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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, and happy GivingTuesday. We begin today on the roads, the roads of New York City, Jersey City, Hoboken, as models for the rest of the country. I know many of you saw The New York Times story over the weekend called, The Exceptionally American Problem of Rising Roadway Deaths, but I wonder how many of you saw the Bloomberg news story that came out on Friday called, Where 'Vision Zero' Is Working.

Now, you know from the de Blasio years in New York City that Vision Zero is the name of the aspirational program to cut traffic-related deaths from hundreds a year down to zero. Mayor Adams has also embraced Vision Zero as a goal in a program, but guess what? Hoboken has accomplished it. Now, of course, there's no apples-to-apples comparison between a city of 60,000 people and one across the river with 8 million, but nevertheless, the Bloomberg article tells us Hoboken hasn't had a traffic death in four years.

Jersey City right next door has had zero traffic deaths on its local roads and just five on state roads that go through town all of this year. What can New York City learn from Hoboken and Jersey City? What can the United States learn from us and from the rest of the world? With us now, Angie Schmitt, writer and planning consultant and author of the Bloomberg article and the book called Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, and James Lee, chair of the board of Safe Streets JC, a transportation safety advocacy group in Jersey City. Angie and James, thanks for coming on with us. Welcome to WNYC.

James Lee: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Angie Schmitt: Hi, thanks.

Brian Lehrer: Angie, can we start with this stat from your article? In the decade from 2010 to 2020, traffic deaths in New York City fell 19% while, nationwide, they went up by 8%. How would you begin to explain that dichotomy?

Angie Schmitt: I think New York City is ahead of a lot of the country on this. They have great local advocates that I've worked with that are very outspoken. They have a very sophisticated Department of Transportation that has redesigned a lot of intersections. There's a lot of good stuff happening in New York even though I know that advocates aren't satisfied. I agree they shouldn't be with the progress that's happened.

Brian Lehrer: Longer-term stats I've seen say New York City had around 700 traffic deaths in 1990. That came all the way down to around 200 in 2018 but has gone up some during the pandemic. Big picture, was the city doing something intentionally very right over a 30-year period to go from 700 deaths a year to 200?

Angie Schmitt: Yes, I think it has. Like I said, thousands of intersections have been redesigned. There's the public plazas program, protected bike lanes all over the city, so it really has changed a lot. Again, there's still a long way to go, I would say.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get into some of those ways that we can go that long way. We'll get into why this reversed during the pandemic and got worse even as traffic itself was getting more sparse. Jimmy Lee from Safe Streets JC, Angie's article cites Jersey City as a particular success story with zero traffic deaths this year on city roads and just five on state roads that run through the city limits. Can you make that distinction for our listeners between city roads and state roads and why that might matter to traffic crashes?

James Lee: Yes, absolutely. For city roads, the city is in control of maintenance and redesigning them. Obviously, in the past few years, the city has made really great efforts to redesign them to add bump-outs. Just make sure that cars are turning at safe speeds and they're not going to hit pedestrians in crosswalks. Narrowing lanes so that people don't feel that there's so much room to zoom around and they're driving the city-wide speed limit, which is a safer speed limit of 25 miles per hour.

Hoboken has actually gone down to 20 miles per hour because it is actually safer for pedestrians and bicyclists. State roads, the city is not able to influence their design. Oftentimes, New Jersey DOT and the Turnpike, they actually design for speed, which is unfortunately directly at odds with safety. We're talking about the New Jersey Turnpike extension, which feeds to the Holland Tunnel that folks have driven to or from New York onto Canal Street.

Very likely, you've driven on the Turnpike extension. There's also a variety of state roads that are either truck routes or that are feeder roads also to the Holland Tunnel. One example of this would be Route 139. It's actually a capped highway if you can believe it or not. I know there's a lot of talk around the country about capping highways and reducing pollution and increasing safety. It's actually a capped highway where--

Brian Lehrer: New York is talking about it for the Cross Bronx Expressway. I don't know how seriously they're talking about it, but I know there are proposals out there that we've talked about on this show. Go ahead. Sorry.

