The Adams administration has been murder on kids.
Under the first three years of Mayor Adams leadership, the number of fatalities of children and teens from car crashes has soared — with two record-setting years out of three, including last year, when 16 kids were killed, a new report from Transportation Alternatives shows.
The report puts one fact in stark relief: More children have been killed in the last three years — the entirety of Mayor Adams’s term — than in any other three-year period since Vision Zero began in 2014.
Last year’s bloodshed matched the previous record in 2022 and is up from 12 in 2023. The average number of children killed in crashes in the Vision Zero era has been 11, making last year’s bloodshed 45 percent above average.
Half of the children were killed either walking or biking. That includes high school freshman Niyell McCrorey, who was killed by the driver of an SUV on Manhattan Avenue in November.
It also includes Juraed Umedjon, a 16-year-old cyclist, who was killed in August on Ditmas Avenue by a truck driver.
And it includes Yitty Wertzberger, the 10-year-old who was killed by an impatient, reckless driver in a congested part of Williamsburg in April.
“Our elected leaders must realize that their inaction has consequences in the form of dead children, siblings, parents and friends,” said Maria Sumba, whose daughters, Jael and Leslie, were struck by a truck driver last June, killing Jael, 16, and seriously injuring Leslie, 8. “Leslie survived with serious physical injuries and the psychological trauma of watching her beloved older sister die in front of her. My family will live with this horrific, previously unthinkable loss and pain for the rest of our lives.
“The time is now to take action that will save other families from living this nightmare,” she concluded.
The DOT said in a background statement that it is working to make streets safer for kids by expanding open streets near schools, though this program, at 71 street segments, remains small in comparison to the total number of streets near schools.
In addition, the Transportation Alternatives end-of-year report found:
- Overall pedestrian fatalities rose from 100 in 2023 to 121 last year, an increase of 21 percent.
- According to TA, 90 percent of the pedestrians who were killed at intersections were killed at crossings without physical daylighting.
- Twenty-five bike riders were killed in 2024 — 85 percent of whom killed on streets without protected bicycle infrastructure.
- Council District 19, represented by Vickie Paladino (R-Queens), was the deadliest district with 12 fatalities – two-and-a-half times the citywide per-capita fatality rate, and nearly 5 percent of the city’s total traffic fatalities in a single district. Paladino is a staunch opponent of Vision Zero, most recently attacking the city’s speed camera program as well as its construction of bike lanes.
- Council District 1, represented by Chris Marte (D-Manhattan), has the highest number of pedestrian deaths, per capita — nearly three times as many pedestrian deaths as the average district. Marte is currently spearheading an effort to allow car drivers to use Park Row again, a move that opponents say will only bring more cars and more road violence to Lower Manhattan.
“These numbers are a sobering call to action for everyone who cares about safety in the five boroughs,” said TA’s Executive Director Ben Furnas. “Too many pedestrians are still being killed without critical safety improvements, too many people on bikes are still being killed on streets without protected bike lanes, and too many super-speeders are putting all of us at risk while racking up hundreds of tickets.”
In a statement, DOT spokesman Vin Barone took exception to the fact that the report did not address some positive trends.
“This report fails to acknowledge the year-over-year decreases in pedestrian fatalities and new data around indiscriminate daylighting efforts, as well as many of the vital efforts NYC DOT is already undertaking to address these trends,” Barone said.
Here are the fatality statistics to which he was referring, which show an increase in pedestrian fatalities between 2023 and 2024 (DOT says 2023 was an outlier, and notes that the fatalities in 2024 were lower than 2022 and 2021):
The DOT also argued that the TA report is flawed on the daylighting issue: As the report says, 90 percent of the pedestrians who were killed at intersections were killed at crossings without physical daylighting. But only about 2 percent of intersections across the city have physical daylighting, the agency said, so, that means that intersections with physical daylighting had proportionately more fatalities than intersections without, the agency claimed.
That said, the agency’s own recent report on daylighting admitted that no one has any way of knowing if a daylighted intersection was blocked by an illegally parked car at the moment of the crash.
The report made some of the same recommendation that activists have been making for the entirety of the Vision Zero era:
- Legislators in Albany must require the installation of speed governors on cars operated by repeat speeders. A pending bill has not generated much enthusiasm from the state legislature, which is comprised almost entirely of drivers, despite the fact that a 2024 report found that nearly 50 lives could have been saved if drivers with five or more speeding tickets had been removed from the roads.
- The city must bar parking at every intersection, a process known as daylighting. The DOT has pushed back on this notion — the substance of a pending City Council bill — on the grounds that universal daylighting does not work. The agency’s data on that, however, is flawed.
- The city should lower the speed limit to 20 miles per hour across the board. Last year, the city won the power to set its own speed limits, but the DOT has only announced a tiny number of roadway stretches, plus Lower Manhattan below Canal Street, that will drop from 25 miles per hour.
- The city must build more protected bike lanes and pedestrianized areas. Consider Marte’s district, where 79 percent of the households do not have access to a car, yet more pedestrians are killed, per capita, than in any other district in the city.
- Someone — the city or Albany — needs to lean on the delivery apps. “Delivery work remains the deadliest occupation in New York City, but some members of the City Council are focused on punishing individual workers instead of demanding higher standards from the apps,” the TA report said, referring to a Council bill to require delivery workers to comply with a new registration protocol. “The City Council must pass extensive legislation aimed at the companies profiting from dangerous working conditions to professionalize delivery work, offer safe operating equipment and proper training, and ban unsafe routes, impossible timeframes, and retaliatory deactivation for following the law and riding safely.”
The DOT is open to many of these recommendations, saying that the agency supports solutions beyond fines and fees to combat recidivist speeders who need a greater incentive. The agency said it will lobby lawmakers to give the DMV the power to suspend registrations on vehicles that get five or more red light camera violations in a 12-month period. It also supports putting speed governors on the cars of repeat offenders.
But it is not open to universal daylighting. “Other street safety treatments have greater benefits, on average,” the agency said in a background statement. “Daylighting remains a tool in DOT’s standard safety toolkit and can offer measurable safety benefits when applied situationally.”
