Eric the Relic: In Blaming Dead Pedestrians, Adams Seizes Long-Discredited and Hateful Messaging

Donald Trump blames migrants for America’s ills. His V.P. pick JD Vance famously blamed “hillbillies” for succumbing to opioids. This week, Eric Adams blamed pedestrians for getting run over and killed in New York City.

Questioned on Monday about the 28-percent rise in pedestrian deaths so far this year over the same period last year, Adams expressed sadness, but no outrage, before veering into victim-blaming. 

“I was really surprised to see how many accidents [sic] we’re having because people are crossing in the middle of the street and not at the crosswalk,” the mayor said. “People are walking against the light.”

Adams’s remarks followed testimony last month by a high-ranking DOT official stating that just over one-third (34 percent) of pedestrians killed in New York City in the past five years were crossing either mid-block or against the light.

First off, that DOT factoid — which did not have a yearly breakdown — raises the question of why pedestrian fatalities should have risen 28 percent this year. Have New York’s eight million-plus pedestrians somehow all agreed to start walking more recklessly?

But as Streetsblog readers know, people in power have been assigning U.S. pedestrians blame for their own deaths since the dawn of the Auto Age, so it’s no surprise that Adams is joining the chorus. But it’s distressing as both a harbinger of continued mayoral car coddling and an indicator of municipal amnesia.

Twenty-five years ago, I led the Right Of Way team that published the groundbreaking booklet, Killed By Automobile. Our 64-page report examined 947 pedestrian and cyclist deaths in the five boroughs from 1994 to 1997. Some of the report’s findings stayed in civic discourse for years:

• New Yorkers age 65 and above were more than twice as likely to be killed by a driver as to be murdered.
• Motorists killed 50 pedestrians on New York sidewalks in those four years. 
• The top cause of pedestrian fatalities was vehicles turning into people in crosswalks.

The biggest reveal came from drilling into the fatalities from 1997 and assigning culpability between victims and drivers. Our key finding lit up the New York Times headline: “Drivers Are at Fault in Most Pedestrian Deaths, Report Says.” Times Metro reporter Andy Newman’s lede reads today like a laser rebuke to Eric Adams:

Despite the reputation of New Yorkers as reckless jaywalkers who routinely court death, a study released yesterday by a pedestrian-rights group found that drivers are responsible for the vast majority of accidents in which pedestrians are killed.

Newman was riffing on the 1997 data in the graph at left: In the 189 pedestrian and cyclist fatalities for which culpability could be assigned, pedestrian or cyclist behavior was solely responsible for the fatal crash in just 18 cases ― a shade under 10 percent. In 140 cases (74 percent), the pedestrian or cyclist had the right of way, making the driver at fault. In the other 31 fatalities (16 percent), a driver infraction of some sort contributed to the collision.

The Times story was a game-changer, transferring culpability from pedestrian victim to driver perpetrator. The paradigm shift lasted well into Mayor Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty. But without periodic refresher courses in the etiology of pedestrian fatalities, car-brained electeds fall back on anti-ped slander.

Adams’s Ironies

The ironies would be rich, were so many lives not at stake, along with the basic fabric of our streets.

Irony number one is that the mayor has full access to the NYPD forensics that can explain how and why New York City just underwent the deadliest first six months in Vision Zero’s 10-year history, as Trans Alt’s Tuesday press release put it. 

Vehicle and pedestrian pre-impact positions, vehicle speed, driver braking and sometimes phone use are detailed in each crash report compiled by the NYPD’s Collision Investigation Squad. But as I’ve bemoaned repeatedly (in 2021, in 2020, in 2013), the C.I.S. analyses are kept under wraps, hidden not just from the public but from the City Council. The NYPD doesn’t even compile case digests for internal use ― a dereliction of duty diametrically opposite from bodies such as the American Alpine Club, whose annual Accidents in North American Climbing volumes have been schooling mountaineers in safety since 1950. (I was a fan in my younger days.) 

Eric Adams, an ex-NYPD sergeant who rode his police career to political power, could have the police fatality forensics at his fingertips, should he want to plumb why under his watch pedestrians are dropping like flies (or, more accurately, being killed like dogs).

Irony number two is that crosswalks are often so jammed with cars and trucks ― “spillback,” it’s called ― that people trying to cross must shimmy their way through the hot, pulsating metal machines. That explains a lot of “mid-block” crossing.

But let’s not overlook Irony number three: crossing streets at midblock is often safer than at corners, as Right Of Way consigliere Michael Smith noted in a letter to the New York Times in April 1999: “Particularly on one-way streets,” Smith noted, “a mid-block crossing minimizes the number of directions in which I have to look for oncoming cars.”

“[The Times] quoted one New Yorker who says that pedestrians ‘need to be protected from themselves.’ I would be happy just to be protected from the drivers,” Smith added.

Alas, protection from drivers is precisely what New Yorkers won’t be getting from Eric Adams. Whether he’s covering for Gov. Hochul’s cancellation of congestion pricing or ignoring the city’s legal mandate to install 50 miles of protected bike lanes and 30 miles of dedicated bus lanes or watering down street-safety redesigns in danger zones like Greenpoint and eastern Queens, Adams has made it clear that dialing down citywide car volumes and combating traffic chaos aren’t on his agenda.

If you can’t or won’t protect pedestrians, make them take the rap.