James Lee: No, it's an important environmental justice issue and safety issue. NJDOT actually has a highway on top. [laughs] You have a highway below. Then next to city streets, next to tall apartment buildings, it's a road where people walk across to get to work, that high school students walk across to get to school, and yet it's designed by the state for high speeds as a highway.

Brian Lehrer: That's a state road, not a city road that goes through Jersey City.

James Lee: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: I didn't know about that highway on top of the capped highway. That would seem to defeat the purpose, wouldn't it?

James Lee: I would say so. I think a lot of people here feel it should not be designed the way it is. It is very recent actually where it got redesigned for higher speeds in just 2019. That's in spite of efforts by local citizens and the city to resist that and oppose that.

Brian Lehrer: On those kinds of roads, there have been five traffic fatalities in Jersey City this year. On the city streets, there have been zero. Do you see Jersey City as a Safe Streets success story? Angie refers to it that way in her article.

James Lee: Yes. Cautiously, I would say yes. I think it was a great article to, I think, give encouragement and show examples of how it's working across the country. I would also say it's really encouraging for us here in Jersey City to see that we can reach zero on city and county roads. It hasn't happened before, right? These efforts are based on empirical evidence and so much of the advocacy is based on the experiences of cities actually accomplishing this all around the world. It's a really big change for us.

Now, I would say that going from 15 deaths or 11 on city and county roads, this is a big change. I'd just be cautious and say that there's more to go. We're never satisfied. There's many streets here where anybody, local residents will especially tell you if I'm crossing Kennedy Boulevard, it's really, really dangerous. I have to be careful. Even if I have the right of way, I might not cross because a car is coming. I don't know if they're going to stop. I'm just not going to cross.

There's still a way to go, but it is a really big change and the city has put in a multi-year effort. There's also been great advocacy, not just from Safe Streets but actually from Bike JC as well. They've been leading monthly bike rides that have up to hundreds of people attending where they ride in a big group. They show how pleasant and how safe it can be to travel on our city roads. I think that's generated a lot of interest in protected bike lanes and Safe Streets infrastructure all throughout the city.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take phone calls for our guests here on traffic safety in New York, New Jersey, America, and the world. We will get into the angle of The New York Times article from over the weekend called, The Exceptionally American Problem of Rising Roadway Deaths. We'll get into why traffic deaths went up during the pandemic as driving itself went down. We invite your calls, your comments, your questions for our guests.

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, for Jimmy Lee from Safe Streets NJ and Angie Schmitt, who wrote that article in Bloomberg about success stories in our area in contrast to the rest of the nation. She's also the author of the book, Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America. Angie, what happened during the pandemic? A staff from The Times article is that in the first pandemic year of 2020 as car travel plummeted worldwide, so did traffic deaths worldwide. In the US, they went up. I'm sure you have similar stats. What happened nationally and what happened in New York?

Angie Schmitt: Initially, when people started telecommuting, there was a lot less traffic. What happened was traffic was acting as a control on speeding and reckless driving, right? It's harder to road race if there's a lot of congestion. We saw a big increase in speeding and reckless driving. I think as time has gone on, we're witnessing a little bit of the social fallout of the pandemic. I think a lot of our pandemic policies had some unintended consequences. One of the things that has come out of it is more aggressive behavior, more antisocial behavior, and it's been really deadly on the roadways.

Brian Lehrer: For New York, I don't have last year's final figure, but I have one through late November of last year from the New York Post back then. It said, "So far this year, 222 people have died in car crashes in New York City according to NYPD stats." The city was not immune from rising traffic deaths despite less driving. Jimmy, I see from your group's Facebook posts that 2021 was the deadliest year for road users in New Jersey in more than 30 years and that 2022 could be worse statewide. What's been going on statewide in New Jersey during the pandemic?

James Lee: There's been an epidemic of traffic violence and the numbers are going absolutely in the wrong direction. I think to some of the factors that Angie's pointing out in terms of less traffic, encouraging more people to drive and drive more and drive faster, that's a really big factor. One of the things that we also advocate for is mass transit. It's not just beneficial for cities because it's more efficient.

