Public Hearing on Preventing Deaths and Injuries Caused by Reckless and Negligent Drivers.
Assembly Committees on Codes and Transportation in New York City on 02/27/03

Testimony by: Harris Silver

My name is Harris Silver I am the founder of Citystreets. We are known as a forward-thinking, NYC based organization focused on improving the urban environment by exposing transportation policy flaws, their cultural impact on cities, and bringing much needed attention to pedestrian safety issues.

At Citystreets the definition of the word accident that we use is "that which cannot be avoided". We believe what is often described as "tragic accidents" are in fact "avoidable crashes".

This statement is the philosophical foundation of my entire testimony.

Think about it, our physical world is completely man made. There is no part of New York City that resembles what our city looked like when it was founded by a Dutch Corporation 300 years ago. The question needs to be asked. If our world is made by man, why don’t we make a world that is also safe for man? And woman? And children? And the elderly?

For years the city has attempted to solve its traffic problems by looking at street corners and answering the question: How do we get as many cars to move through this intersection as quickly as possible? Not the question: “How do we make our streets safe for pedestrians?” Seen throught the historical lens this has transformed our city by turning over so much public space for the movement and storage of automobiles.

We refer to this as having a windshield perspective. Thousands of people have died, more injured, because traffic engineers have placed the movement of cars ahead of people’s safety. It’s time to look at this problem from the walkers perspective and as soon as we do the solutions to safer city are easy to see.

When good government groups, community boards, individuals and even many of our cities advocates and experts discuss traffic, they usually point to the failure of enforcement and are blind to the larger design failure.

The following 14 solutions that I am about to offer are a subset of a larger solution series that I have written. The submitted materials go into some of these solutions in more detail.

Solution 1
Change the present priority of the DOT and all agencies that deal with regulations of street use to the proper priority for traffic which is:

1. Pedestrian Safety
2. Emergency Vehicles
3. Mass Transit
4. Personal non polluting transit Bicycles, Segways etc.
5. Commercial (includes medallion taxis)
6. All others

If anyone has any doubts about what the DOT’s priorities are I encourage you to look at today’s New York Times where there is an article stating that the pedestrian activated signals, thousands of them are nothing more than mechanical placebos. That’s right thousands of buttons supposedly there to help pedestrians cross safely have been deactivated and serve no purpose. When were they deactivated ? In the 80’s. Why haven’t they been removed? Why hasn’t the public been informed? Might I suggest that while these buttons are placebos it is the DOT that is sick. Infected with an institutional cancer. It is easy to criticize it is especially easy to criticize the DOT. I believe the chairwoman of the DOT should be held accountable .

I will focus the rest of my testimony on solutions and not criticism.

Solution 2
Detailed investigation and data collection and data analyses of all pedestrian fatalities and Injuries. The logical outcome of this is to use this data to map the most dangerous intersections and thus prioritize re-design with a priority to pedestrian safety. The model for this is how the mapping of crime has helped bring down the city's crime rate. My written testimony goes into this in further depth and addresses the factually inaccurate notion that pedestrian behavior is responsible for pedestrian fatalities. It is of particular interest to this committee that it was Citystreets who first suggested to the DOT in 1997 to use a similar system to NYPD's crime stat mapping to look at pedestrian fatalities. This is what is credited for bringing pedestrian fatalities to historic lows. For more information please click here

Unlike the DOT we think it's a little early for self-congratulatory celebration. NYC still has 15,000 pedestrians seriously injured after being struck by cars every year.

Solution 3
Include pedestrian fatalities and injuries as part of the crime stats reported to the public about street safety.

You can’t solve problems you don’t recognize. Hit someone with your car, and leave them to die on the street, it’s a crime.

A typical example of this is Alice Yang who was crossing canal street with her husband on the evening of February 9th 1997 and they were both hit. She was thrown across the canal street and was killed when she was hit by second vehicle. The vehicle that hit her fled the scene. The vehicle was never found. The driver was never caught. And the police did not include her death as part of the crime statistic the year she was killed.