FIRST ON amNY: Low-income communities of color facing greatest NYC traffic crash danger, receiving fewer street safety features, report finds

Think tank Center for an Urban Future produced the report, titled “Closing NYC’s Street Safety Gaps in the Communities Most at Risk,” in conjunction with the tech industry trade group Tech:NYC, as part of their new joint “Project for Livable Streets.” It is aimed at providing Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration with policy recommendations for making the city’s streetscape safer.

The analysis found that while the city’s Vision Zero program to reduce traffic deaths and serious injuries, through lowering speed limits and a suite of safety features, has been highly effective, its impact has been “uneven” across the city.

The report’s authors analyzed data from the NYC Crash Mapper site on “serious crashes” — a term they used to refer to all traffic deaths and injuries, rather than just serious injuries, involving pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists — between 2015 and last year. Vision Zero was launched in 2014 by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The new report found that the neighborhoods seeing disproportionately high rates of traffic deaths and injuries, low-income communities of color and those with a high concentration of immigrants in the outer-boroughs, are also those that have had the fewest street safety treatments.

“The biggest takeaway from this report is that livable streets interventions really work, and we’re seeing the benefits across New York City,” Eli Dvorkin, the Center for an Urban Future’s policy and editorial director, told amNewYork in an interview.

“But the challenge now is making sure that the neighborhoods facing the greatest risks are seeing the greatest benefits going forward, and so far that landscape of intervention has been uneven,” he added.

DOT says lower-income areas have seen safer streets via Vision Zero

In response to the report, city Department of Transportation (DOT) spokesperson Vincent Barone pointed to a separate DOT report from early last year that found traffic deaths declined most significantly in lower-income communities of color since the start of Vision Zero. The report also found that those areas have received a disproportionately higher share of street safety projects over the same period.

“DOT has prioritized equity since the launch of Vision Zero, with lower-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color experiencing the sharpest declines in traffic deaths since the program’s launch,” Barone said. “Every New Yorker deserves a safe commute, and this administration has made clear that we will be doubling down to protect everyone on our streets and focusing our efforts on the areas suffering the greatest harm.”

Among the traffic safety features the report finds effective, it lists vehicle slow zones, where lower speed limits are combined with turn-calming measures and the elimination of parking spaces near intersections to increase visibility; leading pedestrian intervals, which means timing crossing signals to give pedestrians a few extra seconds to cross before vehicles; and major street redesigns that combine various treatments, including the addition of bus and bike lanes.

Dvorkin said the features implemented under Vision Zero have helped drive down traffic deaths to a record low last year — with a 31% drop since 2014, the city Department of Transportation reported early this year.

“The city has developed a growing toolkit of interventions that are proven to save lives,” Dvorkin said. “So there is some real progress there.”

Tech:NYC President & CEO Julie Samuels said the report is “incredibly optimistic” because the city already has effective ways to drive down traffic deaths and serious injuries at its disposal.

“It shows is that the kinds of interventions the city’s seeing work,” Samuels said. “It gives us the tools to actually address,the current concern in communities that need the most help.”

Unequal implementation of Vision Zero, based on neighborhood analysis

But the report found that those interventions are far less common in swaths of the five boroughs experiencing the greatest volume of serious crashes.  Eight of the city’s 10 neighborhoods with the highest crash rates are low-income communities of color.

For instance, the report found, in the two neighborhoods with the highest crash rates, Brooklyn’s Canarsie and Flatlands areas, there are 84 serious crashes per 10,ooo residents — double the citywide average of 47. In sections of the city with the second-highest serious crash rates, according to the report, including the Bronx’s Melrose, Mott Haven, Longwood, and Hunts Point areas, there were 69.9 such crashes per 10,000 residents.

The Queens neighborhoods of Queens Village, Bellerose, and Rosedale come fourth at 68 serious crashes per 10,000 residents, while Brooklyn’s East Flatbush section is fifth with 67 per 10,000, and the borough’s East New York and Cypress Hills areas are sixth at 66.6 per 10,000.

Moreover, in some of those areas, the report found that serious crash rates have trended in the wrong direction — sharply increasing since a nationwide spike in reckless driving that came during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The continued inequities in terms of where the rates of crashes causing injuries or deaths are the highest, and the fact that the city has lost some ground in some areas since the pandemic unleashed a new wave of reckless driving, not just in New York, but nationally, [show] there is some very important work left to do,” Dvorkin said.

At the same time, according to the report, many of those same corners of the city have received fewer safety enhancements.

For example, the report found that neighborhood slow zones are more prevalent in centralized areas, including Downtown Brooklyn with 17.3 miles, Manhattan’s Lower East Side with 11.4 miles, and Astoria, Queens with 7.29 miles.

However, further out enclaves, such as East New York and Brownsville in Brooklyn, have just 3.7 and 3.6 miles respectively, and much of central and eastern Queens has zero.

The report also found a significant disparity in the application of major street-safety redesigns. That includes corridor coverage, which the report’s authors defined as full-block or multi-block sections of roads that have recieved street redesign features, such as protected bike lanes, pedestrian islands, curb extensions, and raised crosswalks.

It points to Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn, together having 29 miles of corridor coverage and 61 intersection projects; those efforts have helped drive a 29% drop in serious crashes over the past five years.

Meanwhile, the Brooklyn neighborhoods of East and central Flatbush have far thinner coverage, with just 18 and 13 miles of corridor coverage, respectively, and 40 miles of intersection between the two of them, the report found. The same can be said for vast swaths of Queens, including Ozone Park, where just 10 intersections have gotten treatments; and St. Albans and Whitestone, which have had none.

Dvorkin said the disparity likely arises from projects making much faster progress in areas where they face the least pushback and where the strongest organizing efforts bolster them.

“For too long, many of the city’s street safety investments have flowed to neighborhoods where these projects were the easiest to implement,” he said. “And that’s not a question of how easy those projects are to implement technically, it’s a question of where they’re easiest to implement in terms of political will, where there’s been effective advocacy, where local elected officials have championed these interventions.”

Recommendations for Mamdani administration

To address this, the report includes three recommendations for the Mamdani administration.

The first is to orient the next iteration of the Streets Master Plan, which sets legal benchmarks for the mileage of new protected bus and bike lanes the city must add each year, around making those additions specifically in areas that have above-average crash rates.

“Follow the data and be unrelenting and ensure that lifesaving interventions are made everywhere and that success should be measured by reductions in deaths and injuries, not just by counting miles of infrastructure,” Dvorkin said, while acknowledging that DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn has said he wants the next Streets Plan to focus on “outcomes.”

Second, the report recommends phasing out “opt-in” street safety initiatives, in which community members must apply for them through DOT, for features like neighborhood slow zones. Instead, it says the city should automatically qualify neighborhoods with above-average crash rates for them.

“That means City Hall taking a more aggressive leadership role in advocating for policies that work, not just implementing them where they are requested,” Dvorkin said.

However, Barone said DOT has halted the acceptance of opt-in requests due to the imbalance they caused.

Third, would be establishing a “Street Safety Rapid Response Team,” tasked with identifying areas with elevated serious crashes and tailoring responses to them. Dvorkin said it would be composed of staffers with some “credible lived experience” in the communities where they would be sent.

“That Rapid Response Team would go out into those communities working closely with local elected officials, showing up at community board meetings, showing up at local civic associations, and making the case with data,” Dvorkin said.