Toward the end of 2014, as part of the mayor’s agenda, the speed limit on most city streets was reduced to 25 miles an hour. During its first five years, Vision Zero brought the installation of more than 360 speed bumps and major bike lane and pedestrian plaza projects; it also increased by more than sevenfold the number of intersections in which pedestrians were now given a head start to cross, in advance of turning cars. Despite the implementation of these and many other measures, over the long term the raw numbers have not been encouraging. Last year saw 257 traffic fatalities in the city; just one fewer than there had been nine years ago, when Vision Zero began.
The pandemic managed both to confirm and undermine New York’s reputation as the most walkable city in the country. We walked to go places, to achieve equilibrium, to escape, to commune, to protest. The writer David Sedaris sometimes found himself walking 20 miles a day. In a dangerous convergence of trends, persistent fears of public transportation pushed car ownership upward while the stresses of Covid life were causing people to drink more. Speeding and reckless driving were the leading causes of traffic deaths, and in 2021 they reached their highest point in the Vision Zero era. Nationally, there were more pedestrian deaths in 2021 than there had been in 40 years. Covid has receded but some of the dangerous habits it produced obviously have not. A proposed law in the New York State Legislature would lower the permissible level of alcohol in the bloodstream, a measure that some studies have shown acts as an effective deterrent against driving drunk.
Under Vision Zero, the Department of Transportation was tasked with identifying “priority corridors” — those stretches where pedestrian deaths and serious injuries are most concentrated. One of them was Atlantic Avenue: not merely a few blocks but the whole 10 miles of it, from the western end at Brooklyn Bridge Park to Jamaica, Queens. Since 2020, there have been four deaths on the westernmost mile alone. So far this year, traffic injuries have increased on Atlantic between Fourth and Bedford Avenues by roughly a third over the same period in 2022.
Recently, I asked Mr. Orcutt to walk part of the western tip of Atlantic with me, explain the root of the problems and what might be done to solve them. Atlantic is Brooklyn’s primary east-west artery, functionally a highway that runs through a series of increasingly dense residential neighborhoods, where construction during the past several years has been more and more active.
We began our analysis on the southwest corner of Atlantic and Hicks Street at the beginning of rush hour, when a steady stream of cars and trucks were aggressively turning left from Hicks, sometimes cramming into three lanes, to make their way onto Atlantic’s one-lane entrance ramp to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway typically swerving into the crosswalk. Mr. Orcutt pointed out a proliferation of trucks that were so big they were not legally allowed to pass through many streets in the city, especially in the midst of so many dining sheds that worked to obscure drivers and pedestrians from one another.