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Grass8989 t1_j5lx4cp wrote

“ According to the detailed analysis by Transportation Alternatives, 16 children under age 18 were killed in crashes last year”

That’s actually a lot lower of a number than I thought, for a city of 8 million people I’d say we’re doing a pretty good job.

Just like there’s never going to be no crime, there’s never going to be no accidents.

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stickykk t1_j5lxr5h wrote

Not enough people (repeat offenders) aren't losing their drivers licenses or for that matter getting fined / made to appear at court.

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IntelligentCicada363 t1_j5m9f66 wrote

Never forget that getting hit by a car will probably leave you with chronic pain for the rest of your life. Deaths are tragic but not even the whole story.

Drivers will never be responsible and there will never be enough police to enforce traffic laws, ignoring the fact that they actively don’t care.

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NetQuarterLatte t1_j5mcqq9 wrote

How many of those fatalities were cause by criminals driving stolen cars, or criminals using cars as a weapon?

Are we surprise the numbers are ticking up since 2020?

The bail reform left murders bail-eligible, but the reform practically made homicides using vehicles not-bail eligible.

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Grass8989 t1_j5mdnjn wrote

This is also true. I’d imagine the vehement champions of “bail reform” probably desperately want anyone who injures someone with a vehicle to serve the maximum sentence, and be held pretrial. They can’t have it both ways

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NetQuarterLatte t1_j5mgbzi wrote

Probably the most impactful thing the bail reform did to traffic safety was making auto theft not-bail eligible.

Color me skeptic, but I don't believe drivers fleeing with stolen cars care if the car gets damaged. Let alone caring about traffic safety.

  • 2019: 5,430 GLA (GRAND LARCENY AUTO)
  • 2020: 9,037 GLA
  • 2021: 10,415 GLA
  • 2022: 13,750 GLA
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eclectic5228 t1_j5mjkp7 wrote

I attend transportation community board meetings and try to keep up with what DOT is doing. The issue is that many of these safety issues are ignored. DOT sets it's own goals and misses them Community boards ask for specific safety measures and DOT ignores them. In contrast, cities like Hoboken and Jersey City have implemented really cheap and easy fixes, such as stopping cars from parking next to crosswalks (which is actually the law in NY State but the city overrides, and is a proven way of improving visibility) and they have had NO traffic fatalities in years!

Every life is a world. We can't stop all deaths, but DOT isn't even close to stopping preventable deaths

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NetQuarterLatte t1_j5mjvyj wrote

Harvey Weinstein is not the best poster child for pre-trial rights...

The main issue is that the judge in NY can only set bail to ensure his appearance in court. They set to $2M and he did appear in court.

The problem is that the NY laws (incorrectly IMO) makes pre-trial detention be unrelated to public safety and the likelihood to re-offend. And that needs to change.

Under a public safety standard, the sheer amount of victims ought to convince any judge that he is a threat to the public, no matter how much money he has to pay.

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-_SophiaPetrillo_- t1_j5mlv9f wrote

Perhaps the reason so many cyclists were killed in the Bronx after 2019 is the HORRIBLE implementation of bike lanes??? The data is literally showing that cyclists were safer beforehand. To get onto the highway from my main intersection I need to look at SIX light signals, and that doesn’t include the three bike lane lights. I have a red, yellow, green, green arrow, flashing yellow arrow, red arrow. Then the bike lane has its own set of three. But the bike lane has people moving in both directions. So I need to track all six lights and then look over my driver’s side blind spot, over parked cars, to see if a cyclist is coming from behind me. But I can’t take too long or one of my six lights might change. 🙄🤬

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mission17 t1_j5mlze1 wrote

Your leap from "reckless driver" to "car thief" seemed to purposely miss a few other probable explanations for why crashes occur in order to reach your desired conclusion in every thread (bail reform and Bragg = bad).

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flightwaves t1_j5mod1d wrote

As much as this article tries to fear-monger, the stats are not as bad as you'd imagine. Especially since the rate of biking has gone up significantly, we actually saw a decrease YOY.

