A new billboard in eastern New York shows a pedestrian being tossed into the air after bouncing off the front of a car, his coffee splashing everywhere. “Speeding ruins lives,” it reads. “To delay.”
The campaign aims to scare speeding drivers in this Brooklyn neighborhood, where 35 people have died in road accidents since 2017.
It’s part of New York City’s latest effort to curb rampant speeding, turning nearby streets into racetracks and pushing the number of traffic fatalities to its highest level in eight years.
“It’s spiraling out of control — cars speeding every day,” said William Candelario, 64, whose neighborhood auto repair shop was hit by a van last year.
On Monday, the city’s transportation commissioner, Ydanis Rodríguez, will unveil a new safety campaign in three dozen neighborhoods such as eastern New York, where road deaths and injuries are among the highest in the city.
Target areas include Bushwick and Canarsie in Brooklyn, Jamaica in Queens, Harlem and Washington Heights in Manhattan, and Hunts Point in the South Bronx. City officials said these neighborhoods were selected based on increased crash data.
“We’ve just seen too many people dying on our streets, with accidents disproportionately concentrated in certain New York City communities,” said Mr. Rodriguez.
The campaign will feature 18 high-profile billboards lining busy roads and highways, as well as posters on the backs of public buses and at gas station pumps. City workers are sent to hand out postcards, brochures and leaflets.
In New York City, the number of road deaths rose to 64 this year through April 26, from 61 for the same period last year — largely due to a spike in driver and passenger deaths, which nearly doubled this year from 13 last year. years to 23.
The number of pedestrian deaths, while still the largest share of road deaths, has fallen from 39 to 30 this year.
Two cyclists also died, the same number as last year, as well as four motorized device riders, two more than the year before, amid a pandemic boom in bicycles and electric bicycles, scooters and skateboards.
Just over a quarter of the 64 deaths this year occurred on highways — including three deaths each on Henry Hudson Parkway and Grand Central Parkway — while the rest fell on local city streets.
The road deaths wiped out some of the hard-won gains of the city’s eight-year-old transportation policy called Vision Zero, which once aimed to eliminate all road deaths and became a national model. Under the policy, the city gained state approval to lower the speed limit to 40 mph from 30 mph on most streets, built an expansive network of nearly 2,000 automatic speed cameras, and redesigned many streets to make them safer for pedestrians and bicyclists.
Mayor Eric Adams, who took office in January, has pledged to expand Vision Zero’s efforts. He recently pledged $904 million to the city’s street plan over the next five years, including redesigning hazardous intersections and adding more protected bike paths and pedestrian areas. He has said that police officers will also step up enforcement of traffic laws.
In addition, city officials are lobbying state legislators for local control of city streets, which would give them the power to set speed limits, expand red light cameras and extend the hours for speed cameras in school zones to nights and weekends — when the cameras are off and the speed is up. increased. “The city must be able to determine its own destiny so that we can quickly implement changes to cope with the current crisis,” said Mr Rodríguez.
The new billboard and media campaign, which will cost $4 million, aims to amplify those other road safety efforts by seeking to change driver behavior.
“This is a crisis and we must use every means possible to make our streets safer,” said Danny Harris, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group that has helped the city address traffic violence.
An epidemic of speeding and reckless driving has swept the country during the pandemic, in part because some drivers have been encouraged by emptier roads and lax police enforcement, transportation experts say. New York City has also seen an increase in car ownership as many people avoid public transportation.
Even before the pandemic, a growing number of cities sought to lower speed limits and design safer roads over concerns that higher speeds and larger vehicles such as SUVs would lead to more serious injuries and fatalities.
“The risk of death increases exponentially as speed increases,” said Alex Engel, a spokesperson for the National Association of City Transportation Officials. “This is especially important because the vehicles on the street have gotten bigger.”
The city-wide eight-week campaign will also feature television ads in which a pedestrian or cyclist is thrown backwards in slow motion. And it’s targeting social media executives, based on their online searches, and being run in select print publications.
Erick Guerra, an associate professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, said that while media campaigns are important, they don’t have the same immediate effect on slowing drivers as expanding the use of automated speed cameras, for example. “I think it takes a long time to change a driving culture, just like it takes a long time to change a smoking culture,” he said.
Some transportation advocates have called on cities to focus more on redesigning dangerous streets, saying it’s not enough to come to a neighborhood and tell drivers not to speed, when the streets are essentially built. to move traffic as quickly as possible.
“It’s a vicious circle,” said Leah Shahum, the executive director of the Vision Zero Network, a nonprofit campaign. “Why is driving too fast here? That’s because of the environment we’ve built.”
In eastern New York, the billboard will be seen there by drivers passing through a particularly dangerous intersection at Atlantic and Pennsylvania Avenues, where 167 people — including 154 motor vehicle occupants — were injured in crashes from 2015 to 2019, according to the latest available data. .
Laura Remigio, 35, a makeup artist and stylist who said she was nearly hit by a car while visiting a customer in eastern New York, said drivers were speeding and cut her off at the crosswalk. “The idea is for the people to come first and the cars to wait — and they’re not waiting,” she said. “I run because the cars don’t stop.”
But Ian Johnson, 67, a driver from New Jersey, said some pedestrians should also pay more attention. He said he often has to honk at people who aren’t looking when they cross the road or are on the phone “when they almost walk into my vehicle”.
Mr. Candelario, whose auto repair shop is a stone’s throw from the billboard, said he hoped the billboard would finally catch the attention of drivers.
“It’s an eye opener and it makes you think,” he said. ‘You must be tough. You have to put a little bit of fear in it.”
