Rage in South London, a tragedy in Fort Greene - and why it matters to punish bad drivers

It was a frustration as intense as any I’ve ever felt. I’d just been hit as I rode across Newington Causeway, near Elephant & Castle in South London, by another cyclist who’d ridden fast through a red light. Yet, when I made it clear I planned to call the police, he picked up his bike and rode off as fast as he could. A mixture of anger and frustrated impotence welled up inside me. The other rider, I realised, would face no consequences at all for prioritising his own convenience over my safety.

I’ve recalled how I felt following that incident in March 2009 several times in the last few weeks as I’ve contemplated New York City’s response to some of the appalling tragedies on the city’s roads. New York’s law enforcers often seem to shrug off instances of astonishingly poor negligent driving – including many that kill entirely blameless people – as casually as that rider six years ago picked up his fixie and rode off. For example, Marlon Sewell, who drove his SUV onto a sidewalk in Fort Greene on December 6 and killed Victoria Nicodemus, currently faces only two,relatively minor charges: one for driving without a licence and the other for driving without insurance.

Attendees at the vigil for Victoria Nicodemus: killed on the
sidewalk but, as far as Brooklyn law enforcement's concerned,
hey, it's the kind of thing any of us could do.

At a vigil at the site of the crash on December 22, Victoria’s brothers and a series of politicians all lined up to demand Mr Sewell be prosecuted “to the fullest extent of the law”. I recognised anger and frustration similar to what I felt following the crash at Elephant & Castle - though clearly, given the crash’s gravity, theirs was immeasurably deeper and more intense.

It’s a frustration that people concerned about street safety in many parts of the world share. UK cycling and walking activists often express astonishment at the low level of charges that drivers who kill or maim people in the UK face and at the apparently light sentences facing those convicted.

Yet I also occasionally hear dissenting voices. Isn’t it ironic, they ask, that activists who mostly doubt the appropriateness of harsh prison sentences call for them over road crashes? Rabi Abonour, a valued member of New York’s street safety movement, supplied such a voice after Nicodemus’s death, writing that he was “uncomfortable” with the calls for murder or manslaughter charges.

4. We have huge problems with criminal justice in this country. Putting more people in jail doesn't fix anything.

— Rabi Abonour (@rabonour) December 7, 2015

“We have huge problems with criminal justice in this country,” he wrote. “Putting more people in jail doesn't fix anything.”

It’s a complaint that someone writing in the UK could also, to a lesser extent, make, given the UK’s unusual propensity compared with other European countries, for  putting people  in prison.

Pushing for more enforcement, Rabi went on, was almost certainly going to end up meaning more people of colour were prosecuted than white people.

“We need to fix the racism of our criminal justice system before we push for more felony charges against dangerous drivers,” he wrote.

The critical question is how to balance the appropriate demand that drivers face consequences for their bad behaviour with the understanding that the criminal justice system is an imprecise, often unfair tool for achieving that goal.

Occasion for liberal guilt: the corner where I got into a row
that ended in a driver's receiving a worryingly
disproportionate fine.

 I should stress that I yield to no-one in my propensity for liberal guilt. I continue to feel uneasy, for example, about the punishment meted out to a car service driver who grabbed for my camera and bike and yelled abuse at me in March 2014. The driver – who was angry that I tried to take a picture of his vehicle blocking a bike lane – was fined $3,050 – an excessive amount, in my view – after he failed to turn up at the Taxi and Limousine Commission hearing about the case. Drivers who knew how to game the system – enter a guilty plea for far lesser charges and have the gravest counts dropped – generally faced fines of no more than $300. His punishment left me feeling I’d participated in a rather grubby business. There is a tendency across the US criminal justice system for prosecutors to use Draconian charges to scare defendants into striking a plea bargain. It’s unsurprising – and deplorable - that there are many reports of even the innocent being scared into accepting such deals.

Yet those of us on the political left often, I think, misunderstand a critical part of the criminal justice system’s role. The system certainly exists to deter criminals and to reform those who have already committed crimes. But it is also vital that the system expresses society’s rage at those who violate its rules and do unjustified harm to others. There is an inevitable and appropriate element in many criminal sentences related to exacting retribution for the wrongdoer’s violation of the norm that members of a society should not do unjustified harm to one another. It is a vital part of society’s valuing of people’s property, health and lives that it should be so.

