Chapter 10 Families for Safe Streets

October 8, 2013—the day that everything changed for Amy Cohen and her family—was a Tuesday, a normal school day in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

That morning, Amy got on her bicycle and began her daily commute into Manhattan. Her twelve-year-old son, Sammy, turned the other way and walked toward his middle school. It would be the last time she saw him alive.

Park Slope, full of stately brownstones, wine shops, and cafés, is considered one of New York’s safest neighborhoods, a destination for well-to-do young families. By early October, however, the days had started to get shorter. It was the time of year that is always the most dangerous for pedestrians.

Most of Park Slope’s streets are narrow, many of them with just a single one-way lane and parking on both sides. But Prospect Park West, the street that runs along the park, is an exception. It is a two-lane, one-way street. A protected bike lane was added in 2010, narrowing the vehicle lane width. But Prospect Park West then was still one of the few places in the neighborhood where drivers could really build up some speed. The speed limit on the street was 30 miles per hour, but a 2008 study found that 90 percent of drivers were exceeding it.1

At some point around 5:15 p.m. that October evening, later testimony would show, Sammy’s soccer ball rolled into the street.

The driver who struck him, Luis K. Quizhpi-Tacuri, told a judge that he was late for a 5 p.m. appointment. When Sammy’s ball had rolled into the street, another driver had waved him forward. Quizhpi-Tacuri, driving a commercial van for a Queens-based design firm, saw the cars slowing and saw a ball, later testimony showed, but he wanted to beat the light. He hit the gas and moved to pass on the right.

For killing Sammy, he eventually had his license suspended for six months.

The days following Sammy’s death, Amy said, were almost unbearable. The grief was so overwhelming, she said, that she had a constant sensation, a difficulty breathing, “like someone was sitting on your chest.”2

Amy and her husband, Gary Eckstein, a lawyer, tried everything that was available to cope with the pain. They went to individual counseling, couples’ counseling, and support groups for parents who had lost children. “Nothing really worked,” she said. Soon after Sammy’s death, however, Cohen did find something that helped somewhat: activism.

Most people who lose loved ones in traffic collisions suffer in solitude. If they do call for change—like the family of Ignacio Duarte-Rodriguez from Phoenix—their pleas are ignored. In addition, the drivers in these cases, even if they are negligent, often face shockingly light penalties.

But the Cohen case was special in a few ways. Unlike a lot of the other victims and families mentioned in this book, Cohen, being a white professional, had a lot of social privilege. Sammy, at just twelve years old, bright with a promising future, was a very sympathetic victim as well. But perhaps most important is that in 2014, New York City—and in particular, Park Slope—was the epicenter of safe streets advocacy in the United States. A new movement was taking hold there, right at the time of Sammy’s death, that sought to make sure other mothers would not have to experience what Cohen did.

During this time, Prospect Park West, where Sammy was killed, had been the scene of a hard-fought political battle that helped redefine how city streets are apportioned in New York City.

In New York City, everyone is always battling for space: for space on the sidewalk, for a seat on a crowded subway, for a spot in line at Starbucks, for a studio apartment near the subway station. But street space, until Janette Sadik-Khan came on the scene in 2007 as New York City’s transportation commissioner, was almost completely uncontested. Streets were the unquestioned domain of honking taxis and anyone with a license and set of keys.

It was a decidedly unjust distribution of space. Only about half of New York City households even own a car. But while the rest of the city was fighting for scraps, a huge portion of the city was reserved for cars and cars only.

Sadik-Khan began changing that. The city started carving not just bike lanes, but large pedestrian plazas as well, out of asphalt that formerly carried a honking, fuming, metal tangle of vehicles. Perhaps the most striking example was in 2009 when she overhauled Times Square, the city’s most visited tourist location, and turned much of it into a pedestrian plaza. When the streets were redesigned to better reflect the way New Yorkers traveled, traffic deaths dropped, sometimes precipitously.

In 2010, Sadik-Khan decided to test a protected bike lane on Prospect Park West. One travel lane was painted green and turned into a protected bike lane, separated from car traffic by a parking lane. Protected bike lanes were relatively new in New York City at the time, but they had been used successfully in the Netherlands for decades. The project upset some wealthy and influential neighbors, however, who sued the city in 2011 to have the bike lane removed.

