Sunday 6 December 2015

First Avenue Harassment, Talking Down to Pedestrians - and a Culture That Needs to Change

There could hardly have been a clearer illustration of what’s wrong with the culture of New York’s city streets. Two Saturdays ago, as I rode my bike up 1st Avenue on the Upper East Side towards the Metropolitan Museum, I succeeded in shouting forcefully enough to get one turning driver to yield to me momentarily – as legally required – as I rode straight on through an intersection. But his brief slowing – more a result of confusion at my shouting, I think, than a genuine effort to let me through – enraged another driver waiting to turn.

“C’mon – let’s go!” he yelled out of his window at the driver who’d slowed, urging him, in effect, to drive over me.
 
Poorly-designed intersections and illegal maneouvres
by drivers: welcome to First Avenue
It’s the kind of incident I’ve noticed many times in recent weeks as I’ve been trying to understand the persistently high death toll on New York’s streets – particularly a dreadful spate of 12 pedestrian deaths between October 31 and November 11. It’s common to see drivers honk loudly at others who have correctly yielded to pedestrians in crosswalks. I’ve personally been on the receiving end of a fair amount of harassment from drivers who imagined they had a right to overtake me even in places where it was unsafe.

This impatience from city drivers shapes the atmosphere, making pedestrians and cyclists fearful and making the business of using the streets often miserable and stressful for everyone else. Many drivers, traffic planners and police officers seem to accept this aggressive driving culture as an almost charming symptom of the city’s general bustle and as unchangeable as the weather. They seem to regard anyone who breaks the formal law while acting within the limits of this accepted style of driving as essentially not culpable.
 
New York City pedestrians: their own worst
enemies, except for all the bigger, more
dangerous enemies.
The area’s political class are also worryingly oblivious to the nature of the problem. On November 10, Mike Simanowitz, a member of the New York State assembly, chose at a press conference organised by the New York Police Department’s 109th precinct to criticise pedestrians for creating the problems themselves. It was as if he was complaining about the timidity of his pet mice while doing nothing about the gang of unruly cats rampaging through his house.

“If you're crossing in the middle of the street, you're wrong, you're endangering yourself, you're endangering others, you're endangering drivers," Mr Simanowitz said.

He gave no explanation of how pedestrian behaviour might endanger drivers.

“Cross at the green, not in-between, and hopefully we will be able to reduce the number of traffic fatalities," he added.

There is, of course, something fundamentally nebulous about the claim that a set of observed behaviours adds up to a “culture”. I resist sweeping statements about how “bikers” as a whole behave or stereotypes about British people or white people or all the other various groups to which I belong.

Yet I was struck when visiting Los Angeles in mid-November at how differently the average driver behaved from his or her New York counterpart. Los Angeles drivers seem when yielding to pedestrians to stop the car well outside the crosswalk until the pedestrian is out of the way. Used to New York drivers’ constant harrying of pedestrians to hurry them out of crosswalks, I found their stopping at that point so freakish that I’d hesitate a little, wondering what was wrong.

LA drivers meanwhile had a tendency to creep forward into the crosswalk if anticipating they might be able to make a coveted right-turn on a red light (permitted when no pedestrians are crossing). Once clear of intersections, they would take off at horrendous speeds, encouraged by the city’s wide streets.
 
Traffic on Hollywood Boulevard: surprisingly accommodating
to basic standards of decency.
The contrasting patterns of behaviour reflect the two cities’ different road conditions. In New York, on Manhattan avenues and many other places, there can be 20 intersections every mile, with each controlled by traffic lights. In drivers, New Yorkers’ famed impatience expresses itself in a desperate desire to reach the next traffic light before it has been red for too long. Angelenos are famously more laid back – and they can make up for any delay at an intersection by speeding up on the long spaces between lights.

The moment one starts looking for the jostling for position in New York, however, it’s everywhere. If I position myself safely at the head of a line of traffic waiting at a red light, I will typically find the driver first in the line creeping up alongside me, putting me in precisely the proximity to him I was trying to avoid. Every morning, as I ride down Smith St in Brooklyn, I find drivers seeking to turn from side streets have turned half-way through the intersection, blocking the cycle lane and crosswalks, to reserve their rightful place in the street’s slow-moving traffic jam. Drivers are so desperate to get out of parking spaces and into the traffic that they seem truly to look at what's going on only once they're under way down the street.

