Testimony by Senior Policy Analyst for Transportation Sindhu Bharadwaj on Street Safety Infrastructure Before the City Council

On behalf of the NYC Comptroller’s Office, thank you to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and to Chair Brooks-Powers for convening today’s hearing and for the opportunity to provide testimony on behalf of NYC Comptroller Brad Lander.

Traffic fatalities rose sharply after 2018, the safest year since New York City first adopted Vision Zero, and remain at an elevated level. More than 250 people lost their lives in traffic crashes in 2022, and thousands more were injured, including more children than any point in the past ten years. This is a national trend, driven in part by a surge of reckless driving during the pandemic. As we emerge from the emergency phase of the pandemic, New York City must reclaim national leadership on street safety, restore the progress made under Vision Zero, and reverse the recent surge of traffic violence. This is possible by recommitting to the ambitious street design goals of the NYC Streets Master Plans legislation, taking a comprehensive, data-driven, and progressive approach that holds reckless drivers accountable, and making the municipal fleet into a model for vehicle safety and safe driving.

Street Design
Street design remains among our most powerful tools for preventing crashes and saving lives, as well as making space for safer walking and biking. Yet, progress around redesigning streets for safety and multimodal transportation has slowed. The NYC Streets Master Plan, adopted by the Council and embraced by the prior and current Administration, is the City’s blueprint for transforming our streets into safe places to travel, regardless of mode. Unfortunately, DOT did not meet its targets under the Streets Master Plan in 2022, falling 17% short (5 out of 30 total miles) of new protected bike lanes and 52% short (13 out of 25 total miles) of new or camera-enforced bus lanes. Not only do 2022’s numbers fall short of targets legislative mandated by the Council, but the current and projected pace of project implementation is slower than in recent years. DOT implemented 28.6 miles of protected bike lanes in FY 2020 and nearly 30 miles in FY 2021.

More than 20 miles of new bus lanes were installed in FY 2021. Each mile of delay translates to more time lost for transit riders and unnecessary safety risks for the City’s hundreds of thousands of regular cyclists. With annual targets for bike and bus lane installation set to increase under the Streets Plan starting this year, it is essential to speed up the pace of implementation. This requires adding capacity at DOT, filling longstanding staff vacancies at the agency, and resolving longstanding procurement challenges to delivering capital projects more effectively. To that end, we are pleased to be partnering with the Adams Administration via the Capital Process Reform Task Force to address capital procurement and implementation delays, including a package of legislation in Albany this year. As to agency vacancies, in our Title Vacant report we offered a concrete set of steps the Administration can take to address them. These steps, combined with adequate resources, are necessary to scale up implementation of critical street safety infrastructure.

A New Approach to Reckless Driver Accountability
Improvements to street design must be complemented by a new, comprehensive framework to hold reckless drivers accountable. There is reason to believe that the national increase in traffic crashes and fatalities in recent years has been driven by an increase in reckless driving behaviors. Yet most drivers who repeatedly violate traffic safety laws will face no consequences beyond a $50 fine that never escalates. Drivers who cause crashes resulting in a fatality or severe injury almost never face prosecution. New York City needs to address reckless driving using a restorative approach that features escalating consequences for dangerous driving, informed by data-driven measures to changing driver behavior.

NYC’s automated enforcement program has successfully deterred speeding and improved driver behavior, while also shedding light on the scale of reckless driving occurring in the city. In the first two years of the program, 81% of ticketed drivers never received a second violation. Since cameras were first turned on for 24 hours per day in August, the number of speeding violations issued dropped by nearly 30%. Yet in 2022 alone, over 20,000 drivers received fifteen or more camera-issued speeding tickets, with some individuals accumulating hundreds of violations. Although these drivers represent less than one percent of the population of drivers on city streets, they are disproportionately likely to cause crashes and endanger the lives of other road users.

To begin to hold recidivist reckless drivers accountable, as a City Council Member, Comptroller Lander led the effort to pass the Reckless Driver Accountability Act, adopted by the Council as the Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Program (DVAP). Unfortunately, however, the program was scaled down significantly in a compromise with the de Blasio Administration when it was adopted, and its implementation was delayed by the pandemic, and the first year of the program was smaller in scale and scope than originally conceived. Out of the 16,000 vehicles that received enough camera violations to qualify for the program as of November 2021– 15 speed camera violations or 5 red-light camera violations over a 12-month period – notices were sent to only 1,080 drivers of whom 643 completed a safe driving course. Of the 437 drivers who never enrolled a course, only 12 – less than three percent – faced the program’s ultimate consequence of having their vehicle impounded.

Our office appreciates that there are many administrative challenges around implementing DVAP, including limited capacity at DOT to prepare cases and difficulty on the part of the NYC Sheriff’s Office locating vehicles if a warrant is issued. We also look forward to DOT’s report on the outcomes of the pilot phase of DVAP, due in July of this year, which the Council can use to adjust and extend the program, which will otherwise sunset in October 2023.