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mission17 t1_j5ndlzi wrote

Amazing how even in a thread about pedestrian deaths that the conservatives managed to shift the conversation to bail reform and subways, evading the point entirely.

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supermechace t1_j5o8ik5 wrote

I could never make sense of the DOT in queens, they ignores complaints about a dangerous intersection for years before finally painting the ground and putting signs up relatively low cost safety measures. I don't get what their real priorities are other than hints it's to maximize traffic speed regardless of pedestrians.

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werecat t1_j5owyyy wrote

Road deaths are not mandatory, the whole point of vision zero is zero deaths from crashes. This is actually an obtainable goal, we just have to be serious about changing the infrastructure to prevent crashes from occurring in the first place. Especially in the places they keep occurring in, as deadly crashes happen in the same places over and over. The data is clear, changing a street to be safer really does make it safer. No one should have to die or lose a loved one on a known dangerous road because "not enough other people have died yet".

Can we really prevent all road deaths from crashes? We certainly can't if we say "well maybe some deaths are ok"

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johnsciarrino t1_j5pni21 wrote

It’s genuinely shocking how all the changes are making things worse. As a person who walks, bikes, scoots and drives in the boroughs I can’t believe anyone thought these “protected bike lanes” would be a good idea. The change has effectively made the bike lanes gauntlets for bikers to ride in, treacherous tunnels with no option to escape in case of emergencies. And when I say emergencies I mean pedestrians cluelessly standing in the middle of the bike lane, garbage trucks and their employees blocking them to pick up trash, cops doing their normal bullshit of parking wherever the hell they want, delivery trucks backing into loading bays, giant potholes, etc etc.

The worst is seeing bikers avoiding the bike lanes entirely and still riding in traffic, only now the streets are even more narrow because the protected bike lanes have created a five foot wide wall where there used to be space to maneuver. I can’t even blame them for it, I hate being stuck in there too.

And don’t even get me started with the nightmare they created by the Brooklyn bridge. It’s like they did all this planning for a perfect world and not the reality of the chaos of NYC.

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-_SophiaPetrillo_- t1_j5ppp76 wrote

Yes! I think it is more dangerous for everyone involved. I’m not sure where the thought process was here. Putting the bike lane between parked cars/bus stops and sidewalks increases the risk of pedestrians and cyclists colliding. A poor boy was hit bad by a cyclist last year (cyclist was okay) when he tried to get from the baseball field to his family vehicle and didn’t know to look both ways in the bike lane.

The number one thing they need to cut down on car use in NYC is a cost efficient, effective system of public transportation. I would love to not need my car daily. But it doesn’t make sense to gamble on waiting 20 minutes for a bus to take me to the subway when driving into Manhattan will take me 15 min at most. It takes me 45min-1hr to use public transportation for a 15 min drive.

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NetQuarterLatte t1_j5pz7l2 wrote

It’s only possible to say the bail laws are not a factor if we had 13750 car thieves, with each of them only stealing one car and never reoffending.

But that would require NYC to have 13750 car thieves, which is an absurd number (more than 170 per 100,000).

But let’s them keep driving the stolen cars, shall we?

A stolen vehicle is 150 to 200x more likely to be involved in a car accident. So at least we have that going.

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Rottimer t1_j5q1ki7 wrote

Car thefts are not tied to arrests. So your assertion isn’t true at all. You could have 13,750 car thefts by one very busy person who has never been caught and bail reform would have had zero impact on that crime figure.

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NetQuarterLatte t1_j5q4mwe wrote

Fair.

A combination of recidivism during the pre-trial period and a measure of loss in the deterrence effect would be a better way of measuring the impact of the bail reform and the other related reforms (automatic discovery, raise the age, etc).

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throws_rocks_at_cars t1_j5qck6j wrote

Reckless is behaving dangerously or without caution/consideration towards others.

Wreckless means that something is without a wreck. A reckless driver would likely not be wreckless on a long enough enough, because reckless drivers are more prone to get into car wrecks.

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