New York criminal justice is relaxed about bad driving -
and people wonder how the streets end up looking like this.

It seems to me, based on media reports, that a criminal justice system that valued human life appropriately would indeed charge Marlon Sewell with serious offences resulting in a prison sentence of at least a few years. Sewell’s licence had been suspended in March and he was cited three times for speeding in one week in November. Witnesses say he was driving too fast when he mounted the sidewalk. He can have been under no illusions either that he was legally free to drive or that his driving was of an acceptable standard. The system currently plans to treat Mr Sewell’s killing of her as essentially little more than a matter of not having the right paperwork in order.

While it is, of course, fatuous to call the crime murder – it lacked the targeted malice for that – it can be only because the killer was a car driver that the case is currently being treated differently from other deaths through negligence. It is hard to imagine that if Sewell had been driving drunk – the one type of negligent driving most US prosecutors currently take seriously – he would be facing such minor charges.

Yet the tragedy of many criminal justice systems worldwide lies less in how they treat people like Marlon Sewell once they’ve killed someone than in their readiness to let matters get that far. New York City’s authorities essentially believe it more important that people should be free to drive around the city as they please than that the unlicensed or uninsured should face regular checks to prevent them from doing so. The authorities view it as more important that traffic should flow freely and drivers’ privacy be respected than that 30-year-old Ms Nicodemus should be able to walk down a sidewalk unmolested by speeding vehicles. It is at this stage – where a tendency to dangerous behaviour can be detected, challenged and corrected – that the criminal justice system should be working, in Rabi’s words, to “fix” things.

Two drivers block the bike box while a third runs a red
to make an illegal left turn: scenes from a culture
of consequence-free bad driving

The logic of the existing system, meanwhile, reflects grubby realities about US justice that both Rabi and I would like to alter. Unfettered driving is tolerated at least in part because it is the means of transport that has come to seem “natural” for the US’s rich and powerful. Many in authority significantly underestimate driving’s drawbacks because those who suffer the pollution, deaths and injuries are disproportionately poor and, consequently, members of ethnic minorities. While Mr Sewell is black and Ms Nicodemus was white, the concentration of car ownership among the better-off means that well-off whites are disproportionately likely to be killer-drivers. Poor members of ethnic minorities are disproportionately likely to be their victims.

None of this is to say that those concerned about street safety around the world should shrug their shoulders at the shortcomings of their criminal justice systems and push for harsh punishments for dangerous drivers regardless. It is vital, for example, that cities like New York increase their dependence on automated cameras to detect routine speeding and right-of-way violations. Such a move would, I have argued before, help both to reduce the problems caused by police officers’ racial biases and to prevent appalling incidents like the death of Sandra Bland in a Texas jail after she was stopped for a nonsensical, minor violation. Activists should insist that in traffic enforcement, as in non-traffic crime, law enforcement officials develop plans to detect people who are apt to cause harm to others and seek to nudge them with minor punishments – points on their licences, compulsory retesting or restrictions on their licences – designed to make them address their behaviour and attitudes. Many of New York’s streets are also long overdue redesigns that would encourage better driving.

Allen St in Chinatown one recent morning:
a scene from a city that lets drivers off the hook.

It remains clear to me, nevertheless, that a driver takes on a serious responsibility when he or she starts driving in a car. It is impossible to believe that Marlon Sewell, after multiple run-ins with the law over his driving, can have been unaware how serious the consequences of his behaviour could be. As a result of his negligent driving, he has taken away everything the 30-year-old art curator had and much that her family and boyfriend had. The horror of the event, it seems to me, is less that people are calling for Mr Sewell to face serious charges for his actions than that there is such profound moral confusion over it. The New York Daily News, for example, bafflingly quoted an apparent witness to the tragedy as largely exonerating Mr Sewell, saying that he would have Ms Nicodemus’s death on his conscience forever. The real villain, the piece alleged, was a bystander who, dazed after witnessing the crash, took a bite from the pizza she had just bought.

Standing at the site of the crash on Wednesday with others, it was both horrific to contemplate what had happened there and all too easy to imagine. Other drivers kept venting their frustration at the slight congestion from the vigil by honking their horns, blocking crosswalks and exhibiting the kind of behaviour that contributes to New York City’s appalling street safety record. As Ms Nicodemus’s family and colleagues talked about her, the tragedy was not only that she was clearly a unique and talented individual but to think of how the near-daily other tragedies on the city’s streets must be wiping out others just as brilliant and loveable.

