Vision Zero: Speed Limit Reduction and Traffic Injury Prevention in New York City

Abstract

We examine the effect on the incidence of casualties and crashes of a city-wide vehicle speed limit reduction in New York City (NYC) streets. The law change, part of Mayor Bill de Blasio's Vision Zero Action Plan to improve traffic safety, cuts the default speed limit for streets with no speed limit signs from 30 to 25 mph beginning November 7, 2014. We use a monthly panel dataset with crash statistics for the entire population of NYC streets, from July 2012 through March 2019. Several difference-indifferences regressions show a statistically significant and meaningful decline in injuries and crashes.

Frontal Sinus Fractures: 10-Year Contemporary Experience at a Level 1 Urban Trauma Center

“…Similarly, the rate of frontal trauma as a result of interpersonal violence was significantly lower (13% versus 26%, P = 0.005) in our study versus Strong et al The incidence of recreational trauma was similar between groups ( P = 0.65). It is likely that a difference in local speed limits and traffic laws can account for this difference, as the maximum street speed limit in New York City has been 25 mph since late 2014, 12 and 55 mph on urban highways. This is far lower than accepted speed limits even in urban communities in other regions of the United States, which are as high as 65 mph 13 .…”

An analysis of the New York City traffic volume, vehicle collisions, and safety under COVID-19

“…Lower densities of traffic will have higher speeds (and higher variances between the speed of vehicles), and therefore one might anticipate more collisions or more dangerous collisions from the countervailing consequences of speed. We highlight that there has been no major change in the posted speed in NYC in the recent time frame, though there have been major adjustments 6 years ago, in 2014 ( Mammen et al, 2019 ).…”

“…The analysis of traffic congestion and associated collisions has been the interest of research for a number of decades ( Jain et al, 2012 , Cui et al, 2018 , De Fabritiis et al, 2008 ), and continues to be an area of great interest ( Mammen et al, 2019 , Faghih-Imani et al, 2017 ). Studies focus on a number of aspects such as traffic patterns predictions ( Jain et al, 2012 ), traffic flow speed estimation ( Cui et al, 2018 , De Fabritiis et al, 2008 ), relationship between traffic volume and collisions ( Wang et al, 2009 , Shefer and Rietveld, 1997 , Noland and Quddus, 2004 ), and more ( Liu et al, 2011 , Baghestani et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Many of these studies rely on potentially endogenous factors ( Cullinane, 2004 ), such as the introduction of car sharing services (Dills & Mulholland, 2018), taxi ridership ( Faghih-Imani et al, 2017 ), public transit usage ( Iyer et al, 2018 ), policy making ( Mammen et al, 2019 , Abouk and Adams, 2013 ), or eco nomic impact ( Parry & Bento, 2002 ), whose effects are usually visible over a relatively long period of time, making it hard to understand if, and which, other factors may contribute to the changes.…”

A Geospatial Platform to Manage Large-Scale Individual Mobility for an Urban Digital Twin Platform

“…The white sphere is not a moving vehicle or public transportation facility, but an animation of the speed in a specific section of the road. In addition, Vision Zero provides dynamic data including types of traffic accidents, casualties, and air quality information [23]. The urban digital twin (UDT) platform we propose aims to support and provide data that are equal to the number of actual vehicles present in a space, without representing it as a single circle only.…”