The city’s data showed that the bike lane reduced speeding dramatically—injury crashes declined 63 percent—but did not impact average vehicle travel times.3 The lawsuit dragged on for five years before it was finally dropped in 2016 when the opponents conceded, in a major victory for Sadik-Khan’s more people-centered approach to street design.4 Activists seeking to reshape New York City’s streets to be more accommodating to the masses of city users were experienced and emboldened.

Practically speaking, the process of installing the improvements was not difficult. New York City used a mix of epoxy and sand to paint the streets green for the bike lanes or beige for pedestrian plazas. Simple concrete planters or plastic bollards helped keep cars and trucks out. The lanes could be installed practically overnight at a low cost. But politically, they were hard-fought.

Since the Prospect Park West bike lane was first installed, the city has added ninety-eight miles of protected bike lanes and seen traffic deaths, and pedestrian deaths in particular, plummet.5 About 35 percent fewer people were killed while walking or wheeling in traffic in New York City in 2019 than in 2013, the year Sammy was killed.6

After Sammy’s death, Cohen became obsessed with what was happening on the streets around her house. Just days after her son was killed, she borrowed a radar gun from some activists she knew and started clocking the cars driving down Prospect Park West. “There wasn’t a car that was going less than 40 miles per hour,” she said.7

Shortly before Sammy had been killed, the family had taken a vacation to London. At the time, London was in the midst of a safe streets campaign. In 2013, the speed limit in a one-square-mile zone in London’s center city was converted to 20 miles per hour.8 Amy remembered the signs. A thought kept nagging her after Sammy’s death: “If they had done it here, he would still be alive,” she said.9

The concept of zones limited to 20 miles per hour began sweeping the United Kingdom in 2007, initiated by a man named Rod King from the small British town of Warrington. When visiting the town’s sister city, Hilden, Germany, King noticed that a high percentage of trips were made by bicycle: 23 percent,10 much higher than in his town. There were not very many bike lanes in Hilden, but the town did have a speed limit of 30 kilometers per hour (about 18.5 miles per hour).

“That made me stop to think,” King told the Middle Way radio program in 2015. “For every 100 people that they were moving around their town, they had about 25 fewer cars on the road than we did.” King figured that the rule probably did not slow anyone’s journey’s down by any appreciable amount either. “Our journey times are dictated not by how fast we go but how long we’re stopped,” he explained.11

The approach has proved popular. Slower neighborhood streets give children the freedom to roam around the neighborhood and be active, giving parents less to worry about and more freedom of their own. It also reduces noise pollution and gives people the opportunity to walk and bicycle without fear.

After successfully campaigning to convert Warrington’s speed limit to 20 miles per hour in 2004, King formed a nonprofit group and took the campaign national. By 2015, about fifteen million people across the United Kingdom lived in cities that had adopted or were considering adopting the policy, according to the nonprofit group.12 A variety of British studies have also shown that speed limits of 20 miles per hour reduce fatalities 20 percent on neighborhood streets and 40 percent on arterial streets like the one on which Sammy was struck.13 In addition, the World Health Organization, in a 2017 report, called residential speed limits of 20 miles per hour a global best practice.14

The Beginnings of a Movement

Cohen did not know it right away, but it turned out that in 2013, right around the time that Sammy was killed, New York City was considering something similar.

Sammy’s death was galvanizing for the community in Park Slope, which included many influential and powerful New Yorkers. The neighborhood had also been primed by the work of Transportation Alternatives and other activist groups to think of traffic deaths as injustices caused by policy failures.

Overnight, a makeshift memorial was created at the spot where Sammy was killed, with a row of teddy bears holding hearts that spelled his name. “Slow down,” said one sign, next to a row of dried flowers.

Just days after Sammy’s death, a city council transportation committee held a meeting at which speeding in neighborhoods was a subject of discussion. By that time, New York City had begun establishing special zones with speed limits of 20 miles per hour in certain neighborhoods, but at the meeting, residents complained that the process took too long and that not enough was being done to improve safety.

Cohen, her husband, and their daughter each gave tearful testimony in favor of lowering New York’s default speed limit, which was 30 miles per hour. “Every 33 hours, someone is dying. The next one could be someone you love,” Cohen told them.