An installation that Victoria Nicodemus'
colleagues made after her death: likely
to prove an empty plea as long as bad driving
is effectively ignored.

A harsh sentence for Mr Sewell would not, of course, either bring back the woman he killed or on its own do much to solve the deep-seated problems. But there was also an unmistakeable sense at the vigil that the criminal justice system had been complicit in contributing to her death. It is appropriate to feel a surge of anger at the behaviour of drivers like Mr Sewell. Good societies must demand that people who breach the law so flagrantly face serious consequences.

It is obviously correct that the criminal justice system’s biases should be eradicated. It  is obviously correct that unthinking, harsh punishments solve nothing. It is also obviously correct that the US  has relied on prison too much to solve its social problems. In particular, the US has imprisoned far too many young black men for drug offences that in a better-ordered society would not be offences at all.

Yet it is equally clearly true, it seems to me, that a system that defines Marlon Sewell’s driving on December 6 as warranting no more than two warrants for technical violations is morally bankrupt. It is a system that will continue to be incapable of preventing other people – mostly poorer, more marginalised people than Ms Nicodemus – from dying. Their being crushed on sidewalks, in crosswalks and bike lanes by drivers will then be dismissed by the authorities as little more than an understandable slip.

A Twitter row, a gospel passage - and why victim-blaming keeps coming back

It’s not, I accept, a common outcome to a row on social media. But, as I was cycling home on May 20 past downtown Brooklyn’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, my mind turned from a row I’d been having on Twitter with Rory Lancman, a New York city council member, to the New Testament. Specifically, I thought about an incident in the 9th chapter of the Gospel ofJohn.

 

Jay St: not an obvious place, I accept, to start pondering
the Gospel of John

The passage came to mind because Councilman Lancman wants to amend key provisions of the council’s Right of Way law, passed last year. The amendments would shift from the driver to police and prosecutors the burden for proving violations of the law were avoidable. That would make it far harder to use the law for its intended purpose of charging drivers who hit pedestrians and cyclists who have the right of way. The councilman’s arguments to my mind suggest he thinks there are cases where motorists strike vulnerable road users acting legally and the crash is still ultimately somehow the vulnerable road user’s fault.

John Chapter 9 is a reminder of how long human beings have been battling that same instinct to assume people nearly always bring their misfortune on themselves. It details an encounter between Jesus and his disciples and a man born blind. The disciples assume the man must be suffering because of some wrongdoing either on his own or his parents’ part.

The efforts by Councilman Lancman and many others to shift the blame for crashes make far more sense, it seems to me, looked at in the context of millennia of instinctive victim-blaming than as a rational piece of public policy-making. The belief that victims deserve their fate continues to underlie thinking in a huge range of areas. While it clouds a huge amount of people’s thinking about road safety, it has still more invidious effects in thinking about class, race and, most obviously in the contemporary US, violence by the police. It is particularly invidious because it tends to be applied disproportionately to the powerless – the pedestrian or cyclist more than the motorist; the poor, unarmed black person killed by police more than the police officer.

“As Jesus went along, he saw a man blind from birth,” John Chapter 9 reads. “ His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned - this man or his parents - that he was born blind?’”

A crash I encountered on Friday: since it involved two
motor vehicles, Councilman Lancman is spared
the task of working out how to exonerate one party.

Councilman Lancman, of course, doesn’t accept my interpretation of his proposed amendments. He insists that his concern is a purely technical one – that the law passed last year is wrongly being interpreted as a “strict liability” law: that drivers are charged irrespective of the circumstances and their culpability in striking the victim of the crash. The police are wrongly failing before making arrests to analyse whether the crash was somehow unavoidable.

An email he sent to fellow council members explaining his proposed amendments, however, suggests he simply doesn't think drivers are truly to blame for many crashes.

“Adding a provision to the bill to require an analysis of due care will penalise drivers who hit pedestrians out of recklessness and gross negligence, while sparing drivers when accidents are caused by poor road conditions, bad weather and scofflaw pedestrians,” he wrote.

The email suggests strongly that many motorists who strike pedestrians and cyclists moving legally and with the right of way are somehow helpless victims either of circumstances on the roads or of the negligence of those they hit. Since it’s impossible that a pedestrian crossing the street with a walk signal can be crossing the street illegally, Councilman Lancman seems to be suggesting that, for example, a motorist might be let off charges for striking him or her if, say, the victim was talking on a mobile telephone.

