The Upper West Side Pedestrian Death Zone

Addendum, November 13, 2024: Shortly before 1 p.m. on November 12, Miriam Reinharth, the 69-year-old wife of a friend, was struck by an ambulance at Amsterdam Avenue and 96th Street – the same intersection where my neighbor Young Kwon was killed last year. Three hours later, Reinharth died from her injuries. Six weeks before New Year's Eve, traffic accidents in New York have already killed more pedestrians than in any other year since the launch of the (so-called) Vision Zero program a decade ago. Four people died on Halloween weekend alone. As the Upper West Side's Bermuda Triangle of pedestrian deaths continues to claim victims in the same few blocks, Curbed is republishing this article, which first appeared on January 24, 2023.

Young Kwon was a petite lady with impeccable manners and quiet endurance. She took small steps, almost as if she wanted to avoid harming any microscopic creatures in her path. She took many of them in stride, however: During the Northeast blackout of 2003, she, my dog, and I trekked up about 30 flights of stairs in the dark, an adventure she remembered fondly and one I recalled often. Two decades later, when she was 84, her step had slowed to a shuffle, but her smile remained unchanged, and I saw her making almost daily forays into the neighborhood. She regularly visited another 80-year-old Korean woman who is my neighbor.

On the morning of January 15, Kwon was crossing Amsterdam Avenue at West 96th Street, a block from our apartment building, when a driver in the center lane plowed his Mercedes into her. The impact caused so much damage that she died in hospital a few hours later. Drivers often complain about reckless, distracted pedestrians putting them at risk of inadvertent violence, but if Kwon had a phone, I never saw it, and she certainly wasn't able to run into traffic. I would say she was killed because she was too small and walked too slowly.

She was far from the only victim of the neighborhood's out-of-control traffic, churned up by a truck route (Amsterdam Avenue), a double-wide east-west thoroughfare (96th Street) and a confluence of steep, beckoning slopes Encouraging drivers to step on the accelerator and cross streets leading to and from the Henry Hudson Parkway. The mere proximity of this road seems to tempt drivers to run through traffic lights, speed through curves and try to avoid sluggish pedestrians. Traffic cops stationed at particularly difficult intersections often make matters worse by steering cars into zebra crossings where they get stuck.

I've lived in this Bermuda Triangle of pedestrian death long enough to remember some of its other victims. I remember with particularly venomous intensity the week in mid-January 2014 when a 73-year-old antique dealer, Alexander Shear, was killed by a tour bus on 96th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam. Half an hour later and two blocks away, a third-grader named Cooper Stock crossed West End Avenue at 97th Street (yes, yes, at the stoplight and in the crosswalk) and held his father's hand as a taxi driver pulled around the corner and crushed him to death. A few days later, Samantha Lee, a 26-year-old anesthesiologist at Columbia Medical School, also a neighbor of mine, was crossing West 96th Street in front of our building when an ambulance pushed her into the path of another car. This summer, Jean Chambers, an artist whose Scottish terrier had befriended my dog ​​in Riverside Park, was killed when an extremely reckless driver, Roberto Mercado, mowed her down on West End Avenue at 95th Street.

It turns out I have forgotten more of these horrors than I remember. According to the website NYC Crash Mapper, 11 pedestrians and one cyclist have died in the surrounding blocks since 2011. That doesn't even take into account the hundreds who have survived the impact of a 4,000-pound hunk of rolling steel, losing limbs, damaged organs or brain injuries. Or the man in his 60s I saw lying in the rain in a crosswalk on Riverside Drive at West 95th Street. The woman who hit him with her car couldn't help him much because she sobbed as she turned because she didn't see him. Helpful spectators were quickly on site. Nobody said what we all must have thought: you should I saw him because he was there.

The data also doesn't capture near misses, like the time I was walking in the Open Street section of West End Avenue at 96th Street and a box truck came barreling down the hill toward me, shattering a wooden police barrier. Or the time I was crossing the same corner at the light and an oblivious traffic cop started waving cars through the red light. Statistics tell us nothing about how many older New Yorkers minimize their time outdoors or avoid crossing an avenue for fear of suffering a fate like Young Kwon's. According to a Department of Transportation report released last year, “seniors make up less than 15 percent of our population but account for over 45 percent of annual pedestrian fatalities in New York City,” a disparity the department is addressing by focusing on particularly ominous ones areas concentrated.

