Mayoral candidate Christine Quinn said today that if elected, she would appoint an interagency "Safe Streets Working Group" tasked with cutting traffic fatalities in half by 2021. The working group, featuring "high level staff" from DOT, NYPD, City Planning, and the Department of Health, would coordinate automated enforcement, police enforcement, street design, and traffic calming interventions.
Achieving that goal would entail a significant acceleration in the reduction of citywide traffic deaths, which dropped 17.5 percent -- from 297 to 245 -- between 2004 and 2011, then increased to 274 last year.
The news was featured in the transportation section of a mobile app Quinn's campaign released this afternoon. The app also lays out a few other ideas related to transit and bicycling: installing countdown clocks outside of subway stations, installing MetroCard vending machines above ground at transit hubs along Select Bus Service routes, reducing the amount of time between a bike rack request and its installation, and increasing the amount of bike parking at train stations, bus stops, and ferry landings.
Quinn made a major transportation speech last month in which she focused on expanding ferry service, increasing city control of the MTA, rolling out 10 new Select Bus Service routes in the next four years, and an already-planned expansion of Metro-North service through the Bronx to Penn Station.