These habits are far more than local foibles like New Yorkers’ tendency to be rude or fondness for street food. New York city bus drivers alone killed three pedestrians in November – two hit by drivers turning through crosswalks and another hit by a driver apparently speeding. The police appear to be attributing a crash on October 31 that killed Louis Perez, 64, Nyanna Aquil, 10, and Kristian Leka, 24, on a sidewalk in The Bronx to the driver’s “medical issue”. But, whatever happened immediately before the crash, the driver was driving a powerful Dodge Charger car at such a speed that it became airborne after hitting another car and landed on top of the victims. A read through Radio WNYC’s list of this year’s traffic fatalities – 228 at the time of writing – reveals a steady stream of people killed by drivers ignoring their right of way, driving too fast or mounting a sidewalk after crashes resulting from excessive speed.
 
125th St in Harlem: I see excessive speed and fast, risky
turns. But a New York assembly member sees this as a space
spoilt by pedestrians' recklessness.
There is a mountain of evidence about the costs and causes of the current traffic culture. While the number of traffic deaths to the end of November - 224 – was down on the 252 for the same period in 2014, only 127 people died in London – a slightly larger city with more motor traffic – in the whole of 2014. Research by Streetsblog, the campaigning website, shows that only around 7 or 8 per cent of crashes involving pedestrians in New York are labelled a result of an error by a pedestrian.

There's no denying that New York pedestrians and cyclists are also often in a hurry. I am frequently frustrated, for example, by pedestrians' rush to cross the street after cars have passed, without looking out for cyclists. I find it tempting to ride through traffic lights just as they're changing precisely because it means I can avoid jostling with drivers when the lights turn green again. When I run through lights a little later than I should, however, I find an even later car nearly invariably following me through. The behaviour of both pedestrians and cyclists is dictated mainly, it seems to me, by their desire to avoid crossing streets or moving away from lights at the same time that cars are doing so.

Mr Simanowitz’s comments are unusually revealing, meanwhile, about why politicians and the police persist in trying to berate pedestrians and cyclists into solving the problem rather than going after the real issue – driver behaviour. The patronising rhyme – “cross at the green, not in-between” – makes it clear that he regards pedestrians as irresponsible children in contrast to the grown-ups – the drivers – in the streets. I encountered similar reasoning myself recently when I got into a row with a driver who’d pulled out into my path and he quickly fell to insinuating that cycling was a children’s activity.

“You’re a grown-ass man on a push bike!” he yelled, incredulously, as if being an adult in charge of an elderly, collision-damaged Lexus SUV were inherently superior.
The sign says "slow zone"; the design says fast.
Which do you think motorists do?

The rhyme suggests that Mr Simanowitz’s thinking – and, I suspect, that of many other senior politicians – remains dominated by the facile road safety lessons given to children. Those are, typically, predicated on the idea that it’s children’s own job to keep themselves safe. They embrace none of the complexity that the statistics reveal – that most road traffic victims suffer from someone else’s negligence, not their own. It’s as if they were trying to solve the mice’s timidity by giving the mice lessons in strengthening their characters, not keeping the cats at a safe distance.

There’s little mystery about what it would take to alter the traffic culture. Many New York streets at present look designed precisely to encourage excess speed, not to discourage it. The sidewalks and cycle lanes are mostly add-ons that are sacrificed anywhere that cyclists or pedestrians might slow down or otherwise hamper traffic. Enforcement of traffic laws is haphazard and often directed at harassing cyclists and pedestrians, based on the same fundamental misunderstanding of road relationships that Mr Simanowitz betrayed.

London, which has made little concerted effort to address road safety and whose transport policies have many shortcomings, has far better figures largely by dint of having better road design, better places to cross the street and far more speed cameras.

But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the city as a whole for now takes the view of the people I encountered as I rode down MacDougal St in Greenwich Village on Thursday evening. They stepped out into the bike lane to hail a taxi which then, with considerable predictability, veered left into the bike lane cutting me off and forcing me to come abruptly to a halt.

They were superficially apologetic and sympathetic.

“Oh – that’s not right,” one of them said.

But the sympathy wore off in less time than it took me to ask the driver what he thought he was doing.

“Be on your way – we’re in a hurry,” the initially sympathetic man shouted at me, in the stilted tone of a character in a novel.

