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With Judy Ross, Benjamin Heim Shepard and Barbara Ross calling for safe streets. The violence cyclists face every day is out of control. We get honked at, swerved at, and quite often, physically attacked as we ride. |
Today,
the collective heart of New York City is breaking as we learn
more about the victims who were needlessly killed and injured on
the Hudson River Greenway, the busiest bicycle path in the
country.
This
is a tough day for all New Yorkers -- and tough for everyone in
the United States and around the world who regularly bikes and
walks on city streets. There exists already a baseline sense of
vulnerability. Now that feeling is heightened.
The
weaponization of motor vehicles is increasingly common, as we
saw earlier this year in Barcelona, Charlottesville and Times
Square. But the truth is -- before the rise of weaponization of
motor vehicles -- traffic crashes all too often taken pedestrian
and cyclist lives in New York City.
On
Halloween in 2015, a holiday when we need safe streets more than
any other, a reckless driver jumped a curb at speed in the
Bronx, killing three trick-or-treaters and injuring four others.
In 2006, bike rider Eric Ng was killed by a driver who
intentionally drove onto the Greenway at high speed at the exact
same location as yesterday’s attack. These are just two examples
of countless preventable deaths.
Yet
contrary to what some have said, there are proven ways to
prevent these types of attacks and crashes. Prompted by Eric’s
death, advocates have fought for more than a decade to block
vehicular access to the Greenway with a common measure known as
bollards. These life-saving bollards are already in place at
some intersections along the Greenway, such as at Barclay
Street, but are far from standard and for no good reason.
Unless
we change the priorities of our city to place people over the
ease of vehicular movement, this will happen again. Across the
five boroughs, through the years, this story repeats: a New
Yorker is killed by a driver every other day, yet our city’s
leaders never change drivers’ unfettered access to our city’s
public spaces.
It
should be the norm -- not the exception -- that we provide
better protection for New York City’s bike lanes, pedestrian
plazas and most crowded sidewalks. In addition to installing
bollards, granite blocks and other proven countermeasures to
protect bikers and walkers, the city must do a better job of
monitoring and managing car and truck traffic. With the very
real threats that New York City faces, we must restrict vehicle
access to New York City’s most vulnerable areas, such as Lower
Manhattan and Midtown. More widely, the City of New York should
begin regulating and limiting truck and vehicle access to our
city’s most crowded areas the same way that many European cities
do for both safety, security and street efficiency rationales.
An obvious opportunity for improvement would be to move
deliveries that require large trucks to overnight hours when
streets are not teeming with pedestrians and cyclists.
Today,
as our city grieves, New Yorkers in all five boroughs are also
biking and walking as we always do, in greater numbers than ever
before. We celebrate these actions as part of what makes New
York City great. The Mayor must redouble his commitment to
Vision Zero by expanding and accelerating the proven traffic
safety measures that protect New York City’s most important
public spaces, beginning by first working with whomever
necessary to install bollards along potential vehicular access
points to the Hudson River Greenway.
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