NYC NOW - January 17, 2024: Midday News

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

In his proposed budget, Mayor Adams is pulling back from the deep cuts to education. Also, police are investigating after a woman was fatally struck by a pickup truck in Brooklyn Tuesday night. Finally, WNYC is spending the week examining Vision Zero, the street safety initiative launched by former Mayor Bill de Blasio a decade ago. WNYC’s Michael Hill spoke with Janette Sadik-Khan, the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, about what the policy has achieved and how it's fallen short.

Welcome to NYC Now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Wednesday, January 17th. Here's the midday news from Lance Lund. In his proposed budget, Mayor Adams is pulling back from the deep cuts to education he originally announced months ago, but the plan would still reduce spending on school supplies and pre-K. Many programs funded by stimulus dollars are also set to expire. Annie Mingez Garcia is vice president at Good Shepherd Services. They will not be able to operate at the level that they're operating today.

That's a lot of families and a lot of children that will be impacted. Critics say the education cuts will affect the most vulnerable students, including migrants, kids who are homeless and kids with disabilities. Last week, the mayor announced that higher revenues and planning had made it possible to avoid new cuts. Police are investigating after a woman was fatally struck by a pickup truck driver in Brooklyn. last night. Officials say 52-year-old Xiaohong Chen was crossing at the intersection of Bay Ridge and 13th avenues in Diker Heights, about 8 p.m.

When the driver hit her. Police found her critically injured. She was later pronounced dead at a hospital. The driver remained at the scene. Police have not made an arrest. Chen is the fourth pedestrian to die in a New York City crash in 2024 so far. 20 right now, about 28 later in sunshine. Rattigusty winds. 20 overnight and clouds in 32 tomorrow. Stay close. There's more after the break.

For WNYC, I'm Michael Hill. All this week on NYC now, we're taking a long look at the Safe Streets Policy Vision Zero. Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's ambitious street safety plan. Today, we look back at some of the work that laid the foundation for that policy change. Jeanette Sadiq Khan led New York City's Department of Transportation from 2007 to 2013 under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg. She joins us now. During your time in the DOT, you oversaw something of a culture shift away from a more

car-centric planning model. The city gained bike lanes and bus lanes, pedestrian plazas, and the city bike program. Would you tell us how you were able to make that shift? Well, when you think about it, the streets of New York City had not changed in 70 years. And so much of the world has changed in seven years. Our streets were like Jurassic Park streets, right? They were like wrapped in amber. You know, we had the need to make our streets safer, to make them more accessible,

give people more options, affordable options for getting around. And that was a big part of Mike Bloomberg's Plan Y, C program. And so we took that invitation to find ways to make our streets safer for everyone. We actually conducted the largest safety analysis ever done in the country. We looked at 7,000 crashes that took place in New York City, the who, the what, the where, and the why. We did this in 2010, and all of that informed our first pedestrian safety report and action plan. And so we found that traffic safety wasn't a problem with just like rogue cyclists or kids chasing ball.

into the street, but it was about looking at the specific locations where the problems lay, and then focusing on the most dangerous intersections and corridors. One thing the city struggles with now is how to handle micromobility, e-bikes, scooters, mopeds, what do you think would make a difference in terms of making streets safer, both for the riders and pedestrians? You know, it's troubling that the traffic death numbers are stalling. And in a lot of ways, we're still fighting the last traffic war, and we're kind of having the same old street fights. But the way that this street is being used now has changed, and it's gotten ahead of our street design.

You know, electric mobility is moving faster than bikes and faster than transit and faster than regulators. So we're sort of seeing next generation problems, but we're not seeing next generation solutions. And so that's, I think, a big piece of where we need to build on the strong foundation, whether that's creating better bike lanes for bikes and dedicated lanes for, you know, faster mopeds, car-free districts, daylighting, slow zones can be turned into superblocks. There are any number of interventions that we can make. And, you know, 10 years ago, bike lanes, and wider sidewalks were the solution, you know, on hundreds of streets.

But we need to pivot now to more innovative designs for micromobility. I'm going to pick up on that. You've been all over talking about these issues. What trends are you seeing around the world that maybe New York City should adopt? One of the big trends is, you know, we've got some slow zones in New York City, but looking to turn them into neighborhood superblocks. Other cities are leaving New York City behind with designs that calm traffic in residential areas. In cities like London and Barcelona and in Paris, residential streets are being designed into one-way local street networks.

So they're no longer shortcuts that drivers use to speed through a neighborhood. I think bike lanes for bikes and not next generation motorcycles is really important. And I think we could have dedicated lanes on avenues and cruise. across town streets for faster bikes and scooters, which would make them safer for the riders and take them out of the way of regular bike riders and pedestrians. And I think the last couple would be, you know, car-free districts. Lower Manhattan, I think, would be a great opportunity and car-free streets near Midtown hubs like Penn Station and Grand Central. And so there's a lot that we can do to rededicate the space from cars to more.

sustainable, safer ways of getting around. And I think we could be testing these now. Vision Zero had the ambition of getting traffic deaths down to zero. The statistics show, of course, that has not happened in New York City. Why is it so hard to decrease or eliminate traffic deaths in New York City? Well, you know, it's so interesting. You can have, you know, all of these actions. We talked about, you know, Vision Zero actions and not have a Vision Zero policy.

Or you can have a Vision Zero policy and not take any of the action. needed to get there. I think Vision Zero is still the strongest foundation for eliminating traffic deaths. First, because it holds that traffic deaths and injuries are at their core preventable, and because it takes a system-wide approach to eliminating them, not just the particular apparent danger, but the underlying one. And so it recognizes that, you know, people make mistakes. A driver may speed and try to make a light, a pedestrian made jaywalk. You know, you see bike riders going the wrong way all the time. And Vision Zero tries to prevent these by making crashes less likely, but also less severe when they happen. I think there's been a huge awakening that death and injury on

our streets aren't just unconscionable. They're avoidable. And most New Yorkers get around by walking and taking transit and biking. And they have a right to safe streets and to be free of traffic violence. At the city scale, safety isn't something you can just opt out of or that leaders can abandon if there's any opposition. And I think to this day, there's still an unfortunate tendency to delay projects and go through a bizarre ritual where, you know, the city has to entertain the same arguments and hear the same objections as, you know, 10 years ago.

And at some point when you indulge these arguments here, you really kind of cross the line from good faith, community input into, you know, complicity and delaying safety. Commission, you sound as if you think the city should change its approach in some way. And I'm curious, what way do you think the city should change its approach? Well, I think that in the end, you know, the successful strategy in Vision Zero and safety projects isn't convincing skeptics in order to do the project.

It's doing the project in order to convince the skeptics, right? It's easy to stand in the way of something. But once a project has a chance to work, a safer status quo is almost impossible to argue with. And I think today there's a political and social culture that's growing that rejects traffic crashes as a fact of life. And people see safety is something that they're owed. Jeanette Sadi Khan led New York City's Department of Transportation from 2007 to 2013. Former Commissioner, thank you. Thank you so much, Michael.

Thanks for listening. This is NYC Now from WNYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back this evening.