Within months of taking office, Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law several bills intended to add teeth to his Vision Zero street safety initiative. In the year since taking effect, however, the most important of those laws was barely used by NYPD.
The Right of Way Law, also known as Section 19-190, made it a misdemeanor for motorists to harm people walking and biking with the right of way. It took effect last August.
The Right of Way Law was supposed to bring an end to the common scenario of reckless New York City motorists hurting and killing people without consequence. The key to the law is that ordinary precinct cops can apply it, not just the small number of specialists in the NYPD Collision Investigation Squad. NYPD Chief of Transportation Thomas Chan said all 35,000 uniformed officers would be trained to enforce the Right of Way Law, but the department has applied it only a handful of times in the 14 months since it was enacted.
According to data provided by the mayor’s office, from August through December of 2014 NYPD made 15 arrests for Section 19-190 violations, resulting from 21 investigations. In addition, police made one arrest for reckless driving and issued one summons for careless driving.
So far this year, NYPD has arrested 20 drivers under the Right of Way Law, after 41 investigations. Police also issued seven careless driving summonses resulting from those investigations. Twelve investigations are ongoing, the mayor’s office said. In addition, 11 other drivers have been charged under a Right of Way Law provision that applies to failure-to-yield cases that don't involve injury (more on that later).
The scale of enforcement remains far below the scale of damage caused by motorists who fail to yield.
From September 2014 through September 2015, drivers injured 11,109 people walking in NYC, and killed 140, according to DOT data. Since failure to yield is the primary factor in 27 percent of serious pedestrian injuries and deaths, according to DOT's 2010 Pedestrian Safety Study and Action Plan [PDF], it’s all but certain that the vast majority of drivers who violate the Right of Way Law are not charged by NYPD.
Nor is NYPD increasing enforcement. Police averaged three Right of Way charges per month last year, compared to an average of two cases a month in 2015. This suggests that Right of Way investigations remain the province of the Collision Investigation Squad and are not being pursued by precinct cops.
In addition to the Right of Way Law, another key piece of Vision Zero legislation has not been used much. Cooper's Law, named after 9-year-old Cooper Stock, gave the Taxi and Limousine Commission the power to suspend or revoke the TLC licenses of cab drivers convicted of a traffic violation or a crime following a crash that results in death or critical injury. It took effect last September.
As we've reported before, for the law to get dangerous cabbies off the streets, police first have to issue summonses or file charges. TLC license sanctions hinge on findings gleaned from NYPD crash reports.
From September 2014, when the law took effect, to June 2015, the TLC reviewed 30 crashes involving a TLC-licensed driver that resulted in critical injury or death, according to the latest available agency data. Of those, the TLC suspended the licenses of seven drivers. It's possible that the number of crashes triggering a review under the law is under-reported, since TLC-licensed vehicles were involved in 31,110 total crashes during that time frame.
We asked the TLC what became of those seven suspended drivers and have yet to receive that information. Earlier this year, the TLC reinstated an Uber driver after his license was suspended for the January crash that killed Wesley Mensing and seriously injured Erin Sauchelli. It's unknown whether the TLC has ever applied Cooper's Law to permanently revoke the license of a cab driver who hurt or killed someone.
Mayor de Blasio and the City Council stepped up to adopt laws meant to make NYC streets safer, but it's clear additional work is needed. For one thing, Cooper's Law should be amended so that license sanctions can proceed based on TLC investigations alone, severing dependence on NYPD. As for the Right of Way Law, if de Blasio is serious about Vision Zero, he should hold Police Commissioner Bill Bratton accountable for NYPD's failure to put it to use.