Two pedestrians in this Meatpacking District crosswalk
are on their phones. That makes them fair game, right?

The email also suggests an entirely mistaken conception of a driver’s duty to exercise due care. In poor road conditions and bad weather, it’s a driver’s responsibility to drive more carefully. If a driver has blindspots, he has to compensate for them by looking more carefully. To assume that the vulnerable have to assume all the blame is to make a crude assumption that might is generally right.

The true obscenity of the councilman’s proposed amendment, meanwhile, is that it’s seeking to stamp out a “problem” that barely exists. According to Streetsblog, between the introduction of the Right of Way Law last August and the end of April, only 22 drivers had been charged under it, out of 8,000 collisions between motorists and pedestrians or cyclists. His proposed amendment would usher in a system where even that minuscule number of prosecutions would inevitably fall to nearly zero. It is no comfort at all that the councilman's proposed amendment and some other recent legislation aimed at gutting the Right of Way Law seem to be aimed at ensuring that more members of Transport Workers' Union Local 100, which represents New York bus drivers, escape arrest when they hit pedestrians.

It’s hardly as if, after all, there isn’t already a firmly-established paradigm in the heads of police officers and district attorneys that pedestrians and cyclists bring their fates on themselves. On May 18, for example, a driver struck and killed John Torson, 89, at the corner of 1^st Avenue and 61^st Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and claimed that, while she had done her best to stop, he had “just hobbled into the middle of the street”. Extraordinarily, the New York Police Department appears to have accepted this improbable excuse for hitting a man of 89 who was crossing with the right of way. The NYPD let it be known that Mr Torson had been “crossing outside the marked crosswalk”. Pictures of the scene showed the car stopped only just beyond the crosswalk, suggesting that he must at least have been very close to the marked lines.

Mr Torson was killed only a few blocks from where a turning cab driver killed Amelia Sterental, 76, on May 9 at 60^th Street and Madison Avenue. That crash – which also involved a turning driver and someone crossing the street with the walk signal - has yet to produce any charges either, suggesting that the police in that case have also found some improbable excuse for the driver’s negligence.

A van driver swings through a crosswalk
on Sixth Avenue. If he hits a pedestrian,
in many circumstances, Rory Lancman
will have his back

New means of suggesting pedestrians and cyclists bring their fate on themselves are constantly emerging and need to be slapped down, like some strange game of cultural whack-a-mole. One snowy morning in early 2014, I shouted at a cab driver who honked at me to try to get me out of a crosswalk. When he got out to confront me, I told him impatient driving like his explained the city’s poor road safety record. He asserted – even though I had not been using a phone – that pedestrians’ mobile phone use that explained the spike in crashes. I have seen abundant commentary recently on the risks of pedestrians' mobile phone use - and far less on the far greater danger posed by distracted drivers.

In the UK, Bradley Wiggins - for whose sporting achievements I feel the greatest respect - recently made the latest of a series of poorly-judged interventions on cycling safety to say cyclists "have to help themselves" by wearing "helmets and things". The Metropolitan Police shamefully failed to charge the driver who fatally hit Michael Mason on Regent’s Street because, although his bike was well lit, he was wearing neither a helmet nor high-visibility clothing. Most dispiritingly, I once had a lunch with a UK road safety minister who, when asked about cyclist safety, said cyclists were "their own worst enemies".

The persistence of such thinking is all the more extraordinary given the mental leaps that should be required to accept this narrative. Research regularly places the main blame for between two-thirds and 80 per cent of crashes involving vulnerable road users on the driver involved. Yet the victim-blaming narrative suggests cyclists and pedestrians either don’t know themselves to be vulnerable or consistently throw themselves in front of deadly, speeding vehicles heedless of the dangers.

The desperation to exonerate motorists reflects not only a desire to blame victims but to exculpate the powerful of wrongdoing. Last week, for example, after a driver mounted a sidewalk in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and mowed down Oscar Chen, four, the police were quick to dismiss this appalling piece of driving as “just an accident”. The four-year-old was saved, to judge by videos, only by being by a tree – which fell over and protected him – when the vehicle hit him. The distasteful rush to exonerate contrasts sharply with the police’s desperation to accept the false account of Ahmad Abu-Zayedeha, the driver who killed three-year-old Allison Liao in a crosswalk in Queens in 2013. The driver said Allison had “broken away” from her grandmother while crossing the street – a version of events that subsequent evidence has shown to be entirely misleading. Allison's family are constituents of Rory Lancman's.

