Pedestrian mortality in New York fell to a hundred-year low last year

In 2014, 134 pedestrians were killed by cars in New York City. As tragic as this figure may seem at first glance, it is the lowest pedestrian death rate on New York City roads in the past hundred years—since 1910. In 1910, statistics on road deaths began to be kept in the metropolis, but history is silent about how many citizens had previously died in road accidents.

The peak of pedestrian deaths fell on the 1929 year, when 952 people parted lives under the wheels of cars and other vehicles.

In 2007, 140 pedestrians were killed in New York, and 2013 in 180. New York authorities attribute the drop in the number of road deaths last year to the successful launch of the Vision Zero program, designed to reduce such tragedies to nothing.

Last year, the minimum thresholds for permissible driving speed were raised on a number of streets in the megalopolis, in some places new “speed bumps” and round-the-clock surveillance cameras appeared. In total, said Mayor Bill de Blasio and city transport administration officer Polly Trottenberg, 50 projects were completed to make road traffic safer.

This year, about fifty more similar projects are expected to be implemented in different parts of New York. They want to make Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan and Queens Boulevard in Queens safer. One of the goals is to deprive careless drivers of the temptation to speed. In particular, it is planned to reduce the number of lanes in some places, putting the streets, as Trottenberg put it, “on a diet.”

By the way, not all news regarding road accidents is good. Despite the fact that the number of pedestrian fatalities is falling, the number of cyclists killed in New York over the year has increased by an order of magnitude - from 12 people in 2013 to 20 in 2014