Transportation Alternatives

Transportation Alternatives launched an updated version of its CrashStat website today, providing a wealth of new data about street safety in New York City and where pedestrians and cyclists are most at risk. The upgrade adds four years of geo-coded data about traffic injuries and fatalities, a smoother interface, and a wealth of interactive features.

Transportation Alternatives and the New York Chapter of the American Association of Family Physicians today released a letter to Mayor Bloomberg, signed by 140 medical professionals from a broad spectrum of specialties, praising the city's bike and pedestrian infrastructure as essential to the health of New Yorkers. It's a solid counterweight to the hysteria surrounding the recent Hunter College bike-ped crash study:

The gender gap in American cycling is a thorny and persistent issue, and New York City performs relatively poorly on the measure. The percentage of female bike commuters has wavered between 20 and 25 percent of the total over the last two decades, but with a marked rise in the most recent years.

The Straphangers Campaign and Transportation Alternatives have chosen the winners for their best and worst of New York City Transit photo contest. The top “Good Transit Scene" was "Break of Day " by Sabrina Porter, while John Wehmeyer took the prize for best “Bad Transit Scene" with ""Reassuring? Not so much!"

Traffic crash data, long a closely guarded secret of the NYPD, is now slowly being released online.

The transit photo contest held by the Straphangers Campaign and Transportation Alternatives has moved into the final round. Five finalists have been selected for the photo that most captures New York City's transit system at its best, and five have been chosen to represent the system at its worst. You can vote for your favorite here.

Traffic deaths need to be treated as an ethical imperative to save lives, said representatives from Transportation Alternatives, the Drum Major Institute, and the medical community today at the public release of the new report, "Vision Zero" [PDF].

The Drum Major Institute and Transportation Alternatives today called on the city to step up efforts to reduce vehicular deaths, and implored the Bloomberg administration and the New York City Council to change the widespread "culture of acceptance" that leads many New Yorkers to view thousands of preventable, life-altering injuries as an inevitable byproduct of urban traffic.

We often describe the importance of transit in numbers, like the fact that 54 percent of New York City households don't even own a car. But even the most convincing stats can get a little dry. To help capture what the subways and buses mean to a city where the transit system is the closest thing to a shared experience for eight million people, the Straphangers Campaign and Transportation Alternatives are launching a photography contest. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all.