There are similar forces at work in the effort to vilify Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old killed last year by Cleveland Police, and make excuses for the police officers who killed him. It’s not too much of a stretch, I think, to see the victim-blaming, power-exonerating dynamic at work in much of recent decades’ US economic policy. The rich need the carrot of lower taxes if they’re to be persuaded to work harder. The poor need the stick of withdrawn benefits.

The victim-blaming narrative, after all, has huge implications. If we all primarily determine our own fate on the roads, there should be a presumption of minimal intervention by the police, prosecutors and licensing authorities in drivers’ freedom to do as they please. If, however, people’s fates depend predominantly on the behaviour of others, the presumption in favour of freedom should be significantly eroded.

It’s striking for how long these moral and intellectual battles have been fought and refought, however. In the Jewish scriptures, the book of Job recounts a man suffering a series of afflictions whose friends falsely assume his own wrongdoing has somehow brought them on him. In John Chapter 9, meanwhile, Jesus firmly rebukes his disciples.

 

Parking outside Brooklyn Basilica: how would Jesus park,
do you think?

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” he says.

The story in John has a far happier ending than many collisions on New York’s or London’s streets or between angry police officers and vulnerable African-Americans. Jesus says that the blind man is blind "so that the works of God might be displayed in him". That is, I accept, a problematical idea. But Jesus goes on to put mud on the man’s eyes and have him wash it off. Afterwards, he can see.

Such a moment of eye-opening doesn’t yet seem to have come to Councilman Lancman or many other policy-makers or law enforcement officials worldwide. It hasn’t, sadly, even come to some of my fellow contemporary followers of Christ. As I cycled home on May 31, a little over a fortnight after my row with Councilman Lancman, I headed as usual down Jay St past St James’s Cathedral. I came up short when I found the bike lane was blocked. People attending an event at the cathedral had arrived by car in large numbers and decided, entirely illegally, to park diagonally to the kerb, blocking the bike lane in both directions. Cyclists were forced out into a busy stream of rush-hour traffic, endangered to provide more convenient parking for the congregation.

It’s a casual example of the arrogance of the powerful against the weak. Were Jesus present on earth in the same sense as 2,000 years ago, there would, I’m sure, be issues that would cause him still more concern. But there's a moral responsibility to park a car - just as there is to move it - in a way that poses the least possible risk to others. When people undertake even such minor acts in a fashion so casually contemptuous of the interests of others, it strikes me as deeply at odds with the solicitude for others that Christian faith – or the true practice of Judaism, humanism or any truly ethical belief system – should inspire.

A changing junction, a political bike ride - and the progressive case for cycling

As I ride home from work in the evenings, an intersection in downtown Brooklyn often prompts me to ponder New York City’s attitude to cycling. The southbound bike lane on Smith St at Fulton St used to move out gracefully round a waiting area for taxis and car-service vehicles. Then, recognising that the lane was constantly blocked by parked vehicles, the city decided to repaint the lane so that the parked taxis would no longer block it – though cyclists would have to perform a dangerous swerve out into traffic to round the parked vehicles. More recently, it’s been repainted yet again – and the lane’s now back to guiding cyclists smoothly through the junction – and once again perpetually blocked.

Smith St at Fulton: as it was before it became a symbol
of the city's vacillation about cyclists.

The intersection is a beautiful concrete – or asphalt – illustration of New York City’s equivocal attitude towards encouraging cycling. The city has been prepared to paint bicycle lanes on streets – although it’s now retreating even from that in favour of the dreadful “extra-wide parking lane”. But the city has been far less ready – particularly since Janette Sadik-Khan left as transport commissioner at the end of 2013 – to recognise that to accommodate cyclists well in a given road space it is also often necessary to inconvenience motorists. There has lately seemed to be a waning of the confidence under Michael Bloomberg, the previous mayor, that by promoting cycling the city was making progress towards being a better city.

A bike ride last Thursday prompted me to ponder further the politics of this change. I rode with members of New York city council’s progressive caucus from Brooklyn Borough Hall across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall to highlight the importance of cycling. A Manhattan delegation, having ridden from Union Square, met us at City Hall. As I rode with Brad Lander, Carlos Menchaca and other left-leaning individuals, I got into discussion about the “progressive” agenda for transport in the city and how intimately cycling is linked to making the city better for all its inhabitants.

