Vision Zero won’t save you.

It might, if you’re lucky. We hope it does! But as implemented in New York City, Vision Zero isn’t working.

Politicians like to call us America’s safest big city. But after years of Vision Zero, thousands of New Yorkers a month are still being injured in car crashes, and aggressive driving is still the order of the day. And our police do not seem to take the problem seriously — in fact, they make it worse.

The NYPD won’t save you.

Some precincts tweet about Vision Zero, and hand out flyers. That’s fine. But look at what their officers behave. They park on sidewalks and in pedestrian plazas, and drive across them. They turn the blocks around their own precincts into auto junkyards. They ignore the hundreds of obvious trouble spots where crosswalks and safety zones are continuously blocked by aggressive drivers for hours at a time every day. They obstruct bike lanes and bus lanes with their own personal cars, forcing people into traffic and delaying thousands of people a day.

When we report cars parked where they shouldn’t be, our police lie on the record and don’t take action. And worst of all, when we’re injured by cars and trucks, they blame us rather than the 3-ton metal boxes that hit us.

New Yorkers deserve a safety force that actually understands what’s dangerous about this city and works to mitigate it, rather than the police we have, who mostly drive in from somewhere else and behave like they don’t respect the people who live here.

The DOT has good ideas. But change is slow.

How to keep people from being hit by cars and trucks on the streets of New York City is not complicated. The tactics that work are well known and not at all mysterious!

• The need: Reconfigure our street space so it’s harder for drivers to hit us, even if they’re idiots or angry. Use physical obstructions to make cars slow down, and put physical barriers between cars and people. Address specific conflicts (e.g., drivers turning across a bike lane) in ways that reduce the likelihood of death or injury.
  The reality: Our DOT does some of this. But not nearly enough.
  
• The need: Make the experience for drivers worse, so people who have other less unpleasant options for getting around will use them. Bar vehicles entirely from parts of the city, restrict turns, reduce lanes.
  The reality: For all the carping from drivers, we’ve done proportionally very little of this. Even in Manhattan, there have been no significant changes on more than 80% of our street mileage.
  
• The need: Make parking expensive: make people pay what it’s actually worth. Eliminate free curbside storage for private cars; repurpose curbs for loading, plazas, bicycle parking, trash collection, and other human uses.
  The reality: Propose removing 2 parking spaces for a safety island, and see what happens at the next public meeting.
  
• The need: Enforce the law, starting with the laws that keep people from being killed. Ticket drivers who block crosswalks; control speeds; impound the vehicles of serial offenders. Don’t let city employees steal parking. Don’t (we can’t believe we have to say this) let police officers park or drive on the sidewalk.
  The reality: Individual police officers personally benefit from the status quo. This system won’t change itself.

The DOT knows all this. For most of the tactics that increase safety, it has statistics to prove that they work, which match the data from around the world. And we get, intermittently, great street designs from them! But the great things we get take forever to happen. We’re decades behind where we should be, because no one in city government will say “street safety is a higher priority than anything else” — and then back it up.

For two City Council sessions in a row, we’ve gotten some vocal Council support. But last session it pretty much came to nothing: the NYPD lied to Corey Johnson’s face in a City Council hearing, and the DOT pushed back against a major change that would give it authority to tackle the problem. If we keep the pressure on, things may be different this year.

Cars are the real danger. But nobody will face it.

Last year, 50,000 of us were hurt in car crashes in our city. 272 of us died. Meanwhile, bikes killed almost nobody* and injured almost nobody, and most of the injuries they did cause were not very serious. That makes sense! A bike is small and doesn’t go very fast; meanwhile, any collision with a motor vehicle is likely to send you to the hospital with a serious injury.

Still, each time a truck runs over someone on a bike, the NYPD’s typical response is to look for a reason to blame the dead person, then spend a week performatively harassing some people on bikes. Nobody’s willing to face the real problem: there’s virtually no cost to driving in or through our city, street parking is free or nearly free for hundreds of thousands of vehicles, and the NYPD provides almost no enforcement of fundamental safety laws, even at places where there are dozens or hundreds of serious safety violations an hour that put thousands of people at risk of injury or death every day.

*In roughly 150 million bike trips in NYC in 2019, bike riders killed 0, 1, or 2 pedestrians, depending on how you count.

Let’s build the city we deserve.

In a diverse, creative, vibrant, economically powerful city like New York, we could have streets that are safe, pleasant, and attractive, while also giving first priority to the mobility needs of the overwhelming majority of our population who didn’t arrive here today in their own personal cars — and meeting the practical delivery and service needs of companies and industries.

Instead, we have …this.

We deserve so much better. Let’s use our voices to support good ideas — from inside and outside city government — and help make them happen faster.

Join us, or get out of the way. We’re coming through.

Some big problems