Then, as I accepted defeat and headed off towards Bleecker Street, he spoke for the city when he yelled after me: “Shit happens – get used to it!”

This blog is the first after a lengthy delay caused by the Invisible Visible Man’s efforts, among other things, to interest publishers and agents in the possibility of a book based on the blog. I apologise for the interruption.

The timing of future blogposts will depend on progress in the efforts to find a publisher. Anyone interested in taking me on as an agent or publisher is free to contact me at robert dot wright at ft dot com.

19 comments:

  1. Reminds me of, in NJ, climbing a hill, approaching a more minor road teeing on the right, wearing bright orange, using a front strobe which could have lit Zeppelins over London (in another century, even), occupying "Prime Position", having one car already pulled out in front of me, followed by a guy in a Suburban, who basically aimed for me but somehow stopping JIT, claiming it was my fault because, he, "Didn't see me."

    Yes, "Shit happens." I've just got used to expecting it. I hope the next cyclist he didn't see fared as well as me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Alan,

      Thank you for your comment.

      It's certainly fascinating how drivers expect their victims to shrug off their nearly being killed.

      All the best,

      Invisible.

      Delete
  2. Oh yes, so much this.

    On Monday night coming home, I got the rare chance to vent at the right offendor. At 116th Street in Morningside Heights, southbound Claremont Avenue ends at a T intersection, and traffic turning right/westbound actually has an arc to turn through, with a stop sign at the merge with 116. I come along on my bike, the first car turning west sees me coming and yields, and the car behind it lays in with the horn, not once, but twice.

    Now, I'm a loud and angry-sounding shouter, and there were no other vehicles around, so I think everyone heard and understood who I meant when I shouted "F*ck you! F*CK YOU!!" before completing my descent on the short hill there and turning onto RSD. This was a little consolation.

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    Replies
    1. Matt,

      I have written before about the importance of communication on the streets and how part of the safety problem is that it's so hard for people to communicate across the barrier of a vehicle's steel walls. So I approve of the loud yelling thing, albeit I tend to express myself mainly through my volume, not via profanity. It is bizarre how ready people become to threaten others once they get in a car.

      All the best,

      Invisible.

      Delete
  3. What do you think is the right answer on taxis and bike lanes, BTW? Laws are on the books that taxi drivers may not accept or discharge passengers in them. But with the buildout of the bike network in NYC, there are pretty big swaths of neighborhood where there aren't logical other places to pull over.

    I'd settle for actually weakening the law to "do not force bikes to react to you anything close to suddenly if you stop in a bike lane, and do not linger there any longer than is needed to collect or discharge your passengers." in exchange for real law enforcement attention, tbh. I've never seen any ticketing for the current rules...

    ReplyDelete
  4. What do you think is the right answer on taxis and bike lanes, BTW? Laws are on the books that taxi drivers may not accept or discharge passengers in them. But with the buildout of the bike network in NYC, there are pretty big swaths of neighborhood where there aren't logical other places to pull over.

    I'd settle for actually weakening the law to "do not force bikes to react to you anything close to suddenly if you stop in a bike lane, and do not linger there any longer than is needed to collect or discharge your passengers." in exchange for real law enforcement attention, tbh. I've never seen any ticketing for the current rules...

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    Replies
    1. Matt,

      I don't know the precise answer but I will say that it's currently far too accepted a practice for pretty much everyone to stop in bike lanes. The other Friday, for example, I was riding home through Chinatown, got to the short stretch of two-way bike lane by the Manhattan Bridge and found it blocked by a police car. As I photographed the offending vehicle, the officers came and started yelling at me about where else were they supposed to park. I pointed out there were free legal (or at least safer) parking places yards away.

      Taxi drivers often seem to prefer to drop a customer in a bike lane rather than stop legally on the other side and have the passenger cross a single-lane street him or herself. That's just stupid.

      One thing I never fully appreciated in London when I lived there was how well organised the parking, loading zones and so on were. New York needs to have a comprehensive look at these things. It's far too easy, for example, for people commuting from the city's periphery to drive to somewhere like Fort Greene, park for free then head by subway into the city. There should be costs associated with that.

      All the best,

      Invisible.

      Delete
    2. I'm of the opinion that sacrificing several free or well below market rate street parking spots for passenger loading and unloading would help immensely. In fact, converting nearly 100% of on street parking to some type of loading zone, commercial, delivery, passenger, etc could go a long way to making our streets safer.