They're actually also a lot safer. Buses are considered 8 to 10 times safer per passenger mile than driving. Trains are something like 17 times safer per passenger mile. Statewide, there hasn't been a Vision Zero effort. Some of the statewide advocates and victims' families are advocating for that actively. I hope we do adopt that. The problem with not having Safe Streets infrastructure from a city street to a highway to a rural road is that if something changes, it can fill in the gaps and lead to this dangerous behavior.

If you don't design it for Safe Streets and then there's less interest in traffic enforcement, that's not something you can necessarily rely on. New York City does have automated traffic enforcement. That can be and will be going forward 24/7. In New Jersey, we don't have that. Without Safe Streets infrastructure, without orienting towards a Vision Zero goal, these bad behaviors can just fill in those gaps. It's like water. It will flow to the lowest point.

I will also just mention that the traffic mentality-- we attend these public hearings for these different redesigns of roads. You think about how they're counting things. It's just wrong unless you also consider safety. They literally do not count people crossing the road as part of their goals, as part of what they call level of service for their roads. They literally only count the number of cars. Not the number of passengers in those cars, not the movement of people on bikes, on trains, on buses, walking.

They just care about the number of cars that they can put through a particular segment of road and they're not considering safety. That's the context in how we end up with a growing number of deaths. There's a lot of really great writing out there that Angie has written about and others on larger and larger vehicles that also are contributing to the growing amount of traffic violence.

Brian Lehrer: It is incredible that in this age when everybody knows about climate change and everybody wants to cut down in theory, not to mention rising prices for gasoline, the average size of cars continues to go up. We're going to get into that a little bit more as we go. I want to take our first caller and it's a caller from Jersey City. Matt in Jersey City, you're on WNYC. Hi, Matt.

Matt: Hey, Brian, great to be on. Love this topic. I just wanted to echo a lot of the stuff we've heard from Jimmy already. I think over on this side of the river, we can look at some of the announcements for greenways and things very jealously. It's great to be reminded that we are doing so well here. I think the idea here that these proposals need to be exported and expanded, I think one of the things that's so frustrating for us here is having a very progressive governor who is quite literally a limousine liberal.

Next time he's on, or maybe we can get Nancy to ask him some questions about this, he's so progressive on so many issues. He's so great on sustainability, except when it comes to the Department of Transportation. I would love to bike my kids to school in Hoboken. I do sometimes, but we do have to cross that state highway that he's talking about. 139, the highway over the highway.

They just repaved and there's plenty of room for bike lanes there. There's 15-foot wide car lanes where there could easily be space for more transit uses. It's like they don't even think about it. It's all about car throughput. Actually, the most devastating thing that maybe you'll get into is they want to expand the highway leading into the Holland Tunnel, which is only going to drive more cars onto the city streets.

As someone who drives now, I think it's fascinating that one of the problems is I think people remember when the streets were more open. Now, the traffic's coming back. It's like the traffic is only making me want to bike more, but also seeing all the crazy drivers makes me anxious. That's why I think this infrastructure is so important and we need to get more and more people on board and, hopefully, we can.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting, Matt. Thank you very much. We're going to take a break and then continue. Kate in Jersey City, we see you. She has a different take on the city than I think we just heard from Matt. We're going to get into the title of Angie's book, the subtitle, Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America. I'll ask her where she thinks race and class come in.

For both of you, I want to acknowledge our caller board. Whenever we do topics like this, we may start out talking about cars, but half the calls or more are about bicycles and motorized scooters and things like that. We'll get to see where you think those things fit into your big Vision Zero picture as we continue on The Brian Lehrer Show. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we talk about new stats, which show traffic fatalities diverging very much between New York and let's say the New York metro area, New York, Jersey City, and Hoboken in general, which are the subjects of a Bloomberg news story that came out on Friday called, Where 'Vision Zero' Is Working. The rest of the country, there was that time story over the weekend called, The Exceptionally American Problem of Rising Roadway Deaths.

We're talking with Angie Schmitt, who wrote the Bloomberg story. She's the author of the book, Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America. James Lee, chair of the board of Safe Streets JC, a transportation safety advocacy group in Jersey City. Angie, about the subtitle of your book, Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, where do race and class come in?

