Street Justice

Last Thursday, the New York City Council passed Intro 238. This legislation makes it a misdemeanor for drivers to strike pedestrians or cyclists who have the right of way. Intro 238 has the potential to dramatically change driver behavior and advance the Vision Zero program of eliminating traffic fatalities.  But without enforcement by NYPD and prosecutors, Intro 238 will be no more than an unheeded "message in a bottle."

As seasoned observers of the department's dealings with bicyclists know, NYPD has long enjoyed taking our bikes. Following the 2004 Republican National Convention, NYPD clipped locks and took bikes of persons suspected of associating with Critical Mass, resulting in a successful federal lawsuit that enjoined the practice as a constitutional violation. During a 2010 visit to New York by President Obama, NYPD without notice confiscated bikes wholesale along the president's route, failing to tag the bikes and making it extremely difficult for their owners to reclaim them. Now, NYPD has taken things to the next level by shuttering its bike pound for a year and a half, and refusing to allow owners to claim their bicycles indefinitely.

Although the de Blasio administration’s Vision Zero plan to eliminate traffic fatalities does not specifically call for pedestrian traffic enforcement, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton has made clear that individual precinct commanders have the discretion to do so if they determine it to be warranted.

The election of numerous safe streets candidates earlier this month, followed by the exoneration of road-raging cabbie Faysal Himon and the gut-wrenching parade of daily traffic deaths since, create the best opportunity in years to impose meaningful consequences for sober reckless driving.

New Yorkers were outraged to hear yesterday that there may be no criminal charges against cab driver Mohammed Himon, who plowed into a bicyclist and several pedestrians, horribly injuring a woman on the sidewalk. Although yesterday's NYPD statement was not official, anonymous leaks to the effect that sober drivers who stay at the scene of a crash will face no criminal charges are almost always borne out  — unless the District Attorney conducts its own investigation.

Yesterday’s watershed decision in Floyd v. New York, in which federal Judge Shira Scheindlin found NYPD’s stop and frisk program unconstitutional, has thrown a spotlight on the issue of personal security. Mayor Bloomberg, Commissioner Kelly at his side, utterly rejected the decision, suggested it would directly result in increased violent street crime, and vowed an appeal.

The right of way. You won't find it in the Declaration of Independence, the UN Charter on Human Rights, or any other foundational declaration of rights. But that's not because it's any less important. At least for those living in dense urban environments -- a growing proportion of Americans -- respect for the right of way is critical to efficiently navigating the routine of daily life. For millions of us, respect for the right of way is a matter of life and death.

I was gratified to learn in March that NYPD had re-christened its “Accident Investigation Squad” the “Collision Investigation Squad” (CIS), and reportedly beefed up its 19-person force of crash investigators by 50 percent. But as a lawyer representing pedestrian and cyclist crash victims, I have yet to see the impact of these changes on the ground. Instead, NYPD continues to waste a significant portion of the resources it devotes to traffic law enforcement on “garbage” summonsing of cyclists. Looking at NYPD’s overall traffic law enforcement program -- including both crash investigations and traffic law enforcement -- it seems like little has changed.

As any good policy wonk knows, certain activities effectively force people who only bear the costs of that activity to subsidize the beneficiaries. To use the classic contemporary example, fossil fuel polluters receive billions in tax breaks, but pay nothing for the climate change-inducing carbon that they emit.