NYC’s Streets Got Deadlier In 2020

Before 26-year-old Jose Contla was killed by a hit-and-run driver in Bensonhurst late last February on his way to work, his wife had an unsettling feeling.

“Six months before he passed, all those six months, everything was perfect,” Marisol Contla told Gothamist/WNYC. “One day I told my sister-in-law and my mother-in-law, I’m scared that something may happen to him, because he seems to be perfect.”

Marisol and Jose met when they were 16 and 14 years old, respectively, though initially Jose added two years to his age.

“He told me, ‘I had to lie to you because I was scared you wouldn’t date me because of my age,’” she recalled. The teenage couple moved in with Jose’s mother Maria, and lived together for ten years in Sunset Park. Marisol described Jose as a hard working and dedicated husband, who earned his associate’s degree at Kingsborough Community College while working full-time at a Mexican bakery in Bensonhurst, about a block from where he was killed. An aspiring lawyer, Jose had started taking classes at John Jay to earn his bachelor’s degree when he died.

“We did it together. Everything,” Marisol said. “We got our first car together. We were planning to save up to get a house, maybe in 10 years. We had so many dreams. Everything he promised me, before he passed, whatever he promised me, he did it.”

Nearly ten months since the fatal crash, the NYPD has still not made an arrest in Jose Contla’s case. The police department says they are still investigating, and a spokesperson for the Brooklyn DA’s office declined to comment on an active inquiry.

Marisol and Jose’s sister, Arleen Soto, said they were frustrated at the pace of the investigation.

“They know who [the driver] is. That’s the frustration, that there’s no criminal charges against them yet, and it’s been almost a year,” Soto said. “What more evidence do they want?”

Soto added, “Drivers should be aware and constantly reminding themselves that pedestrians come first. These are people, people with families.”

This year is on track to be the deadliest year on New York City streets since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in 2014 and pledged to end traffic deaths by 2024 under his ambitious Vision Zero initiative.

As of December 14th, 234 people have been killed in crashes citywide, up from 208 at the same point in 2019.

At a recent press conference, de Blasio blamed the increase in deaths on a “horrible, perfect storm moment,” prompted by the pandemic.

“There's obviously been a lot more people traveling by car this year, proportionate to mass transit. There's been a lot of things that have been unusual and really unhelpful. And obviously not consistent with what we want to do with Vision Zero,” de Blasio said. “So, I would say in my last year, we're going to double down on Vision Zero, go right back to everything that was working consistently for years.”

The city’s 950 speed cameras, which are installed across 750 school zones, have issued more than four million speeding tickets this year, roughly double what they issued in 2019, though the DOT has installed several hundred more cameras this year. However, NYPD speeding enforcement is down from 2019, with 116,649 summonses issued through November, compared to 139,839 last year.

“Unfortunately, this pandemic has brought out, in some cases, our worst selves, rather than our best selves,” Brooklyn Councilmember Brad Lander said. “You would hope that people’s sense of solidarity in a pandemic would lead them to care more about their neighbors’ lives. And at least on our roads, the opposite looks to be true.”

Transportation and safe streets advocates charge that the de Blasio administration has failed to act swiftly and boldly to adapt to the necessities of the pandemic. The mayor also ignored the recommendations of a group of transit experts that he tapped for dealing with the challenges the pandemic created.

The panel recommended that the mayor aggressively expand street space for pedestrians and ramp up bike lane installation with the goal of doubling ridership; install 40 miles of emergency bus lanes; devise a plan for restricting vehicular traffic in Manhattan, like the city did after 9/11; and come up with a "robust communications plan" to help New Yorkers get out of their cars and find other ways to get around.

“We worked for months to advance solutions and they fell, not on deaf ears, they fell on no ears,” said Danny Harris, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives. “The things that we’re seeing play out on our streets now were preventable, and the mayor had a plan, and didn’t act on it.”

Cycling rates over the city’s bridges into Manhattan have nearly doubled, as tens of thousands of New Yorkers have turned to biking over mass transit or automobile use, part of a worldwide biking boom. In Paris, the mayor announced the creation of 400 new miles of temporary bike lanes to protect cyclists.

Meanwhile, New York is on track to add 25 miles of protected bike lanes by the end of the year, short of their pre-pandemic goal of 30 protected miles for the year. The city has already built 35 miles of regular bike lanes in 2020. There are currently 545 miles of protected bike lanes in NYC, and 524 miles of conventional painted lanes; there are 6,300 miles of streets overseen by the DOT.