Angie Schmitt: Yes, so it's pretty clear from the statistics that Black folks and Native folks are at increased risk to be killed while walking. Native folks in particular, about twice as likely to be killed. Black people, about 50% more likely. Some data does show Latinos at increased risk as well, so there's a couple of things going on there. Those groups may be less likely to own a car, so more likely to be walking in the first place. Secondly, there's some discrimination happening. We see this in metro area after metro area where Black neighborhoods, Latino neighborhoods are under-resourced in terms of the Safe Streets amenities that wider, wealthier neighborhoods are able to attract more easily.

Brian Lehrer: Do Vision Zero policies need to be race and class-specific, culturally competent if that's the right way to put it like many other policies need to be, to be most effective?

Angie Schmitt: Yes, absolutely. An example I use in my book is Portland. Even though Portland has done a ton of investment in safe walking and safe biking infrastructure, they've actually seen this problem get worse. There's a big disparity in Portland on the poorer side of town in East Portland, the poorer, more diverse side of town. People are twice as likely to be killed while in traffic basically. The amenities are really lacking there. There's less bike lanes. There's less crosswalks. There's even less bike racks on that part of town. If we're not conscious of where we're investing and how it relates to those societal conventions we have, we can increase the inequality in the facilities and also worsen the traffic safety problem.

Brian Lehrer: Kate in Jersey City, you're on WNYC. Hi, Kate.

Kate: Hi there. Thanks for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

Kate: I live in the Greenville section of Jersey City, which is not Downtown Jersey City. It's the polar opposite where there really is no funding or care from the government or the mayor, whoever runs it. There are a few bumps, those speed bumps on side streets. There's no bikers' lane, except maybe it starts a little bit closer to Downtown Jersey City and Lincoln Park. I think there might be some bikers' lane, but there's really no access to biking unless you're a daredevil. Speeding is ferocious. Reckless driving is ferocious. I'm just wondering if there's going to be any sort of advocacy pushing towards the more urban--

Brian Lehrer: Jimmy, this goes to exactly what we were just talking about with Angie, right? A race and class disparity. You hear Kate's story from the Greenville section. Do you advocate along these lines at Safe Streets JC?

James Lee: Oh, absolutely, and this is why we aren't done. It is literally painful on a daily basis for people throughout the city and so there's a lot further to go. We're always interested in organizing with folks in different neighborhoods to advocate. This is, I guess, how the sausage is made. If there are groups in each neighborhood that are willing to advocate for Safe Streets infrastructure, we would love to work with them. It gives motivation and pressure on our local council persons to support it.

I don't think we have quite the same political system as in New York City, where there's this member deference as I understand it, but we do also. If the Safe Streets infrastructure is not locally supported, sometimes it can pass over folks that actually need it the most if people are relying on the light rail station on a daily basis. We allow cars to be blocking all the entrances and all the crosswalks. Those kids are taking mass transportation to get to school every day. They're crossing the crosswalk to get to playgrounds.

This is a little bit tangent, but Governor Murphy said, "Okay, we're going to put a stadium in Liberty State Park." No state parks at stadiums, but at least in New Jersey. He's like, "Okay, we'll put a stadium in Liberty State Park. We're going to build all these recreational facilities for the people of Jersey City that don't have access to recreation." This is not the problem at all. There's plenty of ball fields. There's plenty of parks. The issue is can kids safely get to them, right? If you have a 12-year-old, do you feel comfortable letting them walk four blocks to a playground or do you worry that they-

Brian Lehrer: -might get hit by a car?

James Lee: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: I want to thank Kate in Jersey City. Thank you for raising that in that way. Angie, you use Hoboken as a success story in your article citing in part A. Pedestrian crossing strategy called "daylighting." What's daylighting?

Angie Schmitt: Yes, I love this. I think Hoboken really is a cool example that places around the country can look to because a lot of the reforms there that have been so effective are relatively low-cost and simple. This idea of daylighting, it's all about the visibility at the intersections. What daylighting means is they just pull back the parking a little bit from the intersections. If cars are parked right up against the intersections, then pedestrians are having to stick their head out and look. It really affects drivers' field of visibility a lot. Again, it's very low-cost. They're using paint, in some cases bollards, to prohibit cars from parking too close to the intersections. It's been very effective there.

