A decade in, pedestrian deaths dip under Vision Zero

A decade ago, New York became the first American city to adopt the “Vision Zero” approach to traffic safety, which looks to eliminate road deaths through infrastructure and enforcement changes that would slow vehicles to make crashes less common and less deadly.

The city is nowhere near achieving perfection: The same number of people died in traffic crashes in 2014, the first year of the program, as in 2023.

But at a time when traffic deaths in the rest of the country are up 30% from a decade ago, New York’s record stands apart.

The city’s ability to curb traffic deaths comes almost entirely from its improved record for pedestrians, according to an analysis by Transportation Alternatives, a New York advocacy group. The number of walkers who died decreased from 140 in 2014 to 100 in 2023. In other words, pedestrian deaths decreased by nearly 13% from the start of New York’s program until 2022, while pedestrian fatalities nationally increased by more than 50%.

The city was an early adopter of practices that are increasingly common in U.S. cities. Department of Transportation crews installed flex posts and bollards to slow drivers as they make left turns. They also reconfigured nearly 6,000 stoplights to give pedestrians a head start in crosswalks before vehicles can move. New York officials and advocates also lobbied state lawmakers to lower the city’s speed limit and install dozens of speed cameras.

Cyclists in New York, on the other hand, fared far worse. Last year, 29 bicycle riders died in New York, the highest number since 1999. In the first year of Vision Zero, the city saw 20 cyclist deaths.

The number of motorist deaths inched up over the decade, from 100 to 110. The city first started tallying the number of people who died while using electric scooters and other devices in 2021; that number stood at 20 last year.

“It’s encouraging to see that where New York City has been really putting its energy and resources, we see clear benefits. Fewer people are dying. People are safer and moving more easily,” said Leah Shahum, the founder and director of the Vision Zero Network, a nationwide group. “That said, the city is nowhere near the scale of doing what it needs to do. This analysis shows the city should be leaning in at triple time to do what works.”

She said the program was especially effective in its earlier years. But with a change in mayoral administration and road fatalities increasing nationally after the pandemic, the improvements have waned. Shahum said that showed the importance of cities constantly working to address dangerous conditions, even years after they committed to Vision Zero.

“Making that commitment needs to be the start of doing things differently,” she said. “Where New York has been doing things significantly differently, they're seeing major progress. But they’re not scaling it up enough.”

In New York, whiter, wealthier areas benefited most from the safety improvements, the Transportation Alternatives analysis showed. Predominantly white neighborhoods saw a 4% decrease in traffic fatalities over the last decades, while predominantly Black areas saw a 13% increase and majority Latino areas experienced a 30% increase.

Danny Harris, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, said the vastly different outcomes reflected the vastly different amount of safety improvements the city made in those neighborhoods.

“There are neighborhoods that have gotten absolutely no treatments at all. They have no protected bike lanes. Some neighborhoods don’t even have sidewalks. They have gotten absolutely nothing,” he said. “Others have certainly gotten more than their fair share. They have complete streets and open streets and pocket parks and daylighting [of intersections] and protected bike lanes and protected bus lanes and on and on.”

Often city officials have been hesitant to improve dangerous corridors because of neighborhood concerns about losing parking or dealing with slower traffic. But Harris said those obstacles shouldn’t be able to stifle safety improvements.

“There’s no scenario in which New York or D.C. or Detroit would say they’re only going to allow a fire station in this neighborhood and not that neighborhood, or they wouldn’t allow a fire hydrant on very block,” he said, “but when it comes to street safety, we take the approach of politics as opposed to safety.”

The negotiations over safety improvement projects should be over the amenities that come along with them, Harris argued. When the city is going to “daylight” an intersection to give drivers better sightlines around the corners by eliminating parking spots, for example, there could be a neighborhood discussion on whether to add landscaping or benches or bike parking instead. But the safety improvement itself shouldn’t be up for discussion, he said.

Harris said the uneven rollout of safety measures in New York can be seen in the data. Many changes to protect pedestrians—like the early walk signs at stoplights—have been rolled out across the city. But the administration of Mayor Eric Adams has fallen far short of a 2019 city council mandate to build 30 miles of bus lanes and 50 miles of protected bike lanes each year. (Nearly all of the cyclist deaths have occurred outside of protected bike lanes.) The city doesn’t use cameras to ensure that vehicles don’t block the bike lanes that do exist. And red light cameras that could improve safety for drivers are still extremely rare, deployed at less than 1% of all intersections citywide, Harris said.

But Harris insists that the halting progress of Vision Zero in New York shows that the program can work, but only when it is deployed widely.

“Vision Zero works,” he said. “This isn’t some high-minded academic concept that only exists in the vacuum of a classroom. This works in complicated, big cities that have winters and summers and people who drink and drive and people who are distracted and pedestrians who walk into traffic and cyclists who are riding without lights. It needs to work here and in any other city.”