On Nov. 2, 2013, one year and five days ago, my son’s friend Lucian was killed by a reckless driver in Brooklyn.
Today the New York City speed limit drops to 25 miles per hour, from 30.
That juxtaposition — the death of this 9-year-old boy and New York’s willingness to reduce traffic speed to a low not seen since 1964 — is not a coincidence.
Lucian’s death came on the heels of a spate avoidable traffic violence involving children. Five-year-old Kiko Shao was killed by an S.U.V. in Brooklyn on Sept. 26, 2013. On October 6 of that year, Allison Liao, 3, was struck and killed in a Queens crosswalk. Two days later, 12-year-old Sammy Cohen Eckstein was run down by a van outside his Brooklyn home. And on October 11, a drunken driver killed 3-year-old Olvin Jahir Figueroa in Queens.
Speaking at a rally in late November 2013, Sammy’s mother, Amy Cohen, stated what should have been — but wasn’t — a fact: “Our children deserve neighborhood streets where they can run and play without fear that they will be run over by automobiles. Our children should not be sacrificed so someone can shave a few seconds off their travel time.”
This past January, families of these lost children joined with scores of other victims’ families and crash survivors to create Families For Safe Streets, an advocacy group demanding an end to traffic violence in New York City. (My own family was a very small part of those efforts.) Organized by Transportation Alternatives, a pedestrian and cyclist organization, the group has met monthly to strategize on ways to put their collective pain to good use. Early on, they settled on a biggie: Get the speed limit lowered.
It was no small feat. They crowded into City Council hearings, bearing signs depicting the once-smiling faces of their loved ones. They testified to their own tragedies and urged local politicians to bring Mayor Bill de Blasio’s expanding Vision Zero (a program aimed at bringing traffic fatalities and serious injuries to an end) policies to fruition. They took their suitcases of grief to Albany, the final say in all things traffic. The State Legislature passed the speed limit reduction in June, and in August, Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the bill into law. On October 27, Mr. de Blasio added his name. Today the 25-mile-per-hour signs start going up all over the city, big and bold and covered in the invisible fingerprints of the innocents we’ve lost.
Of course not everyone is happy about the change. I’ve heard my share of taxi drivers bemoaning the tyranny of speed limits. How many times I’ve had to hold my tongue when a cabby complains, “We’re just trying to make a living!” Understandable, maybe. Not so understandable to members of Families for Safe Streets was the recent New Yorker article Slow Cab Coming, in which longtime staff writer Nick Paumgarten mourns the loss of “hurtling home after a late night out, storefronts racing by in a blur, potholes rattling the hubcaps.
“Smooth open road is so rare, at least in the denser parts of the city, that a lead foot can hardly resist the urge to hit the gas,” he wrote. “In a city of lost time — there’s never enough, never enough — any chance to regain some is sweet.”
But bitter is how the piece has left the group of mourner activists.
“In the moments after the car came to rest (stopped by a brick wall), I knew that life as I had known it was over,” Lucian’s mother, Anna Kovel, wrote in a letter to the magazine. “My beautiful son was on the sidewalk, unmoving. His little brother, age 5, was pulled out, crying and screaming … He is fine, except for having lost his only brother, role model and best friend; his parents are anguished and depressed, and he will spend a lifetime learning to process this traumatic experience.”
“Perhaps you also think people should be allowed to drink and drive again,” reads another letter to The New Yorker from Dana Lerner, the mother of Cooper Stock, a 9-year-old who was run down by a taxi as he crossed an Upper West Side crosswalk with his father. “God forbid us New Yorkers do not get to have the grand old time we came here for.”
Last year, my family was drying our tears. Today we celebrate the work of New York City’s wounded parents, while acknowledging that their job is not done; that more tears will be shed.
Lowering the speed limit won’t completely fix the problem. Laws and safeguards only work if they’re obeyed, and they’re rarely obeyed if not enforced. In the last four years, more New Yorkers died crossing with a traffic signal than crossing against one. We need more enforcement, safer street design and criminal consequences for the drivers that kill our citizens. Families for Safe Streets, a heroic club no one wants to join, will work to fix these issues, too.
In their perfect words: Not one more.
An earlier version of this post misidentified the relative who was crossing the street with Cooper Stock. His father was with him, not his grandfather. An accompanying picture caption repeated the error.