City Transpo, Health Advocates: One Traffic Death Is One Too Many

The Drum Major Institute and Transportation Alternatives today called on the city to step up efforts to reduce vehicular deaths, and implored the Bloomberg administration and the New York City Council to change the widespread “culture of acceptance” that leads many New Yorkers to view thousands of preventable, life-altering injuries as an inevitable byproduct of urban traffic.

“Vision Zero: How Safer Streets In New York City Can Save Over 100 Lives A Year” reveals that between 2001 and 2009 more people were killed in New York traffic than fell victim to gun homicides. On average, one person dies every 35 hours in a city traffic crash, while every year some 70,000 are injured.

DMI and TA were joined by health care providers and victims of traffic violence at Essex and Delancey Streets, the most dangerous intersection on Manhattan’s East Side, to announce the release of the report, which draws on technical studies from the World Health Organization, World Bank, the European Conference of Ministers of Transport and others.

“Inaction comes at a heavy human cost,” said DMI’s John Petro. “If New York’s roads were as safe as Paris or Berlin’s, we’d save over one hundred lives every year. It’s time that we as a city rethink the way that traffic fatalities seem to be accepted as a matter of fact in New York. It doesn’t have to be this way. We know because other cities have done it.”

You can find the report here. We’ll have more on its recommendations and this morning’s event later today.