Other advocates—professionals with long histories—had been working on transportation reform in New York, but the tearful Cohen-Eckstein family, still raw from Sammy’s death, was something new. Their speeches ended with applause, and some city council members cried. “Cohen’s courageous speech turned her and her mourning family into the face of a larger campaign to slow down cars,” Sasha Goldstein wrote in the New York Daily News at the time.15

The year that Sammy was killed, 168 pedestrians were killed in traffic in New York.16

The family began a personalized lobbying campaign, targeting every city council member. Cohen printed up little photo albums of Sammy, showing him smiling on family vacations. The family stood at the entryway of the meetings and handed an album to each member.

Activism gave Cohen somewhere to put the frenetic energy that Sammy’s death had left her with and an activity to fill the sleepless nights. She now had a new purpose: preventing other families from going through what her family had gone through.

Through her advocacy, Cohen started meeting other New York families who had lost children to traffic crashes. Two of those parents were Amy Tam-Liao and Hsi-Pei Liao, whose three-year-old daughter, Allison, was killed by the driver of an SUV in 2013 while she was holding her grandmother’s hand in a crosswalk in Flushing, Queens.17

“The shock and suddenness of losing a family member or friend through traffic violence is unexplainable until you have experienced it,” wrote the Liaos. “Learning that tragedies like ours happen every day and nothing was being done about it fuels an anger that something needs to change.”18

In January 2014, with the help of Transportation Alternatives, they and a handful of other New Yorkers launched Families for Safe Streets (FSS), a support group and advocacy arm for those who have lost loved ones to traffic violence in New York City. “We were already in the mindset of seeking change, not just financial compensation, which is what the other lawyers offered,” the Liaos said. “So when the opportunity to create FSS came along, there was no hesitation of being part of that.”19

The group was modeled in some ways after Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and Everytown for Gun Safety. It operates by the principle of “meet people where they are” and offers individualized support to grieving families. It also encourages members to fight back and push for reforms that can prevent traffic deaths.

“You get incredible support knowing that you haven’t been singled out by the universe for this horrific tragedy,” said Cohen. “There was literally a member of the group that I would say saved my life. She was there in a way for me that we tried to formally replicate.”20

There are currently more than two hundred active members of Families for Safe Streets in New York City. All are family and friends who have lost people to “traffic violence,” as they call it.

Families for Safe Streets’ first fight, in January 2014, was lowering New York City’s default speed limits from 30 to 25 miles per hour. It would be a tough battle. Lowering the speed limit is a complicated legal process. Speed limits in the state of New York—as in other states—are governed by state law, and in most states, the laws are set up to protect drivers from speed traps, not to protect pedestrians from injuries.

For example, the city council in Austin, Texas, voted in 2016 to lower the city’s default speed limit from 30 to 25 miles per hour, but it was mostly a symbolic gesture. Even though Austin has about sixty traffic deaths a year, the city does not have the authority to lower its speed limits without enabling legislation from the state. That is a tough political battle in Texas, but it is often difficult even in progressive states like New York and Massachusetts because suburban and rural constituencies who have little to gain from lower urban speed limits often dominate state legislatures.

Cohen and Families for Safe Streets started traveling to the statehouse in Albany. Often a legal change like the one they were requesting can take a year in New York, but the grieving families and their stories proved powerful in moving legislators.

“Our members provide a different perspective, a sense of urgency and a moral authority on the issue,” Cohen told the Vision Zero Network in 2015. “It’s hard for an elected official to say ‘No’ to a change that will save lives when speaking to a parent who has paid the highest sacrifice because a driver didn’t want to be slightly inconvenienced.”21

Families for Safe Streets got the speed limit rule they needed in just one legislative session.

Growing Momentum

In January 2014, New York City’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, announced that the city would adopt a Vision Zero approach to ending traffic deaths.22 By October 2014, a year after Sammy’s death, New York’s city council had committed to a speed limit of 25 miles per hour. When the law took effect the following month, the speed limit was lowered from 30 to 25 miles per hour on all streets that were not specially signed.23 Cohen’s and the other families’ hard work was paying off.

About a year after the speed limits were reduced, another little boy was struck on Prospect Park West. Five-year-old Roark Bennett was hit just feet from where Sammy’s memorial stood in 2014. He survived with only minor injuries. In an interview with the New York Daily News, his mother, Karina Bennett, credited Cohen and other activists’ advocacy with helping save her son, saying that her son “would not have been OK if he had been hit when someone was going 30 [miles per hour].”24

For Cohen, who was still overwhelmed with grief, it was a gratifying recognition, but the fight was not over. Next, Families for Safe Streets was to go back to Albany to fight for speed cameras in school zones—another local safety measure that required state authorization.

