could happen in New Amsterdam? Well, check your history: In 1975, the traffic fatality rate in the Netherlands was 20% higher than in the U.S., but by 2008 it was 60% lower, thanks to a social movement called “Stop de Kindermoord” (Stop the Child Murder), which began after a child — a child like Apolline Mong-Guillemin — was killed by a driver.

We can stop the child murder, too, if we rein in cars.

In fact, the very corner where Baby Apolline drew her last breath is a perfect symbol of the de Blasio administration’s failure: the traffic triangle at the confluence of Gates Ave., Vanderbilt Ave. and Fulton St. was

actually redesigned in 2017, but the DOT did not turn the one-block squibb of Gates into a public plaza — as it did elsewhere in the neighborhood — in order to preserve a few parking spaces. Had that roadway been a public plaza, with bollards and trees, Apolline would be alive.

And the city’s failure to seize space from car drivers has only emboldened local politicians who believe they are burnishing their street cred with constituents by boasting of adding parking to their neighborhoods (reminder: free parking encourages car ownership and use, which leads to death and pollution). Former Councilman Chaim Deutsch (recently sent to jail for tax fraud) blocked a bike lane on Emmons Ave. in Sheepshead Bay and convinced the city to install more parking there. Is it any wonder that there have been 809 reported crashes on that one-mile stretch since de Blasio took office, injuring 36 cyclists, 39 pedestrians, and 129 motorists, killing three pedestrians?

It’s 2021 and we live in a coastal city that is already experiencing frequent disruptions caused by climate change. Do we really want our politicians advocating for more driving?

CAP CAR SPEEDS

The speed of an electric Citi Bike — a form of transportation that apparently has never been the cause of a fatal crash — is capped at 18 mph. Yet car speed is only restricted to the limits of Detroit engineering.

Modern technology could solve this problem. Google Maps, for example, already tells drivers when they’ve crossed from a 30 mph zone to a 25.

It’s time to take the next step: Have the map control the car’s top speed, too.

STOP NORMALIZING DRIVING

De Blasio has often been mocked for how he gets driven from Gracie Mansion on the Upper East Side to his gym in Park Slope. But is not merely bad look for a supposed “climate” mayor, but part of the normalization of driving that has been an

American cultural norm since oil was discovered in Pennsylvania.

Seeing driving as a normal part of city life perverts our policy: City parking placards, which cause congestion and unsafe streets because they encourage scores of thousands of city workers to drive, are distributed like candy to kids on Halloween because our officials believe that driving is what “important” “working” people must do.

We will hear the same debate this week when congestion pricing hearings begin; pro-car interests groups will seek exemptions from the central business district tolls because car owners do not want to pay even a small portion of the damage they do to our society.

And that damage is catastrophic; the “freedom” that Detroit is constantly peddling simply isn’t free — it takes a constant daily toll:

Driving creates an atmosphere of perpetual fear for everyone outside of the car. It undermines urban design, which ends up encouraging more driving instead of encouraging cycling, walking or riding the bus. It prevents non-drivers from the freedom to live the lives they want to live. It deprives kids of the opportunity to travel freely and gain independence. It undermines the livability of our neighborhoods and the social life of our streets (we don’t know our neighbors because we don’t meet them in the most common public space we have. Think about how much everyone enjoys a block party)

So, yes, Vision Zero is a laudable goal, but if it does not slash the amount of driving, it cannot be a success because of how each individual driver’s use of a car robs all of us every day, crash or no crash.

There’s a reason we all love how our blocks feel when they are closed to cars for a block party. Let’s have that feeling every day.

NO MORE DELAYS

The mayor’s original Vision Zero proposal called for street redesigns “in partnership with elected officials, community boards and stakeholders.”

As a result of that caveat, so many locations, such as Coney Island Ave., where cyclist Jose Alzorriz was killed by a reckless driver as he simply waited for a red light, or Third Ave. in Brooklyn, where delivery cyclist Hugo Garcia was killed after being doored by a taxi passenger, remain unfixed.

Everything gets delayed or watered down; The mayor initially promised “25 new arterial slow zones and eight new neighborhood slow zones.” According to the DOT, however, only 11 such zones were created by this administration — and none in the six years since mid-2015.

And in June, 2020, the mayor announced 20 miles of emergency bus lanes and carfree busways — roughly one-third of what the MTA asked for. It’s almost a year-anda-half later and the city is finally beginning work on the last project of that scaled-back initiative. Dedicated bus lanes are essential for moving people efficiently, yet every single one of the projects met community board opposition and delay.

The city is only required by law to update community boards on its plans. And it should do that...by merely sending a letter to community boards saying, “Here’s what we’re doing on Archer Ave. Email us with your comments.” Instead, entrenched community interest groups battle changes we need for the future with the tools of the past.

THE NYPD DOES HAVE A ROLE

Someone has to hold the worst drivers, like the one who killed Baby Apolline accountable. For now, state law still bars camera-issued tickets from counting against a driver’s record, so the NYPD needs to write more tickets that actually do add points to a license.

In 2013, the last year of the Bloomberg administration, cops wrote 1,036,942 moving violation tickets in all categories, including speeding and the most serious violations such as failure to yield, running red lights, and using a cell phone while driving.

By 2020, the number of total moving violation summonses had dropped to 510,342 or 51% less.

Police don’t view it as their job to get the worst drivers off the street. They must. The death of Baby Apolline proves that again.