Photo Courtesy of Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office
The campaign launched Monday with the unveiling of a new billboard on Pennsylvania Avenue in East New York.
By Forum Staff
Mayor Eric Adams and City Department of Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez on Monday launched a $4 million multi-platform, multilingual campaign to counter rising traffic violence and curb dangerous driving behaviors, like speeding, that have occurred at higher rates since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The City’s largest and most concentrated investment in public awareness since the start of Vision Zero in 2014, the campaign — titled “Speeding Ruins Lives, Slow Down” — also represents the largest education effort targeted at community and ethnic media with a $1.5 million commitment, helping to reach a range of communities across the five boroughs, including communities of color that disproportionately suffer as a result of traffic violence.
The campaign launched with the unveiling of a new billboard on Pennsylvania Avenue in East New York. With 35 traffic fatalities and more than 300 serious injuries since 2017, East New York is one of the neighborhoods hit hardest by traffic violence during the last two years of the pandemic and a Vision Zero priority area with major safety and street redesign projects also currently underway. Campaign content will reach all five boroughs through a variety of media, radio and television ads, billboards, bus shelters, LinkNYC kiosks, and gas station pumps. An extensive community and ethnic media presence — with a $1.5 million commitment marking the city’s first Vision Zero public education campaign focused on community and ethnic media with more than $1 million — will include newspaper and online digital ads, running in nine different languages: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, Haitian Creole, Korean, Polish. Russian, and Spanish.
Adams also noted that the City Police Department continues to increase its enforcement of speeding and reckless driving in areas where fatalities are occurring. In the 28-day period ending April 24, the NYPD issued 47.4 percent more summonses for all hazardous conditions on city roads than in the same period in 2021. The NYPD also issued 54.6 percent more summonses in that period than in the same period last year, including a 322 percent increase in East New York’s 75th Precinct, and they have issued five percent more speeding summonses citywide in the first four months of 2022 than they had at this point last year.
“Speeding and reckless driving behavior puts everyone on New York City’s roads at risk, and eradicating it remains at the core of the NYPD’s intelligence-driven traffic safety policies,” said NYPD Chief of Transportation Kim Royster. “We have stepped up enforcement on highways where data shows a rise in injuries and fatal collisions. Across the NYPD, we have focused relentlessly on drivers who fail to yield to pedestrians and cyclists at intersections. And we have continued to conduct Vision Zero high-visibility corridor enforcement and education operations, which strategically deploy personnel to carry out traffic enforcement and education in areas of the city where it is needed most: those locations with a high number of vulnerable road users hurt in traffic collisions. The NYPD’s layered approach reinforces our core philosophy that traffic safety is public safety — a philosophy that drives enforcement across all our police precincts and at our weekly traffic safety forum meetings.”
