Cars won the city in the 20th century. In the 21st century, the resurgent city wants to win the city back from cars. The new mayor of New York enters the battle of the century with a vision of zero deaths from the current occupying army of our streets...
The mayor pointed out that last year, the city hit a record low of 333 homicides, but that nearly as many people – 286, by last count – died in traffic. "It is shocking to see how those two numbers correspond,” he said. He noted that motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of injury-related death among New Yorkers younger than 14, and the second-leading cause of injury-related deaths among New York's seniors.
7 pedestrians have been killed in NYC since Bill de Blasio took office on the first day of this month.
NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio Makes Historic "Vision Zero" Announcement from Streetfilms on Vimeo.
Also worth thinking about...
Despite the attention given to the country’s bloody drug war, more Mexicans die on the roads every year than as a result of narco-violence...That passage is from an excellent new book, Happy City, by Charles Montgomery—a writer who lives in Vancouver BC. I will have more to say about Happy City today and the coming weeks.Mexico experiences an average of twenty-three pedestrian deaths a day. For the drug war to beat that, there would have to be more than 8,395 killings a year.