This part of the Upper West Side is not the biggest danger zone in the city. Areas with lots of freeways, particularly in Brooklyn and the Bronx, are even deadlier. The advocacy group Transportation Alternatives just released its annual report listing the names of all 255 pedestrians, drivers and cyclists killed on city streets in 2022. Almost half were on foot. The Department of Transportation boasts of having “reduced traffic fatalities to historic lows,” as they say, which is true if you mean history since last year. When you compare it to the actual historic low of 2018, when the carnage was limited to “just” 202 people, the numbers look less rosy. Nine years into the Vision Zero era, we should really call it Vision 125: the average number of pedestrians killed in New York each year since 2014. One every three days.

Apparently this is all fine, the unfortunate, acceptable byproduct of a city where people in cars and people without cars mix. At least that's the signal we all send when we shake our heads, shrug our shoulders and move on. When drivers who kill rarely suffer a harsher punishment than a speeding ticket and then immediately get back on the road. When city officials murmur pieties and let life-saving street designs get lost in endless studies. When the Department of Transportation has sparse staff and a limited budget to manage 6,000 miles of roads, and an endless supply of unruly New Yorkers eager to streamline, delay or even block life-saving road improvements.

Maybe the death toll while driving through New York City isn't worth worrying about, in the grand scheme of things. Last year, more than three times as many New Yorkers were murdered as died under the wheels. Several thousand overdosed. Many froze to death on the streets. If we accept these circumstances, we should at least be honest and admit that some people will get hit by cars and die, and we don't care or care enough.

However, we should do that because fatalism is self-fulfilling. Crime, drugs and homelessness are symptoms of extremely complex, potentially intractable social problems. Traffic fatalities vary. The entire philosophy of Vision Zero is based on the belief that they can almost always be prevented with a well-understood set of tools. Some major cities, such as Stockholm, have made them virtually obsolete. The DOT's own data shows that traffic-slowing road design works. This includes lower speed limits, numerous speed cameras and consistent enforcement. I don't know this just from reading the research or siding with pedestrians in a transportation showdown; I know what conditions will help me as a driver stay cautious and alert. Making the streets safer requires no mystical process or cultural change, just political will and a sense of urgency. Not every step has to be implemented through a slow democratic consensus.

In 2014, when the concept of Vision Zero was new in this country, the Just reported on his track record in Sweden: “The result [of Sweden’s street-safety campaign] was a kind of social contract between state and citizen: If residents obey the most basic traffic rules, engineers can design roads that protect against all fatalities.” The article further quoted a senior Swedish transport official as saying: “You should be able to “To make mistakes without being punished with death.” Or without killing someone else. The introduction of Vision Zero produced immediate results: Pedestrian fatalities fell and never returned to 2013 levels. (Cyclist, motorcyclist, and car driver deaths fluctuate, with no clear trend.) Yet all the Growing amounts of evidence and ever-refining expertise cannot resolve the persistent disconnect between design, civility and compliance.

The DOT conducts its analysis, prioritizes projects and evaluates results, a deliberate process that cannot keep up with the increasing number of drivers who are choosing larger, heavier and more cumbersome vehicles and operating them more recklessly. The department notes that New York has become somewhat safer, although other cities are faring worse. Since the carnage of 2014, the West Side near 96th Street has received a slew of new traffic patterns, protected bike lanes, shorter intersections, better-timed streetlights, and so on. But enforcement is critical and coordination (particularly with the NYPD) is a must; In classic New York government fashion, both are obviously missing. Thousands of lane miles are repaved each year, largely resurfacing the same poorly designed roads. Like virtually every form of public work in New York, street redesigns are laborious and expensive. Even if they are finished, they can be undone. The intersection where Cooper Stock was killed underwent DOT rehabilitation: a mix of paint and granite blocks narrowed 97th Street to a single lane. A concrete median on West End Avenue prevented cars from shortening the curve. Last year, workers moved the granite blocks to the sidewalk to resurface the street and left them there. My wife and I called 311 and our city council member's office, filled out online complaint forms and contacted the DOT. A new set of bike racks has appeared, but these three large rocks, each the size of a love seat, still clog the sidewalk and make a mockery of the entire reason they were placed on the street that has been renamed Cooper Stock Way. I can't help but see their continued presence there as a symbol of a city that lives by its words What are you going to do?