Marcia Kramer on Vision Zero: Why Isn’t City Hall Sticking It to Pedestrians?

She’s back. Marcia Kramer is here to defend unsuspecting New Yorkers from Bill de Blasio and his nefarious goal to eliminate traffic deaths in the city.

“The city says 250 New Yorkers are killed every year; 4,000 injured,” she began her report last night on WCBS. Okay, if the city says so.

But as for the mayor’s plan to prevent New Yorkers from getting injured and killed by keeping dangerous drivers off the road, he’s got it all wrong. “Apparently not at the top of the mayor’s list is helping motorists,” Kramer said, apparently oblivious to the fact that more than a hundred motor vehicle occupants are killed and thousands more injured in New York City each year.

No, forget about protecting people in cars from reckless drivers. To “help motorists” you have to do something about those pesky pedestrians. “Who can argue that jaywalkers are a driver’s nightmare?” Kramer asks. “But not the mayor’s priority.”

You know what’s worse than jaywalkers? Of course: bicyclists. “What about bicyclists who don’t stay to the side of the road or go up one-way streets the wrong way… [and] who weave in and out of traffic, going into whatever lane they want?” Kramer asks, over a shot of a cyclist riding with traffic up Sixth Avenue, navigating outside the door zone of a stopped taxi cab.

What a nightmare.

Kramer does mention one victim of traffic violence: Noshat Nahian, age 8, who was killed just feet from where de Blasio signed the traffic safety bills yesterday.

Was he jaywalking? Riding his bike the wrong way? No, he was walking to school with his sister, in the crosswalk, with the signal, when an unlicensed tractor-trailer truck driver drove over him. Kramer never mentions that.

In the eyes of Kramer and the team at CBS 2, because de Blasio won’t address what anchor Dana Tyler introduced as “two major headaches for motorists,” New York is headed in an ominous direction.

Filmmaker Anna Zivarts has posted a glimpse of what this Vision Zero future will look like. Don’t say Marcia Kramer didn’t warn you:

  • Southerner

    Marcia Kremer is dumber than a bag of rocks.

  • Media Watch

    I would have thought Marica’s infamous “But what if the man on a bike was a terrorist” claim would have caused the NYC press to revoke Marcia’s membership card for good, but I guess I overestimated the NYC press corps. Oh, well. That’s why I rely on real news sites like Streetsblog for unbiased coverage of important topics.

  • SteveVaccaro

    Hopefully Marcia’s correct that Intro 238 will send drivers who strike pedestrians with the right of way to jail, but as in the case of virtually all unclassified misdemeanors, that is not likely the case. She’s so full of it.

  • Kevin Love

    In my opinion, it is not a matter of intelligence or mental health issues, but of ethical impairment.

    In other words, she is not dumb. She is not crazy. She is evil.

  • StepUpAndSaySomething

    This woman turns my stomach. She’s a sign that intelligent people don’t get their news from TV anymore.

    When a website like Streetsblog with a tiny staff can do orders of magnitude better at reporting then these high priced news readers and the news rooms behind them, there is something seriously wrong with main stream journalism.

    Friends don’t let friends watch network news.

    Where’s that donate button.

  • Tyler

    Yes. It’s willful and intentional.

  • KillMoto

    Lazy, lazy “journalism”.

    Notice the examples of jaywalking are people crossing in a crosswalk (albeit against “the red hand”) where the intersection is gridlocked. Too lazy to spend another 3 minutes to film some genuine, unashamed jaywalkers.

    Personally I find crossing through gridlock some of the safest crossings. Cars are stopped and have barriers all around, so heck yeah it’s safe.
    More germane th the video is this – the biggest impediment to those poor downtrodden drivers are (wait for it)…
    …the driver blocking the box.

  • Joe Enoch

    Speaking as a fellow broadcaster, Marcia is an old, tired, lazy reporter with a once-promising career who has been phoning it in for about a decade. She thinks her seniority gives her the credo to editorialize in her general news reports and her manager obviously can’t get the approval to fire her.

    Last night’s report is what we call “track and wallpaper” because it’s nothing more than her boring tracks and equally boring “b-roll.” She’s been doing that for years and yet still draws a paycheck….

  • Media Watch

    If only it were lazy journalism. It’s a political attack ad disguised as “news.” Marcia Kramer would apparently rather see Mayor de Blasio fail than have more lives be saved. When a reporter is this ethically challenged, images and facts don’t matter, especially when one has as little respect for one’s audience as local TV news producers do. All that matters is the tone.

