When the pandemic hit New York City, cars seemed to have disappeared from many streets, as the blockade disrupted urban life and drivers stayed home.
Today, traffic is sometimes even lighter than normal. But in a worrying trend that has echoed across the country, the number of fatal car accidents has skyrocketed.
At least 243 people died in traffic accidents in New York City in 2020 – making it the deadliest year on record since Mayor Bill de Blasio presented his plan to improve street safety in 2014.
The increase in traffic deaths has defied historical trends: economic slowdowns and reduced congestion usually lead to fewer fatal accidents, say federal researchers. But during the pandemic, it seemed that drivers who felt confined to their homes ran out onto the open streets.
People accelerated recklessly on empty roads. Bikers who haven’t ridden a motorcycle in years – or never – hit the roads. In big cities, late-night drag racing became more popular as other diversions disappeared.
Deaths of drivers, passengers and motorcyclists increased sharply in 2020, from 68 in 2019 to 120 – an increase of 76% and the highest level in more than a decade, according to city data.
These figures do not include deaths of pedestrians, who have fallen, and of cyclists, who have remained virtually the same.
The overall increase in fatalities is a blow to Blasio’s Vision Zero program, which aims to eliminate all traffic deaths by 2024, and a challenge for the coming months, when traffic patterns are unlikely to return to normal.
“We always knew that Vision Zero would not be linear, we would have some years when fatalities would increase and we would have some better years,” Margaret Forgione, interim city transport commissioner, said in an interview. “But this year it threw everything into disarray.”
She added: “It is not a year that reflects what is normally happening in our city.”
New York was no exception. Across the country, death rates from 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 rose to about 30 percent higher than in 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 cautious drivers, stayed home. Without their usual diversions, younger drivers – who are more likely to take risks – hit the road. And the increased use of alcohol and drugs to deal with pandemic-related stress has been factored into many accidents, the federal agency said.
In the spring, speeding fines of more than 100 miles an hour increased by 87% in California during the first month of blockade across the state. New York City’s automated cameras issued nearly twice as many speeding tickets daily, and the speed of rush hour traffic in Brooklyn and Queens increased by more than 80%. State troops in Georgia cited 140 drivers for speeds over 160 km / h over a two-week period in April.
“There were places that saw more speeding tickets issued during Covid than ever before,” said Richard Retting, a traffic safety expert at Sam Schwartz Engineering, a traffic and transportation planning company. “The bottom line is that the risk on the road during the Covid era is significantly greater. The chance of dying in a car accident is greater than before Covid. “
In New York, officials said the majority of fatal crashes in the city last year involved high-speed drivers, often late at night and on highways outside Manhattan.
Motorcycle fatalities have also reached their highest level in more than 30 years, and about 60 percent of them involved motorcyclists who did not have a valid motorcycle license, according to city data.
The number of accidents in which only the motorcyclist died or was injured also increased, suggesting that more inexperienced motorcyclists were riding at high speed, city officials said.
“We saw many young people, especially young people, who seem to be looking for a way out of Covid’s stress and boredom and riding a motorcycle when they had nothing to do,” said Forgione.
The result of all these trends was a series of particularly horrific accidents: On a Saturday night in July, a group of teenagers gathered in a disabled airfield in southeastern Brooklyn to watch two of them “make donuts” or spin their cars on high speed laps. The cars collided, killing an 11-year-old boy and two teenagers.
During two days in August, three motorcyclists – including two men in their 20s – died in three different accidents. And last month in Yonkers, on the outskirts of New York, four high school graduates died when a high-speed driver crashed into his car, splitting it in half.
To crack down on speeding, city officials reduced speed limits in September by five miles per hour on nine of the most dangerous roads in the five districts.
De Blasio also asked the Legislative Assembly last month to allow the city’s speed camera program – which limits cameras to operate only in school zones and at certain times of the day – to operate 24 hours a day.
The city has more than 1,300 automated cameras, spread across 750 school zones, which operate between 6 am and 10 pm. More than a third of fatal accidents that happened off the highway in 2020 occurred in areas where the cameras were not active, according to city data.
The Police Department also deployed its vehicles on multi-lane roads in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, where dozens of fatal accidents have occurred and where state law does not allow radars.
“Frankly, drivers took advantage of the open roads and accelerated with their vehicles,” said Kim Royster, chief of transport for the Police Department. “Visibility is very important when it comes to traffic surveillance, especially for sprint and sprint drivers.”
Chief Royster noted that the police issued fewer general traffic subpoenas, including arrests for driving while intoxicated or driving without a license, compared to 2019 due to a shortage of staff in the spring and last summer, when police officers fell ill or were mobilized for protests against police brutality.
But the police issued about 140,000 speeding subpoenas between November 2019 and November 2020 – just 7 percent less than in the same period last year, according to police data.
On a positive note, pedestrian deaths hit a record low last year as fewer people walked the streets in places like Midtown Manhattan. The city’s streets have had their longest stretch without the death of a pedestrian – 58 days – since authorities began tracking these deaths in 1983.
And despite the increase in the number of cyclists, fatalities among cyclists were almost the same as last year, which city officials attributed to reduced traffic, the effect of safety on numbers and a record 28.6 miles of protected cycle paths that were implemented in 2020.
Still, transportation advocacy groups have asked de Blasio to take a more aggressive approach and point out the examples given by cities like Paris, which pledged to add about 400 miles of bike lanes when the pandemic struck.
Making major changes to the urban landscape would allow cities to capitalize on the momentum created by the pandemic towards using environmentally friendly forms of transportation and keeping people on bicycles, scooters and motorcycles, even with the return of urban life and traffic, the groups say. .
“Whatever your memory of street life before Covid, it probably wasn’t positive – there was congestion, pollution, danger for vulnerable street users,” said Danny Harris, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a defense group . “We can’t go back to normal.”