Shalloween: Cars Are Haunting our Trick-or-Treaters, But DOT Protects Only a Few

Why is this night different from all other nights?

For the third Halloween in a row, the Department of Transportation will close some road segments across the city to motor vehicle traffic to add pedestrian space and ensure children can trick-or-treat safely. The program, “Trick-or-Streets,” provides “an added safety benefit” on a night when “more children [are] expected out on our streets,” the agency said.

It’s a good idea. There’s enough for little kids to be afraid of on Halloween, such as ghosts, ghouls, and gargoyles. But getting bloodied by the driver of an SUV should not be one of them.

But why should kids be safe only on Halloween — and only on a tiny number of streets — and not every other day?

Since 2014, 116 city children have been killed by car drivers, a Transportation Alternatives investigation found. That’s 12 children per year on average. And tens of thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — more have been injured by drivers.

Those children weren’t trick-or-treating. They were just walking to and from school, or to a friend’s house, or were in some adult’s car. They deserve safe streets, too.

The only permanent solution is simply to pedestrianize more streets.

Palliative measures like “Trick-or-Streets” are welcome, but they don’t address the root problem, which is that there are too many cars in too many places endangering too many kids.

The first step should be to banish motor vehicles from streets near schools. As Streetsblog reported in 2022, streets near schools are more dangerous on average than other city streets. 

During the drop-off hour, there are 57 percent more crashes on streets near the 1,600 city-run public schools than on the city’s other streets. This disparity largely disappears on days when schools are closed.

Closing school streets to cars has worked well in Paris, which has closed more than 200 such streets since 2000. 

This shouldn’t be controversial. Kids are being killed and maimed, yet we treat it as a normal cost of being able to use heavy vehicles to go wherever we want. That’s a cost none of us should be willing to accept.

It’s bad enough we subject adults to the evils of motornormativity — deadly collisions, deafening noise, toxic fumes, gridlock, road rage. It is unconscionable that we subject our children to it. 

In 2024 so far, 14 children have been killed in car crashes, according to Transportation Alternatives. So, yes, “Trick-or-Streets” is great — but this one-day respite from killing machines is only a reminder of the horrors haunting our streets the rest of the year.