Brian Lehrer: Daylight, that's daylighting. Well, Merriam-Webster just declared its word of the year for 2022 to be "gaslighting," but people have been saying gaslighting for years. Maybe it should have been daylighting and then more people would be talking about this. Karen on the Upper West Side, you're on WNYC. Hi, Karen.

Karen: Hi, Brian. I'm lucky enough to work from home in the 80s on Central Park West. I have a really good view of my block and half a block above and below me. If I look at the relatively newly-installed bike lane and I count in a minute or 45 seconds, I count 10 people going by in the bike lane, more than half of them are going the wrong way and more than half of them are on motorized bikes.

Then I look in the downtown lane that's just two lanes of regular traffic. There's bike messengers who are not using the bike lanes that is either in Central Park or on Columbus Avenue. They're riding with traffic. It was such a push to install these lanes and this idea that if you build it, they will come. I've seen at least three accidents in the last six months where people got into ambulances. They built a catastrophe. Who's in charge of regulating it? If you don't have rules or people don't follow rules, it's just an increase in accidents.

Brian Lehrer: Karen, thank you. Angie, we've been doing some segments lately on the show on motorized two-wheeler injuries and deaths. More than 500 e-bike or e-scooter injuries in New York this year is one stat I saw reported, but transportation safety advocates like to say the overwhelming problem is cars. I'm sure that's true, but is it increasingly these other motorized vehicles too? We could take calls like Karen's all day.

Angie Schmitt: Yes, I do tend to agree with the advocates. I understand there's the devil you know versus the new scourge, I guess. They are relatively new. I do think with e-scooters and everything, there are some potential safety issues. It's a consumer product safety issue compared to the carnage that's caused by drivers. Again, we're talking about rule-following. We've seen this big increase since the pandemic began in reckless driving, speeding. These are really dangerous activities, drunk driving as well.

I think there's a double standard with how we look at rule-breaking where we wink at speeding even though it causes 10,000 deaths a year. These more minor infractions caused by people or committed by people using vehicles with much less potential for harm are much more scrutinized. I don't know why that is. Maybe there is a need for certain reforms to help protect people from motorized scooters and that kind of thing as they become more pronounced in the city also.

Brian Lehrer: Jimmy, I'll give you the last word on this topic, and then we're out of time. From your advocacy position, are you acknowledging these scooters? To some degree, e-bikes is also a problem that needs to be dealt with even if they're not as deadly as cars.

James Lee: Yes, I think I would agree with Angie. I think the question is scale. I understand that sometimes people feel annoyed, but it really goes back to that 700 deaths in New Jersey a year, the Turnpike and Garden State Parkway, which they want to widen. I'm talking about close to 15,000 crashes a year, 40 a day. The vast majority of the deaths are caused by vehicles.

This is due to basic physics. It's mass times velocity squared and you're talking about a 4,000-pound vehicle going-- When a vehicle is going 30, 40, 50, 70, 80, 90 miles per hour, that just really doesn't compare to speed-limited e-bikes. They're largely going 20 miles per hour and weigh 200 pounds maybe with the rider depending. I think there can be simple rules.

Brian Lehrer: 500 crashes with injuries?

James Lee: Yes, and I think you're really looking towards preventing deaths, first of all, and I think we should do better on all fronts. Let's not take our eye off the ball that the vast majority of deaths are created by vehicles. The issue with the bikes is if we overregulate them and people get into cars instead, we may inadvertently create more danger. When an Uber delivery driver in a car rushes through a neighborhood to earn a living but create that pollution of road safety to other folks, if we force people to get off bikes, including e-bikes, and we force them to get into cars, how much more danger is that going to cause?

Brian Lehrer: James Lee is chair of the board of Safe Streets JC, a transportation safety advocacy group in Jersey City. Angie Schmitt wrote the Bloomberg news article this weekend called, Where 'Vision Zero' Is Working. She's the author of the book, Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America. Thank you both so much for coming on today.

James Lee: Thank you.

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