  • Emmily_Litella

    This is yet another reminder of the tragic waste and corruption by money of a valuable communications medium. It so obvious that a divide and conquer strategy is at play here. Also loved how she described out of control cabbies actions as ‘nick’ing pedestrians.

  • Andres Dee

    But cyclists are supposed to drive on the sidewalk. Just last week, an SUV driver told me that’s the law, after honking me repeatedly.

  • It’s just a provocative story meant to stir up the people who think everybody hit by a car is asking for it by breaking the law.

    The bright side is that our city leaders aren’t kowtowing to these types anymore. They’re focusing quite correctly on the real problem, people driving cars.

  • sammy davis jr jr

    “And send drivers who interfere with pedestrians at intersections to jail”.

    That would be a dream come true, but no. We’re light years away from that, Marcia!

  • Brad Aaron

    We’ve written before about how the NYC press leads the public to believe that drivers who hurt and kill people are up shit creek. I used to think they knew better, but based on this and a recent back-and-forth with another journalist on Twitter I’m starting to think they just have no idea what they’re talking about.

  • Andres Dee

    Silly Killmoto. If a pedestrian is hit in the crosswalk (with the light) or on the sidewalk, then it’s because of a cyclist, or a bike lane.

  • walks bikes drives

    What gets me is the difference between minor nuisance and safety issue. When I drive, and a pedestrian jaywalks across a crosswalk, without a light, it causes me to slow down. O usually honk quickly if it is blatant. Then I move on. Time lost, maybe 5 seconds. Same thing when I am on a bike. Slow and honk, then keep going. No one hurt, moments that are not so precious lost. These laws are meant to not save these not so precious moments but to save these very precious lives. I honk not because I’m annoyed at the jaywalker. I’m honking to say “hey, pay attention. You are doing something stupid that could get you hurt by another driver who doesn’t pay the same attention to the road as I do.”

    People need to get a grip. And Marcia Kramer gave CBS yet another black eye with that one. To New Yorkers, anyway. Probably got the respect of the car centric suburbanites who venture into the city every once in a while in their BMWs and Mercedes to catch a Broadway show.

  • walks bikes drives

    Come to think of it, how much does anyone want to bet that Marcia Kramer is one of those BMW suburbanites who drives in every day to her studio, parks in a garage, then drives home at night. Rather than an actual New Yorker who lives here. Her report makes me think SHE is more likely to be the driver killing a pedestrian than a pedestrain being killed by another driver. So of course she would be out for her own benefit. Not thinking of the 8 million of us who have bulls-eyes on our backs every time she drives by.

  • Kevin Love

    The film does not show the start of the crossing of the person shown finishing with the red hand. That person may be crossing perfectly legally, having started with a walk signal.

  • petercow

    With NY press credentials, she doesn’t need a garage. There are areas all over the city reserved for people with press plates.

  • trophysky

    This is a very interesting article. The information is well researched and highly
    informative. I love the way the tpics are choosen. They are so useful in our
    day to day life.See more at Parking Lock

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

Do You Walk in NYC? Then You Don’t Matter to CBS2’s Marcia Kramer

By Ben Fried |
Kramer explains the horror of giving pedestrians more space. No one warps a two-minute segment about New York City pedestrian improvements quite like CBS2 reporter Marcia Kramer. The venerable TV newser, who’s perfected the art of windshield perspective journalism, fired a salvo against the city’s public plaza program on the 6 o’clock broadcast yesterday. This […]

Reality Check: A Small Fraction of NYC Streets Have Bike Lanes

By Ben Fried |
Kramer on the "already-congested" Prospect Park West. Cross motorhead journo Marcia Kramer with sidewalk-hogging Brooklyn Beep Marty Markowitz and this is the unholy offspring that you get: A skewed news segment on the proposed Prospect Park West bike lane, where facts don’t matter and wild assumptions go unchallenged. Kramer followed up last week’s hack-job on […]

A Pedestrian Is Killed, So Let’s Ticket — Pedestrians?

By Sarah Goodyear |
Earlier this week, Brad posted a piece about a recent pedestrian death pedestrian critically injured by an SUV on 14th Street, asking "Is Death an Appropriate Penalty for Jaywalking?" in which he included some fascinating historical information about how jaywalkers have been demonized over the years. Photo by Poppyseed Bandits via Flickr. In Savannah, that […]

Marcia Kramer Exposes the Threat of Pedestrian Refuges [Updated]

By Ben Fried |
I had to pull this Marcia Kramer segment out of the headline stack and post it, because you’ve got to see it to believe it. Earlier this week, CBS2’s chief political correspondent went down to Borough Park to expose the pedestrian refuge threat. Intro: “The Department of Transportation has struck again.” With its outlandish Safe […]