Vision Zero

After a four-month hiatus, City Hall is again updating its Vision Zero View map with new crash data, and through the first six months of 2016, traffic deaths rose slightly compared the same period last year. Through the end of June, 111 people lost their lives to traffic violence, up from 107 in the first half of 2015.

When a police officer in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, shot and killed Philando Castile earlier this month, the encounter began with a traffic stop. The stop fit a pattern: Castile had been pulled over many times before -- 46 times in 13 years -- but few of those citations were for dangerous driving. More prevalent were stops for minor issues like vehicle defects or misplaced license plates -- the type of justifications that police are more likely to use when stopping black and Latino drivers throughout the country.

Main Street in Flushing gets more foot traffic than anywhere else in New York after Times Square, but its sidewalks are too narrow to handle all those people. So later this month, the city will begin expanding the sidewalks on four blocks of Main Street, Council Member Peter Koo, DOT, and the Department of Design and Construction announced this afternoon.

DOT will implement a road diet on the stretch of East Tremont Avenue where a motorist killed cyclist Giovanni Nin in June. Last year DOT had dropped the project in response to a hostile reception from Bronx Community Board 10.

Transportation Alternatives says the de Blasio administration's failure to fully fund Vision Zero street improvements is limiting the number of split-phase traffic signals DOT can install to prevent collisions at dangerous intersections.

In rejecting the case against a school bus driver who struck and killed an elderly woman in a Queens crosswalk, a criminal court judge deemed the city's Right of Way Law unconstitutional. The constitutionality of the law had previously been upheld in a different court, however, and street safety advocates don't expect the new ruling to hold up. Applying the same logic would render criminal statutes against drunk driving unconstitutional as well, they say.

Traffic fatalities in NYC declined 11 percent through the end of May compared to the same period last year, according to NYPD crash data.

When City Council member Jimmy Van Bramer talks about street safety and automated enforcement, the message is clear: speeding is always wrong, it's dangerous, and anyone who gets a ticket needs to change their behavior.

The Bergen Street bike lane between Sixth Avenue and Flatbush was unofficially christened the "Inspector Michael Ameri Bike Lane" yesterday in honor of the late commander of NYPD Highway Patrol.