Around the time that Sammy was killed in 2013, New York State approved a pilot program using twenty speed cameras in school zones. In 2014, the city began issuing tickets for violations in these zones based on camera evidence. City data later showed that the program reduced speeding in school zones 63 percent and reduced injury crashes 17 percent.25

In the summer of 2014, advocates went back to Albany with the goal of expanding the program. They helped win support to expand it to 140 school zones—although that is still just a small fraction of the more than two thousand schools in New York City.

The school zone speeding tickets, although they were only fifty dollars, were surprisingly effective at changing drivers’ behavior. The New York Times reported in 2018 that 1.2 million drivers had been issued one ticket. But that one ticket was a strong deterrent: only 132,000, about 9 percent, received a second ticket.26

One of those rare repeat offenders, however, was in a powerful position. Marty Golden, a state senator who represented parts of Brooklyn, had the infamous distinction of receiving fourteen tickets. And it was with Golden that Families for Safe Streets New York would have its most epic struggle.

Although New York City’s data showed that the program was saving lives, it almost died in 2018 when Golden and the Senate Republican majority refused to bring its reauthorization up for a vote. Golden and Staten Island Republican Senator Andrew Lanza instead introduced a measure that would have killed the program and replaced the cameras with stop signs.27 That might have been the end of it if not for some creative advocacy by Families for Safe Streets.

Just days before the cameras were shut off in June, Amy Tam-Liao, Transportation Alternatives, and Families for Safe Streets held a demonstration in front of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office in Midtown Manhattan. On Third Street, the group—mainly parents who had lost children to traffic collisions in the city—held a banner saying, “Children are going to die.” Tam-Liao and Paul Steely White, Transportation Alternatives’ director at the time, were arrested for blocking traffic and handcuffed by the New York City Police Department in front of news reporters.28

“I was never arrested before and was very nervous,” said Tam-Liao. “But I thought that maybe this is what it takes. I just felt like I had to do it.”29

Cohen, meanwhile, helped with a twenty-four-hour vigil in front of Golden’s Brooklyn office. Members of the community were invited to visit all night and post sticky notes on Cohen’s car—parked in front—outlining their own experiences with traffic violence in New York City. “It was a real community event,” said Cohen. “Ultimately we couldn’t change him, but we put enough pressure on him that he lost the election.”30

Weeks before school resumed, on August 27, Cuomo issued an executive order restoring the program.31 A smiling Cohen stood next to him, flanked on all sides by other New York City families who had lost loved ones, as he signed the measure. And just a few months later, in November, Golden lost his reelection campaign to safe streets advocate Andrew Gounardes.

In the summer of 2019, the speed camera program was dramatically expanded when de Blasio announced that the city would add thirty cameras per month until the cameras reached 750 school zones.

The Golden speed camera fight was a tipping point, Cohen believes, in the way New York City leadership thought about the issue.32 In late 2019, Corey Johnson, the city council’s Speaker, passed a streets master plan that Cohen called “the largest investment in street redesign that the city has ever undertaken.”33 This plan calls for building 150 miles of dedicated transit lanes and 250 miles of protected bike lanes by 2025. It also clarified that the Department of Transportation’s role should not be to emphasize vehicle throughput.

“The passage of the Streets Master Plan sends a clear message that New York City is committed to protecting cyclists, pedestrians and straphangers over cars,” said council member Donovan Richards, chair of the Committee on Public Safety, in a press release.34 “The new bill should be celebrated as a sea change in agency philosophy,” Benjamin Kabak wrote on the real estate news site Curbed.35

Going National

As Cohen, the Liaos, and a growing number of New York City families were getting organized to demand changes, they were also attracting attention from outside the region. Cohen received inquiries from grieving parents in other states who wanted to start their own chapters, and so the group formed chapters in New Jersey, the Bay Area, Oregon, Virginia, and Texas. There are now eleven chapters of Families for Safe Streets.

Could Families for Safe Streets someday be like the movement against drunk driving? In his history of drunk driving in the United States, Barron Lerner describes how prior to the arrival of a few grieving mothers with powerful stories the early 1980s, the American public was “uninterested” in drunk driving. That was despite official statistics showing that drunk driving killed an astounding twenty-five thousand Americans a year and was the leading cause of death for people younger than thirty-seven.