 

Brad Lander addresses the bike-to-work ride outside Borough
Hall: a reliable progressive enthusiast for cycling.

I came away convinced that there are many progressive politicians in the city who recognise that the way people get about significantly affects how equitable and safe a city is for all its inhabitants. But I also left worried that some other progressive politicians fail to grasp what a big role changes to those patterns of mobility could play in achieving their wider goals.

Even the term progress is a pretty significant stumbling-block when thinking about these issues. The term implies that humans are learning from previous generations’ mistakes to make the world a steadily better place. It’s a view of the world that sits uncomfortably with the multiple areas where the world appears to be going into reverse. Among those are the rise of vicious Islamist radicals like the Islamic State and the takeover of the US’s Republican Party by groups that appear to reject the reliability of the scientific method for deducing facts about the world. The term also calls into question what “progress” is. Does it entail everyone’s growing steadily richer and buying ever more cars and consumer goods? At its worst, the goal of pushing towards “progress” has justified appalling acts of political repression.

Nevertheless, I’m confident that in most industrialised societies people’s political instincts divide fairly neatly into conservative and progressive camps. Conservatives tend to believe the past was better than the present and that society’s existing power structures are there for fairly good reasons. Progressives tend to think the future can be better than the present and question the power structures currently in place.

 

I don't know the politics of these people waiting to participate
in last week's ride with progressive city council members -
but it's a fair guess many would call themselves progressives.

It’s no surprise that many cycling activists, as I do, place themselves broadly in the progressive political camp. Since cycling currently accounts for only a small proportion of journeys in many rich countries, arguments for cycling are by their nature arguments for building a future that’s better than the present. Conservatives such as Boris Johnson, London’s elected mayor, are rarer – but often seem to value the bicycle as a symbol of how things were done in the past. Far more conservatives - including Jeremy Clarkson, formerly of the BBC’s Top Gear franchise – seem to identify with car culture.

But that point doesn’t fit with recent shifts in attitudes towards cycling in New York. Following the election in late 2013 of Bill de Blasio – a Democratic mayor about as far left as any conceivable mayor of the US’s main financial centre – it’s clear that cycling has moved well down the city’s list of political priorities. Compared with Michael Bloomberg, his far more conservative predecessor, the current mayor seems to see little reason to encourage cycling to work or the completion of the city’s cycling network. In fact, the fading paint on many of the city’s cycle lanes is a neat illustration of how fragile progress in such an area can be. With less active support for cycling promotion, the previous gains are almost literally fading away.

It wouldn’t be surprising, in fact, if the mayor were a little distrustful of those of us who lobby for cycling. The mayor fought the election on the basis that he would campaign for the second New York that had been neglected during the Bloomberg years. From the perspective of poor neighbourhoods far out in Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx, those of us from brownstone Brooklyn and nice parts of Manhattan who lobby for better cycling provision must seem like representatives of the elements in the city that are already well catered-to.

Poverty-stricken Coney Island after Superstorm Sandy:
cycling promotion probably wasn't on many locals' minds after
this catastrophe.

It must also make a great deal of sense looked at from poorer neighbourhoods for the mayor to focus much of his transport energy on the Vision Zero programme of reducing road deaths. A disproportionate number of those who die on the roads are people like Noshat Nahian, an eight-year-old child of Bangladeshi immigrants killed by a turning semi-trailer truck on Northern Boulevard in Queens, or Amar Diarrassouba, the six-year-old son of immigrants from Cote d’Ivoire killed by a truck in February 2013 as he walked to school in East Harlem. There’s no doubt that trucks and cars – which predominantly support the lifestyles of New York’s richer people – exact a disproportionate toll in death and injury on poorer New Yorkers. The mayor is quite right to try to address that.

Yet it’s a significant failure of imagination not to try to do more than that. Because New York state’s gas tax and other fees for driving cover only 56.1 per cent of the cost of providing the state’s road system, poor state taxpayers without cars are forced to pay much of the cost of maintaining the road system. That’s even before considering all the other costs that the road system imposes – the costs of crashes, congestion, atmospheric pollution and noise, all of which are shouldered by ordinary taxpayers. Any effort to make New York City less car-dependent is inevitably a progressive step away from the regressive effects of the current system of funding for roads. It would also make perfect sense for a progressive mayor to support Move New York’s sensible plans to charge all vehicles entering lower Manhattan a fee that would be used to support the city’s subways and other alternative means of transport. The higher charges would fall predominantly on the city’s wealthiest people, while a great many of the benefits would flow to the city’s poor.

