“Deadliest for City’s Walkers: Male Drivers, Left Turns” (The New York Times)
Just the headline of this article is heartbreaking. So many specifics from the study relate to Zachary’s story: “Inattention, rather than intoxication, was the most common cause for the accidents, with a third of cases involving a driver who simply did not pay attention or suffered from poor visibility.” Please pass this story on. DEMAND that your friends and family take responsibility for their driving behaviors, in honor of my son and others like him who have lost their lives in unnecessary, preventable “accidents.” [FC]
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Want to take a safe stroll around New York City? Avoid crossing at intersections. Pay special heed to cars making left turns. Do not go anywhere between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m., stick to the side streets and skip Manhattan entirely.
It has never been easy to safely navigate the streets of New York, where automobiles zip inches away from smartphone-toting pedestrians and the footrace across an intersection has been compared to a game of human Frogger.
But a report released Monday by the city’s transportation planners offers unique insight into the precarious life on the city’s streets — pinpointing where, when and why pedestrian accidents have most often occurred — while undercutting some of the century-old assumptions about transportation in the country’s biggest city.
Taxis, it turns out, were no careering menace: cabs accounted for far fewer pedestrian accidents in Manhattan than privately owned vehicles. Jaywalkers, surely the city’s most numerous scofflaws, were involved in fewer collisions than their law-abiding counterparts who waited for the “walk” sign — although accidents involving jaywalkers are more likely to result in death.
And one discovery could permanently upend one of the uglier stereotypes of the motoring world: in 80 percent of city accidents that resulted in a pedestrian’s death or serious injury, a male driver was behind the wheel. (Fifty-seven percent of New York City vehicles are registered to men.)
The study, which the city’s Transportation Department described as the most ambitious of its kind by an American city, examined more than 7,000 crashes that occurred in New York City between 2002 and 2006 and that resulted in the death or serious injury of at least one pedestrian.
Equal parts safety manual and urban portrait, the report offers a macabre and revealing look at the boroughs, avenues, and times of day that were most hazardous to pedestrians and motorists alike.
“This is the Rosetta Stone for safety on the streets of New York,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner.
The findings could also become a tool for the Bloomberg administration to extend its re-engineering of the city’s street grid, which it says saves lives. Those changes, which have angered many drivers, include barring vehicles from major avenues and replacing hundreds of parking spaces with bicycle lanes and walkways.
The city says it is already planning a series of street changes based on the data in the report.
Dozens of parking spaces will be removed next year from a major Manhattan avenue — the city won’t say which one — in an experiment designed to make it easier for pedestrians to spot drivers taking left turns. The city will also install countdown clocks at 1,500 intersections that inform pedestrians of the number of seconds remaining until the light changes.
Transportation officials say they are planning a media campaign to educate New Yorkers about safe driving practices — including a reminder that the city’s posted speed limit is 30 miles an hour, a fact that Ms. Sadik-Khan, in an informal poll of her friends, discovered almost nobody knew.
The study found that per street mile, Manhattan had four times as many pedestrian deaths or injuries as the average for the other boroughs.
And for those walking in Manhattan, there was a tip: stick to the side streets. Nearly half of pedestrian deaths, and a third of severe injuries to pedestrians, occurred on major crosstown thoroughfares like 125th Street or Canal Street.
Pedestrians would be well advised to favor sidewalks to the right of moving traffic — left-hand turns were three times as likely to cause a deadly crash as right-hand turns — and stay alert at intersections, where three-quarters of the crashes occurred.
In Manhattan, about 16 percent of pedestrian crashes that led to death or serious injury involved a taxi or livery cab. That is far above the city’s taxi registration rate of 2 percent, but taxis can make up nearly half of Manhattan’s traffic at some times of day, according to some estimates. Throughout the city, 80 percent of the serious crashes involved private motorists.
Inattention, rather than intoxication, was the most common cause for the accidents, with a third of cases involving a driver who simply did not pay attention or suffered from poor visibility.
November and December were the most dangerous months for pedestrians, the report found, citing a combination of holiday crowds and earlier sunsets. New Year’s Day brings calm, with the crash rate falling sharply in January and February.
About 40 percent of pedestrian crashes occurred between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m., the study found; nationally, most crashes occur overnight. Still, collisions in New York that take place in the early morning were more likely to result in a death rather than injury.
Over all, New York’s roadways have become markedly safer in the past decade, with pedestrian deaths down about 20 percent since 2001. The city recorded 256 traffic fatalities last year, which officials described as the lowest number since 1910, the earliest year on record.
New York is now far safer to travel within than most other American cities, with half the per capita fatality rate of Atlanta, Detroit or Los Angeles. But New York still trails world capitals like Berlin, London, Paris and Tokyo, all of which are statistically safer.
“One crash is one crash too many,” said Ms. Sadik-Khan, who said that Monday’s report would help her department “solve the riddle of why people are dying, and where they are dying in the city.”
Rebecca White contributed reporting.
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