      Delete
    3. Ollie,

      Space didn't really permit it here but parking is an enormous part of the issue. London has a lot of loading zones, metered parking and residents' parking places. Residents can buy a long-term permit for the residents' parking, while residents can buy short-term permits for visitors, workmen and so on. It makes parking far, far more orderly. Double parking is far rarer, for example.

      All the best,

      Invisible.

      Delete
  5. It may be worthwhile mentioning that London doesn't just have speed cameras, but cameras at many junctions so drivers get fined if they block the junction box, and also cameras on buses and on bus lanes so drivers get fined if they drive in the bus lane.

    Also while few pedestrians in NY may actually get fined for jaywalking, it may influence the culture compared to London where a pedestrian can cross a road anywhere (except motorways where pedestrians are banned anyway) In the UK a "red man" on a pedestrian crossing is advisory but it isn't against the law for a pedestrian to cross on a red.

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    1. Michael,

      Thanks for your comment. Those are all good points.

      I think the biggest thing with the UK approach to road safety is that it's much less obsessed with the idea of "right of way" - that there are times one's allowed to do things and times one isn't - and much more interested in whether people are behaving reasonably. The drivers trying to turn across my path on 1st Avenue clearly thought they had some kind of right of way over me and so were within their rights to cut across my path. It's a mad way to try to organise a road system. Drivers are constantly getting exonerated in New York for serious crashes because they weren't clearly breaking two separate traffic rules. In the UK, they'd have faced prosecution for driving without due care and attention, careless driving or one of that spectrum of offences. More broadly, there just seems to be a more pragmatic approach to these issues in the UK, from which the US could certainly learn.

      All the best,

      Invisible.

      Delete
    2. After having one driver turn left across our straight-through path when we were out on our ride to Maspeth yesterday, and two nearly do it before I vigorously waved them off, I think there's a class of driver that always thinks they have right of way over a bicycle by virtue of a car being bigger than a bike, or something. It's a little mystifying.

      Delete
  6. I think some attention needs to be called to the ridiculously high fees you face as a driver for breaking the law when driving in New York. For the police this seems designed to be a money maker for the city rather than to deter misbehavior. If I, as a driver, get stuck "blocking the box" because I let pedestrians pass, I could be looking at a ticket for $180, (and in some cases points on my license that will increase my insurance) - which is no small amount of money. If this were truly about safety, I'm not sure why $40 wouldn't do just as well, and might make one less anxious to hurry up and get out of danger.

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  7. Actually, despite the propaganda, it is safer to cross a street midblock. This is due to two reasons - those so crossing watch traffic more closely before crossing and crossing midblock eliminates getting killed by turning motorists.

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    1. Steve,

      Thanks for your comment. You are, of course, correct and New York traffic statistics bear you out. In the UK, many marked crossings are mid-block, for precisely this reason.

      Unfortunately, almost none of this debate is conducted on a straightforward, rational basis.

      All the best,

      Invisible.

      Delete
  8. It's curious that, as far as I know, the US is the only country where jaywalking is an offence.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Alan,

      There is, I think, a whole, rather depressing story about how automakers pushed to get jaywalking made an offence. A "jay" was someone from the sticks who didn't know how to behave in a city, apparently.

      On the other hand, I once tried crossing in Berlin before the light turned green and got shouted at by an angry policeman. So I think other places have similarly silly laws.

      All the best,

      Invisible.

      Delete
  9. Jaywalking is not an offense everywhere, it's state by state. In Missouri, pedestrians are encouraged by the law to cross at intersections in "business districts" (legally ill defined but usually interpreted to mean something like a street lined by retail) but not required. In other places, they can cross anywhere. Similarly, crosswalks are advisory for autos: drivers do not have to stop for you. The only hard and fast rule is stop lights and ped crossing lights: those you're supposed to obey. But since you can legally cross mid-block in most places, it doesn't matter. I once got detained by a cop for walking into a crosswalk that was flashing don't walk in front of his car when he was trying to make a right on red; he released me when his supervisor showed up and explained to him that I hadn't violated any law.

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    Replies
    1. Cid,

      Thanks for the comment. It really doesn't help to encourage sensible driving that the rules differ so widely between places. And it is a great pity that so many police officers appear not to understand the traffic laws they're meant to enforce.

      All the best,

      Invisible.

      Delete

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