The Manhattan Bridge bike lane on bike-to-work day:
I don't want to see more bike traffic jams like this - but there's
a clear progressive case for encouraging these people
to keep riding their bikes.

An increase in the number of people cycling would serve many of the political goals for which the mayor and many other progressives purport to be aiming. It would reduce the cost burden of maintaining the road system, reduce pollution – another ill that disproportionately harms the poor living by arterial roads – and improve New Yorkers’ overall health. Despite some high-profile incidents, it's also far safer for pedestrians to be around people using bicycles than people using cars.

There is no good reason either why, with better cycle provision, people in some of New York’s more central public housing projects should not take to cycling far more than at present.

Yet the scene at the corner of Smith and Fulton illustrates the challenge. The Department of Transportation was prevailed upon to change the bike lane arrangement at the corner in the interests of preserving a single parking space. The city’s willingness to get people cycling has melted in the face of a backlash by those who see parking spaces as their own private property. There could scarcely be a more reactionary force than groups determined to preserve the right to store their private luxury items on-street for free, but their indignation seems for now to have intimidated many progressive forces into leaving parking spaces well alone. Vested interests can also push the apparently progressive side towards reactionary stances. Both Ben Kallos and Robert Cornegy, council members who turned up at last weeks’ cycling event, have backed a bill supported by transport workers exempting them from legal penalties if they hit pedestrians and cyclists who have the right of way.

 

Whatever the precise politics of Jay St's cycle lanes,
they certainly feel regressive

Such equivocation about improving conditions for cycling explains a great deal of what the ride from Brooklyn Borough Hall experienced on the first section of our ride to the Brooklyn Bridge. We left the Borough Hall by way of Jay St and found ourselves jostling among heavy traffic, including at least one double-parked car in the bicycle lane. It wasn’t hard to see, taking in the scene, why only 1 per cent of New Yorkers’ commuting trips are currently by bicycle.

New York and many other cities would be a better, fairer place if more of its citizens were getting about by bicycle. Increasing the share of journeys made by bicycle should, consequently, be part of the progressive agenda alongside more obvious causes such as improving urban education and housing. But, if progressives continue to lack political courage when tackling car-dependency or conservatives stay entrenched in power, it’s hard to imagine conditions improving dramatically in the immediate future.

A new police commissioner, some dodgy statistics - and an open letter from me

William Bratton,

Commissioner,

New York Police Department,

1 Police Plaza,

New York,

NY 10038

January 19, 2014

Dear Commissioner Bratton,

Vision Zero and Statistics

            Congratulations on your appointment as NYPD commissioner. Like many New Yorkers, I feel optimistic based on most of your public statements that you’re determined to build on the progress made on public safety in your previous term at the department. I am particularly optimistic that you are determined, at last, to set about reducing the appalling toll of death and injury that motor vehicles exact from New Yorkers every year.

          I wanted to pick you up, however, on a puzzling statement on January 15 at the launch press conference for the mayor’s Vision Zero initiative. You said pedestrians contributed to causing 73 per cent of pedestrian-motor vehicle collisions last year and that pedestrian actions were directly responsible for 66 per cent of those collisions. It’s a figure that on my reading of the figures is demonstrably incorrect. I fear that, if the NYPD genuinely thinks this figure reflects reality, it could seriously distort the department’s efforts to reduce the grim toll of unnecessary suffering on our city’s streets.

Waiting for a new boss: NYPD officers
outside the new mayor's inauguration

I would be interested to know the basis for your assertion – and grateful if you could put the figure right if, as I am sure it is, it is mistaken.

            Your figure is implausible to start with. It implies that motorists - who stand almost no chance of injury in a collision with a pedestrian, often drive at high speed and are easily distracted – are more solicitous of pedestrians’ safety than the pedestrians themselves. That seems at variance with my experience of human nature as well as with my observation that pedestrians are generally watchful when crossing city streets and motorists often cavalier when driving on them.