Beyond revising and scaling up DVAP, the City – in partnership with the State Legislature – has an opportunity to utilize this moment to adopt a far more comprehensive approach to reckless driving, designed to identify recidivist reckless drivers, give them an opportunity to change their behavior, and impose an escalating series of consequences if they fail to do so, ultimately resulting in license suspension and vehicle booting or impoundment. Such a framework could include the following features:

• When drivers receive a modest but meaningful number of violations, such as three to five speed camera tickets, and/or more than one red-light camera violations within a year, they could be required to take an online course about the dangers of reckless driving and notified of escalating consequences.
• At elevating thresholds, drivers would face further consequences. After that first threshold, the cost of the violations could increase, from the current $50 to say $100, indicating that the City is serious about reducing the behavior. The City could also retain the in-person course of the DVAP program, if it is shown to meaning fully reduce recidivism.
• At some agreed-upon level, excessive camera violations should result in license suspension. We cannot give the most consistently reckless drivers, those who speed and run red lights with abandon, putting their neighbors lives at risk, continued permission to do so.
• Individuals who drive with suspended licenses should have their cars booted, to prevent them from continuing to do so.
• To implement such a program, we would need to impose consequences for driving with obscured or ghost plates, a behavior which has increased sevenfold in recent years as intentionally reckless drivers seek to evade accountability. As with reckless driving, intentionally obscuring a license plate to evade tolls and fines should face escalating consequences up to and including vehicle impoundment.

To be clear, much of this would require changes to State law, some of which the Adams Administration is seeking this year as part of its ROADS legislative package, as well as significantly increased agency capacity. Intro 415, Council Member Power’s bill introduced today, could complement this effort by helping to build a deeper, data-driven understanding of the driving behaviors most closely associated with crashes and the most effective interventions and responses.

A generation ago, the country decided to embark on ambitious effort to confront drunk driving, combining changes in policy, enforcement, consequences, and culture. That effort has saved thousands of lives and millions of injuries. We can and must do the same for reckless driving now.

City Vehicles as a Model for Fleet Safety
Finally, we can improve street safety, prevent crashes, save lives – and save taxpayer dollars – by working to transform the municipal fleet into a model for vehicle safety. Yesterday, the Comptroller’s Office released a report titled “Wreckless Spending,” analyzing trends in claims settled by the City for incidents where a city-owned vehicle caused an injury or fatality. Between 2012 and 2021, 4,656 crashes cost the City over $653 million in settlements and while the number of crashes has modestly declined, average payouts have become much more expensive, leading to higher total payouts.

Municipal fleet vehicles and the employees who operate them can and should meet the highest standards of safety and set an example for other drivers on our streets. This requires equipping vehicles in the City Fleet with technologies and design features proven to prevent crashes, such as automatic emergency braking and intelligent speed assistance – a process DCAS has already spearheaded that could be significantly accelerated with additional funding and targets.

The City should also follow through on commitments to downsize the number of vehicles in its fleet, as well as the size of individual vehicles. The share of large vehicles, primarily SUVs and trucks in the City fleet is increasing, despite evidence that larger vehicles cause more harmful crashes and result in larger payouts. This trend is largely attributable to a shift away from sedans towards SUVs in the market for law enforcement vehicles. The increase in police SUVs has outpaced the effort to downsize other agencies’ vehicles. In addition to the NYPD, the Department of Sanitation and the FDNY should consider whether their essential tasks could be performed using appropriate but somewhat smaller vehicles.

Just as accountability for safe driving is needed more generally, that is true with the City Fleet as well. There are currently few clear consequences for City drivers who receive camera violations or are involved in traffic crashes. Where City drivers speed or run red lights while operating City vehicles, there should be an escalating series of consequences ranging from remedial safety courses to temporary or permanent suspension of driving privileges.

Shared accountability from City agencies could also go far in preventing crashes. Currently, payouts for crashes caused by City vehicles come out of the City’s general fund rather than the budgets of the responsible agencies. This leaves little incentive to change the practices that lead to crash claims. We proposed that the City instead place the budgeted allocation for projected settlement costs within each agency’s budget. The amount budgeted should be projected based on prior years’ trends. Agencies that reduce claims settlements below the projected amounts would be able to apply a portion of the savings towards the following year’s budget, while agencies whose claims exceed their projections would be responsible for covering the costs.

A robust combination of implementing safe street design across the city, establishing a new and comprehensive approach to reckless driver accountability, and making the City Fleet a model of safe and responsible driving would reduce crashes, prevent injuries, save taxpayer dollars on claims, and most importantly, save lives.

Thank you once again to Chair Brooks-Powers and the members of the Committee for your work to advance street safety. We appreciate your consideration of this testimony.

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