New Yorkers have long asserted their rights to cars on the city streets, identifying with Dustin Hoffman in ‘Midnight Cowboy’ who barks:I walk here!to a cab that nearly hits him as he tries to cross the street.
Recent changes to street width, curb size, crosswalks, bike lanes, and speed limits made as part of the city’s 2014 adoption of Vision Zero, a program designed to eliminate traffic fatalities, are a natural extension of this pedestrian-first-thought set .
The street life of the suburbs, however, is built around a landscape designed from the start to give priority to cars.
For example, the Sunrise Highway, once a sleepy street connecting the communities on the south side of Long Island, had become one of the most dangerous thoroughfares in New York State, killing 62 people between 2016 and 2020. In Connecticut, highway ramps that are more than half a century old could be contributing to an alarming increase in head-on collisions. And while several New Jersey communities are eager to join Vision Zero, the state legislature remains hostile to deploying technology for traffic enforcement.
The security risks in the suburbs are often literally built-in.
“Since the 1930s, as a country, we’ve been striving for safety by making it safer to be in a vehicle while making life more dangerous for people outside the vehicle,” said Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and the author of the book “Fighting Traffic”.
It is the presence of high-speed arterial roads that connect dozens of communities and the commercial districts, office parks and shopping centers they share.
Because they are both streets and roads, they are referred to as “stroads” by road safety advocates.
When suburbs were new, streets were viewed as efficient solutions, not problems. They efficiently moved traffic over vast distances. In 1929, The New York Times wrote of the benefit that a “beautiful thoroughfare” on wide, straight roads would bring to speeding traffic through Nassau and Suffolk counties.
Now, safe street advocates say that stroads are inhospitable to anything but motor vehicles.
“We are stuck with a status quo that is dysfunctional, and the question is whether people are willing to blame the essential principles behind it,” said Mr. Norton. “I think you need to change the fundamentals.”
“The starting point has always been: how do I get this vehicle from A to B as quickly and efficiently as possible?” said Jennifer Homendy, president of the National Transportation Safety Board. “It’s not. How do I get this vehicle from point A to point B in the safest way?”
According to Eric Alexander, director of Vision Long Island, a nonprofit regional planning organization, suburbs that spent their days close to home during the pandemic suddenly found themselves exposed to vehicles rumbling through residential communities on highways as wide as highways.
“People can’t rush their way through neighborhoods where people are trying to shop and walk and bike, go to an event, go to church or go to school,” Mr. Alexander said. ”
Mr. Alexander has pushed to do what New York City has done to slow traffic, including removing lanes and installing medians and roundabouts.
In Connecticut, another kind of aging infrastructure is the problem: highway ramps built more than 50 years ago.
In January, 39-year-old Quentin Williams, a three-term state legislator, was killed on his way home from an swearing-in ceremony and celebration in Hartford. Mr. Williams was traveling south on State Route 9 when, shortly before reaching his exit in Middletown, his car was hit head-on by a sedan driven by a 27-year-old woman who, driving in the wrong direction, entered the highway on the exit. Both drivers were killed.
Since 2022, there has been at least one deadly ghost car hit every month in Connecticut.
Nearly a decade earlier, the federal fatal accident reporting system showed that Connecticut’s ghost death rate was the fourth highest in the nation. Transportation engineers looked at what other states were doing to make changes.
“After 2013, we started looking at the signage,” said Josh Morgan, a spokesman for the state’s Department of Transportation. The agency made one-way signs taller and placed them lower to the ground. The circumstances under which ghost crashes have occurred have also been mapped out; 85 percent of the problem spots had adjacent on and off ramps.
“I can see it happening,” says Amy Watkins, program specialist at Watch for me CT, an organization that educates the public about road safety with a grant from the transportation department. “I live near one that I use often, and there’s a foot of grass separating it on from it. I really have to stop and think, which one is the right one?
Ms Watkins said ramp design is not the only factor to consider.
“The roads have been the same for a long time,” she said. “What is the extra piece that makes it so bad now? I think that missing piece is a disorder.”
Research shows that disorders, such as the use of alcohol, play a role in 80 percent of ghost crashes. This includes recreational marijuana, which was decriminalized in Connecticut in 2021.
In 2020, alcohol was a factor in 40 percent of accidental deaths in Connecticut, well above the national rate of 30 percent, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Last week, Connecticut State Police reported that both Mr. Williams and the driver who killed him had THC in their systems and that their blood alcohol levels were above the legal limit.
Even before the recent surge, Connecticut had begun installing cameras and warning lights at some of the 236 exits identified as problems. But this solution is too far in the chain of events, said Beth Osborne, director of the nonprofit Transportation for America.
“They say, ‘We’ll enforce, we’ll add technology — we’re not going to think our design is confusing and needs fixing,'” she said.
All of Connecticut’s highways were designed half a century ago, Mr. Morgan said, and moving ramps would involve “major rebuilding and taking private property.” But apart from the paved infrastructure of the suburbs, it was difficult to deal with high-speed traffic.
New York City is the largest user of traffic enforcement cameras in the country, according to the Governors’ Highway Safety Program. About 750 cameras were installed to detect speeding tickets and more than $100 million in fines were issued in the first five months of operation. These cameras have reduced speeding by more than 70 percent, according to Julia Kite-Laidlaw, director of strategic initiatives at the New York City Department of Transportation.
Following New York’s example, Connecticut’s newly formed Vision Zero Council recommended enforcement cameras. But in New Jersey, speed cameras are a hard sell. In fact, the New Jersey legislature is considering a bill that would withhold information about the New Jersey driver’s identity from other states trying to enforce their speed camera laws. In practice, this would mean that a Hoboken-registered car could drive through Brooklyn without fear of a fine in the mail.
And so without the benefit of enforcement cameras, Jersey City transportation engineers have turned to engineering and design techniques to slow down drivers. Compared to the rest of the state, Jersey City has low car ownership, good access to public transportation, and city leaders with an evangelical passion for safe streets. According to Mayor Steven Fulop, Jersey City’s turning point came in 2018, after a decade with an average of nine traffic deaths per year.
These were not accidents, Mayor Fulop said, because with proper planning, he added, “road deaths can be avoided.”
That year, Jersey City adopted the Vision Zero program and, like New York City, began planning to change streets, curbs, sidewalks, and bike lanes.
It was a departure of “decades and decades” from how urban planners and engineers worked, said Barkha Patel, the city’s infrastructure department director.
Recognizing that “people will never behave perfectly,” Ms. Patel said, Jersey City focused on a plan “designed in a way that it’s forgiving. So even if there’s an accident, we can design a street so that an accident doesn’t happen.” does not cause anyone to lose their life.”
Grove Street, in the center of the city, was one of the first to see changes. To slow down cars where there is heavy foot and bicycle traffic, it was converted from a two-lane street to a one-way street with a protected bike path on one side and a parking lane on the other. In the high-density residential area on Fairmont Avenue, the city has removed a through street and built a park and playground. On busy West Side Avenue, new curbs at intersections give way to pedestrians and force turning motorists to turn.
But not everyone is thrilled. Bus drivers in particular have complained that the bumps make cornering difficult to navigate.
Francisca Sanpablo, whose restaurant, El Sazon de las Americas, is on narrowed Grove Street, said she is losing customers. “People call and ask, ‘Where can I park for lunch?'” she said. “There are no spaces. You get a ticket.”
Ms. Patel acknowledges this criticism. And yet Jersey City reached its Vision Zero goal at the end of the year, four years ahead of schedule: the city did not report a single traffic fatality all year.