            The statistic is also starkly at odds with all the research I’ve read either in New York or elsewhere on the causes of crashes between motor vehicles and vulnerable road users – pedestrians and bicyclists. For example, a study published in 2013 by NYU Langone Medical Center found that 44 per cent of pedestrians treated for injuries after collisions had been hit in a crosswalk while crossing with the light. Another 6 per cent were hit on the sidewalk. Given that some of the other victims will also have been the victims of driver negligence – hit in unsignalised crosswalks, for example – it is clear the majority of studied crashes were mainly drivers’ fault.

Typically dangerous pedestrian behaviour:
midtown Manhattan

            A more comprehensive study, published in 2010 by the city’s own Department of Transportation, attributed blame for 36 per cent of crashes that killed or seriously injured pedestrians to driver inattention. It attributed another 27 per cent to motorists’ failure to yield and said vehicle speed was a major contributor to 21 per cent of crashes. The DoT study reinforces the impression that, while pedestrians undoubtedly cause some crashes, they are probably mainly to blame for only a quarter or so of incidents.

            Around the world, a number of research studies have reached strikingly similar conclusions. Many have attributed blame for crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists to motorists in around 75 per cent of cases. For example, in London, where I lived and cycled for nine years until August 2012, a Transport for London study of every reported motorist-cyclist collision in 2010 attributed blame for around 74 per cent of the crashes to motorists. Motorists’ inattentiveness, excessive speed and impatience are the main killers in every industrialised country of which I’m aware. It's unlikely New York City is a freakish exception.

It might look to you like the outcome of negligent speed:
but there's an NYPD statistician who probably thinks
some pedestrian caused this.

            Your assertion also seems at odds with the evidence of the fatal crashes involving pedestrians so far this year. I’ve been able to glean enough information about four of the fatal pedestrian crashes up until Friday 17 to guess how blame might be allocated. In only one – the death of Xiaoci Hu, killed on January 2 when a car ran into the back of another car that had slowed down to let him cross mid-block – does the pedestrian appear to have carried even a portion of the blame. The driver who struck Mosa Khatun on January 5 in Jamaica was charged with failure to yield; the driver who hit Nydja Herring on January 11 in Parkchester has reportedly been charged with aggravated driving while intoxicated; numerous witnesses attest that the driver who killed Cooper Stock on January 11 hit him and his father in a crosswalk as they crossed with the light.

            Streetsblog, the campaigning website, calculates your department coded only between 7 and 8 per cent of crashes involving pedestrians or cyclists in the first 11 months last year as having resulted from pedestrian or cyclist confusion or error.

            My concern is that a mistaken understanding of the present crisis’ causes could lead the NYPD to pursue mistaken or counterproductive measures to halt it. If pedestrian behaviour were indeed the cause of most pedestrian/car crashes, it would be worthwhile and effective to work harder at changing pedestrian behaviour. I note there are already reports of a police crackdown on “jaywalking” around the area on 96^th street in Manhattan where there has been a cluster of casualties this year. I can imagine it will be tempting for local police precincts to seek in any crackdown to tackle pedestrians and cyclists since they are, by their nature, easier to catch and prosecute than drivers of fast-moving cars.

            If, however, cars cause the majority of crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists, it will make far more sense to work at controlling drivers’ speed and ensuring they yield when required to do so. I am worried that, with the crackdown on the Upper West Side, you are beginning to pursue a pedestrian-focused strategy – one that targets the victims and not the perpetrators.

The new mayor during his campaign: before he had a police
commissioner to explain how pedestrians were
killing themselves

            My personal conviction is that a concerted effort to tackle the traffic crisis’ real causes could yield dramatic results quickly. During my nine years in London, I covered transport issues in the UK and elsewhere for the Financial Times, winning several awards. London, which has a similar population to New York’s and similar traffic volumes, suffers only half the annual traffic fatalities that New York does. Motorists’ adherence to speed limits and other road rules is noticeably more lax in New York City than in London. I see no reason why the introduction to New York of systematic speed enforcement and a general culture of respect for road rules should not quickly bring New York’s fatality levels closer to London’s.

            I look forward to hearing from you about your figure’s origin and how it is affecting your policies. I would of course be delighted to speak with you or your officials about my concerns.

The NYPD and other city agencies have it within their grasp to save hundreds of New Yorkers’ lives every year. It would be a tragedy if apparently mistaken data led you to pass that opportunity up,

Yours Sincerely,

 Invisible