“We were able to put out temporary materials, like barrels and spray paint in places like Smith Street in Downtown Brooklyn, as well as Second Avenue in Midtown,” Julia Kite-Laidlaw, the DOT’s director of strategic initiatives, told Gothamist/WNYC, defending the agency’s record. “This is just our way of showing that yes, we see cycling is up, we know we have to work as quickly as we can, and this is what we’re going to do.”

De Blasio’s longtime DOT Commissioner, Polly Trottenberg, declined an interview request. Trottenberg resigned in early December after serving the administration for seven years, and she was reportedly on President-elect Joe Biden’s short list for Transportation secretary.

While de Blasio eventually embraced using streets for outdoor dining, his administration has struggled to meet his goal of installing 20 miles of new bus lanes and busways—which have proven a critical means of transportation for essential workers. Just0.8 miles of new busways have been put in this year, though the city has put in 10 miles of regular bus lanes.

The DOT cited staffing shortages caused by the pandemic, and time-consuming community outreach for the delay. In Flushing, local business leaders sued to block the busway, and eventually got a restraining order. They argued that a bus lane would hurt businesses already struggling from the pandemic, despite data showing the opposite.

“It was a very ambitious target and we’re going to get very close to it,” said Eric Beaton, the DOT’s deputy commissioner for transportation planning and management. “We’re going to keep working on anything we didn’t get done this year, first thing next year.”

The NYPD could not immediately provide a tally of how many fatal crash investigations have been conducted or closed this year or in years past.

A 2015 report commissioned by Transportation Alternatives showed that fewer than 1% of the drivers involved in 4,000 hit and run crashes that year were charged with a crime.

The Right of Way Law, signed by Mayor de Blasio that year, gave the NYPD wider latitude in citing drivers for failing to yield, and made striking pedestrians and cyclists with the right-of-way a misdemeanor, though its implementation has been slowed by legal challenges.

According to the Mayor’s Office, 1,906 low-level summonses have been issued under the law in 2020 so far, and 17 misdemeanor arrests have been made, down from 3,696 summonses and 51 arrests last year.

More than 40,000 New Yorkers have been injured in more than 100,000 traffic crashes citywide in 2020.

Safe streets advocates argue that the Right of Way Law is often not enough to hold reckless drivers accountable, as the NYPD frequently does not show up to hearings, and many of the cases are dismissed. In 2018, the charter bus driver who was found guilty of fatally running over cyclist Dan Hanegby in Midtown in 2017 was sentenced to 30 days in jail—the maximum penalty under the law—after he rejected a plea deal that would have punished him with a $1,000 fine, driver remediation classes, and a six-month license suspension.

The de Blasio administration also pointed to nine major travel corridors where the speed limit was lowered by 5 mph as further evidence of their commitment to Vision Zero.

One street where the DOT lowered the speed limit from 30 mph to 25 mph last year was Third Avenue in Sunset Park. At least five pedestrians and cyclists have been killed on the road since 2019, most recently Clara Kang, a 31-year-old critical care nurse practitioner who was hit by a motorcyclist in October, while biking home to Long Island City from her overnight shift at NYU-Langone.

Kang’s partner, Diaphel Thompson, said an NYPD detective told him that according to security footage of the incident, it appeared that the motorcyclist was going around 80 mph when he struck Kang.

“I can’t even imagine going 50 on that road, how do you go 80?” Thompson wondered.

The NYPD has not released the name of the 29-year-old motorcyclist, who was seriously injured in the crash. No charges have been filed, and police say the investigation is still active.

“She loved helping people, she was a big proponent for righting inequalities, full stop,” Thompson said, adding that Kang spoke Korean, Spanish, and English, and frequently offered to work for her colleagues when they had to deal with emergencies.

“She did five shifts in a row, which is crazy—12 hour shifts—to help out one of her colleagues. I was actually kind of mad at her,” Thompson said. “She was always so empathetic and so giving, almost to a fault.”

The two of them liked to take weekend bike rides together, and Kang often rose before the sun was up for the 9 mile ride to work. “We even talked about it, ‘I could never date someone who doesn't ride a bike,’” Thompson recalled.

Thompson said he is now working with Families for Safe Streets to advocate for changes to street infrastructure on Third Avenue, and citywide.

“I could tell she was just trying to get to the Fourth Avenue bike lane,” Thompson said, calling for more traffic calming measures and bike lanes that connect all of Sunset Park, changes that other elected officials have pushed for.

“Clara’s death was completely avoidable,” Thompson said. “You have running water, you have electricity, your streets should be safe to get to work. If the electricity goes out, we go and fix it right away. This should be something we go and fix right away. It shouldn’t be, ‘Oh someone’s died, we’ll get to that in a few years.’”

The story has been updated to to reflect the correct breakdown of bus lanes and busways installed in 2020.