On Brooklyn’s Ocean Parkway, two spring car crashes, about a quarter-century apart, have exacted a death toll of five pedestrians.
Nearly 24 years ago, 15-year-old Inna Shatman and her sister, 10-year-old Svetlana, were waiting to cross when a speeding driver killed the girls and severely injured their mother.
Last month on the same road, 34-year-old Natasha Saada and three of her children were in the crosswalk when a driver crashed into another car and then into the family, killing Saada and her daughters, 8-year-old Diana and 5-year-old Deborah, and critically injuring her 4-year-old son.
In the early 2000s, New York had begun choosing to stop accepting deadly wrecks as unavoidable, and that 2001 crash helped accelerate significant improvement, progress that eroded in the past few years. The city’s gains and losses are relevant not just for New York: Distracted and reckless drivers in the aftermath of the pandemic made fatal crashes, including for pedestrians, a bigger problem nationwide.
New York has proved that a quarter-century can make a difference.
For decades, a death toll of more than one a day was acceptable, until, suddenly, it wasn’t. With 701 traffic fatalities (including 366 pedestrians) in 1990, New York began to recoil at the carnage. Lower speed limits, redesigned streets and cameras to enforce traffic laws — supported by Democratic and Republican mayors and governors — made the city safer, as did proactive policing, including traffic stops.
The rest of the nation did not see similar progress, because it didn’t insist on it.
What forced the city and state to act? One factor was enterprise journalism. In 2001, The Daily News ran a series on Queens Boulevard, the “boulevard of death,” where drivers killed 72 pedestrians in less than a decade. The series proposed a startling idea even in a pedestrian-friendly city: Pedestrians weren’t responsible for their own deaths.
Three mayors made design and speed changes, and Queens Boulevard can now go years without a pedestrian killing. Recently, though, New York has surrendered progress, with traffic deaths having crept up from a record low of 206 in 2018.
As a co-founder of Families for Safe Streets, Amy Cohen — who lost her 12-year-old son, Sammy Cohen Eckstein, to a careless driver in 2013 — told me of the recent Ocean Parkway crash, the driver, whom the police accuse of reckless driving and speeding, “could have been stopped before she caused harm.”
The city’s once-controversial red-light and speed cameras, which operate under state law, have produced millions of lines of data, telling us something urgent: A minority of bad drivers persistently engage in aberrant behavior.
The driver’s vehicle in the Ocean Parkway crash, according to one website that tracks violations, had collected many speed- and red-light violations in less than two years, including two violations blocks from the crash; the driver, Miriam Yarimi, who was charged with second-degree manslaughter, was also driving with a suspended license, which isn’t unusual in such cases.
One bill pending in Albany would force owners of vehicles that incurred more than five camera tickets in a year to install proven technology that limits speed to five miles above the limit. A similar bill just passed in Virginia — the first in the country.
Safe-streets activists “toil for years,” said State Senator Andrew Gounardes, “and then a tragedy happens that is just so in-your-face senseless that it catapults the issue.” The law is necessary, he said, because “there is no mechanism to target the most egregiously reckless drivers and prevent them from operating.”
New York’s incomplete success in a quarter-century has demonstrated that traffic deaths are not an inevitability but a choice.
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