Polly Trottenberg Quits De Blasio's DOT As Traffic Deaths Continue To Rise

Polly Trottenberg, the Department of Transportation Commissioner appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio when he took office in 2014, has submitted her resignation. Trottenberg is the longest-serving DOT Commissioner in the city's history, and also served for five years as one of the mayor's appointees on the board of the MTA, often acting as an important, if lonely check on the governor's power. She's leaving as New York has created space on many of its streets for restaurants and social distancing during the pandemic, and while traffic fatalities are poised to rise to some of the highest levels of de Blasio's tenure.

As of this week, 218 people have been killed on New York City streets this year, including 88 pedestrians, according to the DOT—the highest number at this point in the year compared to every year going back to 2014.

In an interview with the Times announcing her resignation, Trottenberg called the surge in traffic deaths "a bit of a national phenomenon,”

“This has been a year of emotion and some disorder, and unfortunately that’s played out in a lot of different spheres, including on our roadways," Trottenberg said.

“We have now 10,700-plus restaurants on our streets and sidewalks and it took us a matter of weeks," she added. "In normal times, it would have taken New York City five years to figure out how to do that.”

Jon Orcutt, a former DOT policy official who is now the director of communications at Bike New York, pointed out that de Blasio and Trottenberg didn't even support a sweeping Open Streets plan when it was first suggested during the first months of the pandemic.

"There were no open streets until the council forced the issue," Orcutt said.

Orcutt divided Trottenberg's tenure into two halves, the first characterized by the introduction of Vision Zero, the second characterized by the failures to create the solutions necessary to support it.

"My long view is, de Blasio's first term was a good consolidation of street changes that some of us started with Janette-Sadik Khan in the Bloomberg administration," he said. "What the second term hasn't done is solve some of the problems that those initiatives raised. Ultimately, how do you follow the paint with stronger materials? What can you do to protect a bike lane if you can't move a line of parked cars into the street?"

He added, "We're looking at a period where, the statistical gains of Vision Zero are being erased."

Danny Harris, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, praised Trottenberg's work in a statement. "New York’s life-saving speed camera program stands out as a remarkable achievement under Trottenberg’s leadership," he said. "Our next DOT Commissioner and Mayor must embrace, without reservation, that people are more important than cars and parking, and as such ensure implementation of safe and equitable streets and transportation options as a right for every New Yorker."

Aside from his heavily subsidized ferry system, transportation policy has been less of a priority for de Blasio, who seems content to let the city coast until the City Council's robust streets master plan comes online in December of 2021.

In the spring, the mayor created a panel of advisors to come up with policy recommendations during the pandemic, then completely ignored most of the recommendations and the panel itself.

"Polly has done an extraordinary job. I want to thank her," de Blasio told reporters on Monday during his daily briefing, calling Vision Zero "something for the ages."

A DOT release states that Trottenberg "had been asked earlier this month to volunteer on the Biden-Harris transition team, advising around transportation issues."

The DOT's press office did not say who will act as interim DOT Commissioner when Trottenberg's resignation takes effect in early December. De Blasio, whose Health Commissioner and Sanitation Commissioner resigned earlier this year, said he will "simply work with a very deep bench we have."

Danny Pearlstein, the policy and communications director for Riders Alliance, agreed that the DOT has lots of talent, and that it should be used to immediately advance Trottenberg's "major breakthroughs in terms of busways, transit signal priority, and open streets and restaurants."

"The mayor, with not so much time left in his term, has the ability to really amp all of these up into a significant part of his legacy, with relatively little money," Pearlstein said, pointing to the city's goal of making 20 miles of new busways in 2020; the MTA had asked for 60. "Essential workers are overwhelmingly dependent on buses."

Orcutt wondered whether New Yorkers would lose their open streets once the city steps off its pandemic footing in a year.

"The top priority really is, what do we do with the open streets?" he said. "We're not having that conversation right now. What do we do with the open streets when a vaccine is here?"