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When the pandemic hit New York City, cars appeared to disappear from many streets as the lockdown brought city life to a halt and drivers stayed at home.
Today, the traffic is still lighter than usual. But in a disturbing trend that is reverberating across the country, the number of fatal car crashes has skyrocketed.
At least 243 people have died in traffic crashes in New York City in 2020 – making it the deadliest year on record since Mayor Bill de Blasio presented his signing plan to improve street safety in 2014.
The spike in road deaths has defied historical trends: Economic downturns and reduced congestion typically result in fewer fatal crashes, federal researchers say. But during the pandemic, it seemed like drivers who felt locked in their homes were flocking to the wide open streets.
People recklessly hurtled down vacant highways. Motorcyclists who hadn’t ridden a motorcycle in years – or never – took to the roads. In large cities, late night drag races became more popular as other entertainment disappeared.
Driver, passenger and motorcycle fatalities rose sharply in 2020, to 120, from 68 in 2019 – a 76% increase and the highest level in more than a decade, according to city data.
These figures do not include pedestrian deaths, which fell, and cyclists, which remained about the same.
The overall rise in fatalities is a blow to Mr. de Blasio’s Vision Zero program, which aimed to eliminate all road fatalities by 2024, and a challenge for the months to come, as models traffic will probably not return to normal.
“We always knew that Vision Zero would not be linear, we would have years when the number of deaths increased and we would have better years,” said Margaret Forgione, the city’s acting transport commissioner, in an interview. “But this year, everything sank into disarray.
She added: “This is not a year reflecting what is generally happening in our city.”
New York was not an outlier. Nationwide, fatality rates in traffic accidents have increased for the first time in years, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a federal agency. Between April and June, the death rate increased about 30% from the first three months of the year, federal researchers found.
The peak can be explained, in large part, by the coronavirus crisis.
The elderly, who tend to be more careful drivers, stayed at home. Without their usual diversions, young drivers – who are more prone to take risks – hit the road. And the increase in alcohol and drug use to cope with stress from the pandemic, factored into many crashes, the federal agency said.
In the spring, speeding tickets over 100 miles per hour jumped 87% in California in the first month of a state lockdown. Automated cameras in New York City were issuing nearly twice as many speeding tickets per day, and rush-hour traffic speeds in Brooklyn and Queens have increased by more than 80%. State soldiers in Georgia cited 140 drivers for speeds above 100 mph over a two-week period in April.
“There were places where more speeding tickets were issued during Covid than ever before,” said Richard Retting, road safety expert at Sam Schwartz Engineering, a traffic and transportation planning company.. “Ultimately, the risk on the road during the Covid era is significantly higher. The risk of dying in a car accident is higher than before Covid. “
In New York City, officials said most of the fatal crashes in the city last year involved drivers traveling at high speeds, often late at night and on freeways outside of Manhattan.
Motorcycle deaths were also at their highest level in more than 30 years, and about 60% of them involved motorcyclists who did not have a valid motorcycle license, according to city data.
The number of crashes in which only the rider was killed or injured has also increased, suggesting more inexperienced motorcyclists are riding at high speeds, city officials said.
“We have seen a lot of young people, young men in particular, seeming to look for an outlet for the stress and boredom of Covid and get on motorcycles when they have nothing to do,” Ms. Forgione said.
The result of all of these trends was a series of particularly gruesome accidents: One Saturday night in July, a group of teenagers gathered on a disused airfield in southeast Brooklyn to watch two of them “do it.” donuts ”or make their car run in a loop. at high speeds. The cars collided, killing an 11-year-old boy and two teenage boys.
Over two days in August, three motorcyclists – including two men in their 20s – were killed in three separate crashes. And last month in Yonkers, just outside New York City, four young high school graduates were killed when a speed driver hit their car, tearing it in two.
To tackle speeding tickets, city officials in September lowered speed limits to five mph on nine of the most dangerous roads in the five boroughs.
Mr de Blasio also called on the state legislature last month to allow the city’s speed camera program – which limits cameras to operating only in school zones and at certain times of the day – to operate 24 hours a day. hours a day.
The city has more than 1,300 automated cameras, spread across 750 school zones, which operate between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. More than a third of fatal crashes that occurred off the highways in 2020 occurred in areas where the cameras were not were not active, according to city data.
The police department has also deployed its vehicles on multi-lane highways in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, where dozens of fatal accidents have occurred and where state law does not permit speed cameras.
“Frankly, the drivers took advantage of the open roads and accelerated with their vehicles,” said Kim Royster, chief of transportation for the police department. “Visibility is very important when it comes to controlling traffic, especially for speed and drag racing drivers.”
Chief Royster noted that police issued fewer general traffic summons, including arrests for impaired driving or driving without a license, compared to 2019 due to staff shortages in the spring and summer. last summer, when officers fell ill or were deployed in protests against police brutality.
But police issued around 140,000 speeding notices between November 2019 and November 2020 – just 7% less than in the same period the year before, according to police data.
In a bright place, the pedestrian death toll hit an all-time high last year as fewer people walked the streets in places like Midtown Manhattan. The city’s streets saw their longest stretch without pedestrian fatalities – 58 days – since authorities began tracking those fatalities in 1983.
And despite an increase in cycling, fatalities among cyclists were about the same as last year, which city officials attributed to reduced traffic, the effect of safety in numbers and to the record of 28.6 miles of protected cycle paths that were deployed in 2020.
Still, transport advocacy groups have urged de Blasio to take a more aggressive approach and cite examples from cities like Paris, which pledged to add around 400 miles of cycle lanes when the pandemic struck.
Making major changes to the streetscape would allow cities to build on the momentum created by the pandemic to use environmentally friendly modes of transportation and keep people on bicycles, scooters and motorcycles even as urban life and traffic are returning, the groups say.
“Whatever your memory of life on the streets before Covid, it probably wasn’t positive – there was congestion, smog, danger to vulnerable street users,” said Danny Harris, director executive of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group. “We cannot go back to this normal.”
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