For most of my time in New York, I
did without a car. After being poor and having cars break down on me at record
pace, I was glad to be done with the world of automobiles. I was happy to leave
the driving to New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, though the MTA is poorly run and will
always find new ways to make you late for important events.
But time has changed the game plan
and I am now one of the lucky people in the five boroughs with a vehicle. Being
in one of the farther reaches of Queens, parking is not as worrisome as it
would be in Manhattan or other more densely populated parts of the city.
I still work in Manhattan and take
public transit to and from work every weekday and will use public transit a lot
on the weekends if driving and parking will be bothersome. So I have the dual
perspective on city life as viewed from both car driver and mass transit
commuter. Mayor de Blasio’s plan to lower the standard speed limit in
New York City to 25 miles per hour is ill-advised, unfair and counterproductive.
The administration got the idea
from a committee that proposed other measures as well, such as more red light
cameras that would automatically dole out tickets and more speed bumps. But if
you are serious about cutting down on traffic fatalities, getting bad drivers
off of the road should be top priority. More aggressive enforcement is part of
the new “Vision Zero” plan, but too much is going to hedge on the speed limit
reduction. And that is a punishment to the entire city.
Trying to slow down the whole city
won’t work. Driving 25 miles per hour is unrealistically slow for most drivers. Soon after announcing
his plans for a change, Mayor de Blasio’s motorcade was caught speeding and violating other
traffic laws by CBS News.
Real, aggressive enforcement of
traffic laws would put the de Blasio administration up against a variety of groups
that he would normally not want to upset.
When I was living in Northern
Manhattan, I once saw a livery cab drive on the wrong side of the street in
front of police in order to make a light and merge into traffic. I have been in
cabs with drivers who lacked English proficiency needed for a New York State
driver’s license, let alone a livery license. Cracking down on unqualified and
dangerous cab drivers would make our roads a lot safer, but the ideas proposed
by the Mayor include needlessly punitive things such as putting devices on cabs
that would stop the meter if they were speeding. Cab drivers are opposing those
new proposals anyway. You might as well get on their bad side with the right
proposals for the right reasons.
Really cracking down on people who
consistently violate traffic laws would be an improvement, but there is some evidence
to suggest this would have a disparate impact on racial minorities. It’s politically
easier to punish everyone with a lower speed limit than to target the drivers
that are causing havoc on the city streets.
Reducing cyclist deaths would mean
really stopping and ticketing the legions of bad cyclists who ride the wrong way
down one-way streets and ride on sidewalks. That would put the Mayor at odds
with more of his natural political allies.
We see this kind of response on the
part of city government all of the time, when making things worse for everyone
can also generate results that political leaders can point to and claim credit
for, public be damned.
And here’s something else advocates
of the plan fail to consider: A 25-mile-per-hour speed limit would also allow
the police to stop just about any driver any time for speeding. It would be a
city-wide speed trap that would put us on the same page as Podunk
counties in rural areas that collect a large chunk of their revenue from
unknowing out-of-town motorists.
The only people who would normally
drive 25 miles per hour are the obese or elderly driving motorized scooters. No fully functional driver would drive that
slowly without there being traffic congestion or inclement weather. Hopefully
this proposal will be kicked to the curb.
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