Advocacy Advance Grant funds NYC Traffic Safety Study

Last month Transportation Alternatives, New York City’s bicycling and walking advocacy organization, released “Executive Order: A Mayoral Strategy for Traffic Safety.”

Executive Order tells the stories of bicyclists who have been killed in New York City and highlights the difficulties in penalizing the drivers and the lack of enforcement of traffic measures that could have prevented the deaths. Based on interviews with more than thirty experts and stakeholders, the report makes twenty recommendations to improve the safety for pedestrians and bicyclists and produced the following findings:

• The likelihood of getting a ticket for speeding in New York City is less than 1 in 12,698

• A driver could speed every day and get ticketed only once every 35 years

• Despite the extensive system of 100 red light cameras in New York City, police and cameras catch only 1 out of every 438 red light runners

• New York City’s 100 red light cameras were responsible for 95.5 percent of the red light summons issued in 2007

• The likelihood of being ticketed for failure to yield, the number two cause of crashes in NYC, is less than 1 in 579,983

• A driver could fail to yield every day and get ticketed only once every 1,589 years

• While the number of fatalities caused by drivers failing to yield rose 26 percent between 2005 and 2007, the number of summons issued for failure to yield decreased 12 percent during that period

• While the number of fatalities caused by speeding rose 11 percent between 2001 and 2006, the number of summons issued for speeding actually dropped 22 percent during that period

The report and TA’s on-going campaign to protect vulnerable road users was funded in part by an Advocacy Advance grant, part of a partnership between the Alliance for Bicycling and Walking and the League of American Bicyclists.