That began to change when mothers like Candy Lightner and Cindi Lamb came on the scene in the early 1980s. Their dramatic stories gave a voice to the wider injustice of drunk driving.

Lightner, whose thirteen-year-old daughter was killed by a driver with four prior drunk driving arrests, including one two days before, had not been “a political person,” according to Lerner, prior to the event. The thirty-three-year-old real estate agent was not even registered to vote. But she was telegenic, she was angry, and she knew how to tell a powerful story. Lightner “would be the main reason MADD would undergo enormous growth, having more than 300 chapters and 600,000 volunteers,” by 1985, Lerner said.36 By the 1990s, MADD was listed among the country’s favorite charities.

Lightner and Lamb were featured in the biggest news outlets in the United States. Lamb’s daughter, Laura, who was paralyzed at five months old by another repeat offender, became a symbol of the problem and was featured in a multipart exposé in the Washington Post in 1980. “I remember the last time Laura felt a hug,” her mother told legislators in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1980, a quote that found its way into the paper. “I remember the last time Laura moved her fingers and hands and feet and legs. Now she doesn’t feel any kisses, doesn’t feel any hugs, doesn’t feel anything.”37

Through their work, Lightner and Lamb were able to dramatically shift the discussion around drunk driving in the United States. Under pressure from MADD and associated groups, President Ronald Reagan established a commission on drunk driving and in 1984 compelled states to raise the legal drinking age to twenty-one.

In many ways, the work remains unfinished. MADD never successfully took on the primacy of the automobile in American life and the lack of practical alternatives to driving in much of the United States. That is an intimidating thing for activists to take on, especially outside of New York City.

Kristi Finney, who lost her son in a Portland, Oregon, bicycle crash to a drunk driver, helps oversee the Oregon and Southwest Washington chapter of Families for Safe Streets. Organizing the family members of victims, however, is challenging. She said that people will say, “Why should we bother because nobody cares anyway?” She added, “It’s really difficult to speak out under the best of circumstances.”38 She now makes an effort to reach out to the family members when she hears of someone killed in a crash.

Grieving parents cannot fight this battle on their own. Cohen said that what she has done would not have been possible without the support of trained advocacy professionals like the people at Transportation Alternatives who cultivated her leadership and included her in key campaigns. “We did not sign up for this work. Many of us were not naturally inclined activists, but we were overwhelmed with pain,” she said. “It’s hard to live with this pain . . . but speaking out has given us a productive challenge.”

“I had no idea this was a preventable epidemic,” she continued. “That [it] wasn’t just a freak accident . . . that our family was marked for this tragedy. That it could have been prevented.”39

The challenge of confronting the problem is made more difficult because there is really no umbrella group that provides a national platform to confront traffic deaths as a leading American killer and supports the local chapters. “We have advocates on gun violence and advocates on opioids,” said Cohen. “For a problem of this scale, there is no national movement.”40

But Cohen and Families for Safe Streets are nevertheless trying to set a national agenda. In late 2019, they set about trying to convince the Democratic presidential candidates to make addressing traffic violence part of their platforms. Cohen and a core group drafted a list of suggestions. They called for a national Vision Zero program, required speed governors for cars, and increased federal spending for transit and safe streets. The letter was signed by the organization’s leaders and sent to all the presidential candidates.

No presidential candidate released a plan at the time, but there was some evidence the letter had reached its target. Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren tweeted to mark World Day of Remembrance, a day that honors people killed in traffic crashes. “Traffic violence kills thousands and injures even more Americans every year,” she wrote. “On World Day of Remembrance for Traffic Crash Victims, I’m sending my love to the families and friends of those who have lost loved ones. It’s time to #EndTrafficViolence.”41

It is notable that Warren adopted the language used by Families for Safe Streets almost exactly. Activists prefer the use of the term traffic violence over the euphemistic accident because it helps desanitize the issue for the public. The term was so unheard of that after Warren tweeted it, Seattle’s alternative weekly newspaper, The Stranger, wrote a whole article investigating the roots of the word.42

Families for Safe Streets’ struggle has been difficult in New York City, and Cohen acknowledges that it will only be harder in cities that are much more reliant on driving.

“Change is hard. We are David against Goliath,” she said. “We are fighting a huge culture that has been indoctrinated in our society that we must drive everywhere by car and it’s an acceptable price to pay to have 100 people die every day.”

“No one is talking about it as a preventable crisis,” she continued. “We’re not going to change that cultural complacency without some activism.”43