As Public Advocate, through my five borough traffic and transportation task force committee’s, I would identify the intersections most utilized by senior citizens, by looking at neighborhood demographics and proximity to senior housing, large populations of seniors and/or senior centers. This data could be used by the Department of Transportation, with a recommendation from my office, to improve these intersections to make them safer for not only seniors but all residents. This can include longer timing for ‘walk’ signals, a waiting area in the middle of a street, lowering the speed limits on theses streets or, where high injuries or deaths are reported, installing lights, signs and having enforcement at these locations (traffic agents or cameras). As Public Advocate I would also use my office to reach out to seniors in these areas about the dangers that they could encounter when crossing some of the most dangerous intersections in our city.

3. Early this year I helped launch a group called the Senior Outrage Coalition; transportation issues remain a chief concern of seniors. I commend Transportation Alternatives for its pioneering proposal of Safe Routes for Seniors, which effectively addressed the concerns of senior pedestrians through improvement to sidewalk design and traffic laws, as well as amenities for senior bus riders. Seniors currently make up 1/7 of NYC’s population, a fraction that will multiply in coming years, and our city has not made preparations to deal with the sobering reality of the service we will need to provide to these people. Doing our due diligence in advance by ensuring all sidewalks and bus stops are senior-friendly will pay off when we aren’t caught off guard years from now. I strongly believe that my vision for the Public Advocate’s office, sending volunteers to senior centers on a biweekly basis to hear and relay their concerns, will help alert city government to recurring complaints that could become major infrastructural crises as seniors become a larger demographic. Finally, the fact that many instances of pedestrian injury involve car accidents only reinforces the need for more bike lanes, which form a safe barrier between pedestrian and automobile traffic.

While many have accepted traffic accidents as common they can be prevented through smarter management of transportation by the Department of Transportation (DOT) and a partnership with the community and organizations like Transportation Alternatives. An example of one such opportunity for a partnership would be Crash Stat 2.0, available at http://crashstat.org, which was launched by Transportation Alternatives in 2004 providing a map showing the quantity, type and results of traffic accidents all over the City.

As Public Advocate we will make information like accident data from the DOT available in as close to real time as possible through a commitment to “Open Data” so that Crash Stat would have real time information and provide funding for an “Apps for New York” competition with prize money for innovative projects like Crash Stat. Working together we can identify dangerous intersections in real time (even before accidents occurred), make intersections safer, and keep track of our results. You can learn more at http://markgreen.com/gov2.

In the mean time we can ask the Department of Transportation to provide warning signs on bike maps and around the City’s 100 most dangerous intersections already identified by Transportation Alternatives while work towards improvements.

Traffic safety is a problem that all New Yorkers face, in particular our City’s seniors and children. In the Council, I introduced legislation (Int 0863-2008) calling on the Department of Transportation to conduct traffic studies for any school with students at or below the eighth grade level to determine what dangers our children are facing and what traffic calming measures we can implement to can best protect them from traffic-related injuries and fatalities. I am currently drafting legislation to call on the Department of Transportation to conduct a similar study and implement appropriate traffic calming and safety measures around our City’s senior centers.

The city insufficiently provides for the safety of elderly pedestrians, and tragically too many seniors have become victims of crashes with motor vehicles.
However, targeted modifications would make our streets and sidewalks safer not just for senior citizens but for all pedestrians.
As Public Advocate, I would push for DOT to study additional key intersections that seniors use often and where accidents have repeatedly occurred, and target these intersections first when implementing changes. While DOT’s Safe Streets for Seniors is a good start, more needs to be done. For senior citizens, wide streets in particular pose special risk of injury due to the increased pace that pedestrians must use to cross safely. And as a result, far too many seniors “get a head start” and stand in the street rather than on the curb before crossing.
Where appropriate, the City should explore retiming traffic signals and increasing pedestrian crossing times. Additionally, ensuring that pedestrian ramps allow anyone with decreased mobility to easily ascend and descend the curb would increase safety greatly.
Finally, vehicles must slow down in intersections. This can be accomplished both with physical impediments and a public awareness campaign to inform drivers of the challenges seniors face.