Street Safety

While traffic safety proponents and law enforcers are pushing for measures to clamp down on unlicensed driving, some state legislators want to keep accused drunk drivers on the road.

Assembly Member Brian Kavanagh, speaking, with Daniel Squadron and Scott Stringer at last year’s rally for Hayley and Diego’s Law. To Squadron’s right are Wendy Cheung, Hayley Ng’s aunt, and Jon Adler, representative for the families of Ng and Diego Martinez. With the state legislative session underway, Albany will soon turn its attention to business … Continued

Streets in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island continue to be among the most dangerous in the region for pedestrians, says a new report from the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

In handing down a prison term of 20-to-life for Auvryn Scarlett, the garbage hauler who had stopped taking his epilepsy medication before suffering a seizure behind the wheel and killing two pedestrians last year, Justice Richard Carruthers described the convicted as "a time bomb ready to explode at any moment on the streets of New York." The same could be said of the countless number of motorists roaming the city at any given moment though their licenses have been suspended or revoked due to a history of recklessness. Two such drivers killed three people in separate crashes over the Thanksgiving holiday.

While it took a lot of very public arm-twisting, last week brought a rare bit of good news from Albany: Lawmakers actually passed and adopted legislation to increase penalties for drunk drivers. And they did so, by their standards, with lightning speed. Reacting to the death of 11-year-old Leandra Rosado, who was thrown from a car driven by an intoxicated Carmen Huertas on the Henry Hudson Parkway on October 11, Governor David Paterson last Wednesday signed a bill making it a felony to drive drunk with children as passengers.

City district attorneys and NYPD have reached an agreement that could speed the process of collecting blood evidence from drunk driving suspects who refuse to take breath tests.

It's not news that a half-century of transportation spending to accommodate the automobile has made the typical American city hazardous and hostile to people on foot. But it's shocking how we still devote so few resources to correcting those mistakes. A new report released today by a coalition of advocacy groups, including Transportation for America and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, quantifies current funding disparities and the cost in human lives. From T4A:

"If I put train tracks down the street, you wouldn’t park your car on them. If I said this is a bus lane, somehow it becomes fair game. One person’s use of a road impacts upon another person’s use of the road. My point is, if we have to make a choice, make the choice for the bus, not for the car.”

After spending the last five weeks affirming Albany's status as the nation's most dysfunctional state capital, the State Senate will have one last extraordinary session this Wednesday before calling it a year. The chamber is not expected to pass much in the way of transportation bills. (The Assembly wrapped up its session last month.) Here's a short summary of unfinished livable streets business which the Senate and Assembly will leave behind until the 2010 legislative session.