By Sarah Goodyear
CityLab
In the ongoing Vision Zero attempt to make New York City streets safer, policymakers have embraced what are known as the three E’s: education, enforcement, and engineering. That last category is usually interpreted to encompass street design, including elements such as signal timing, bike lanes, pedestrian refuges, and the like.
But a new idea from a couple of members of the New York City Council extends the concept of safer engineering to include software. What if you could program safety into tools that assist driver navigation?
A couple officials think it’s worth a try. Council members Brad Lander, deputy leader of policy for the council, and Ydanis Rodriguez, who chairs the council’s transportation committee, wrote a letter to Google on July 1 suggesting two enhancements to the company’s maps. One would create a “stay on truck routes” option for truck drivers. The other, which has a much broader application, would allow users to select “reduce left turns,” minimizing the number of such turns required on a given trip.
Why reduce left turns? In their letter, Lander and Rodriguez cited an extensive report from WNYC reporter Kate Hinds about the danger of left turns by motor vehicles in an urban environment where lots of people travel on foot and by bicycle. According to data compiled by Hinds and her colleagues, 17 pedestrians and three bicyclists were killed in New York by left-turning vehicles last year. The fatality rate for pedestrians struck by drivers making lefts in the city is the highest in the nation, according to Hinds’s report.
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