As a new school year begins, it is a fitting time to reflect on whether we are doing all we can to provide children with safe routes to school, and how we can stem the ongoing epidemic of children injured or killed on city streets.
At many NYC schools, arrival and dismissal times seem chaotic during the first couple of weeks of the school year. Sidewalks overflow as parents accompany their children in greater numbers, and stay longer to make sure kids get safely inside. And the streets are busy, too, as the full workforce returns from vacation season back to daily commuting. Even the pedestrians are in a hurry: many families are not yet settled into new morning routines, and are scrambling to be on time for school and work. It’s a crowded mix of stress, excitement, and distraction, producing a very dangerous environment on neighborhood streets. We need better plans to keep our “kidmuters” safe.
Everybody has a role to play in making this safer.
Parents, regardless of whether you and your children travel to and from school by foot, car, or bike, leaving the house just 10 minutes earlier than deadlines dictate can reduce stress, rushing, multi-tasking, and recklessness, thereby increasing awareness of the environment, good judgment, erring on the side of caution, and relaxed road and street interactions. That in turn can reduce crashes, injuries, and fatalities. Additionally, that 10 minute cushion can model for children that, despite appearances to the contrary in our busy culture, one need not rush and be harried. Courtesy and personal responsibility can pave your way to and from school and work. What better over-arching educational message could we transmit to our children as we send them off to their studies each morning and welcome them back each afternoon?
If you’re walking your kids to school, please model safe crossing behavior for them. Kids get their good and bad habits from us. Encourage them to stand on the curb, look in all directions, heed crossing guards, and make eye contact with turning vehicles. Discuss with them the importance of not texting while crossing in traffic. And remind them to use the crosswalks where crossing guards are posted if possible.
If you drive your kids to school, consider walking instead, at least for these first couple of weeks. If that’s not feasible, consider parking 2-3 blocks away from the school, and walking from there. At many schools, there simply is not enough room at the curb for every parent who wants to pick up or drop off their child by car, and anything that can be done to reduce traffic immediately outside the school in the first couple of weeks helps create a safer environment for everyone. If your child’s school has issued arrival and dismissal procedures, please follow their guidelines.
All drivers should be mindful that pedestrians, especially children, don’t always move predictably. Please take an extra moment to make eye contact and provide pedestrians and cyclists with an extra margin of space for safety. Whatever you do, don’t pass school buses while their red lights are flashing, honk at other vehicles that are yielding to pedestrians, or make U-turns or double-park in school zones.
Bottom line: Everybody plays a role in creating safer streets. Whether you’re behind the wheel, on a bike, or on foot, showing civility and taking responsibility for safety encourages calmer and more predictable behavior on the part of other street users. Your frustration with other drivers, pedestrians, or cyclists may well be justified, but your angry or disrespectful actions in response only perpetuate the pattern of unsafe behavior. Please step up to promote the culture change we need to make our streets more humane and advance Vision Zero in New York City.
We need the City’s help, too.
While we strongly support Mayor de Blasio’s Vision Zero initiative, safer school access has not been one of its early areas of focus. There are still too many schools that desperately need crossing guards, but are being told that resources are not available. The Vision Zero agenda did promise that NYPD would “broaden recruiting efforts for School Crossing Guards” and that the city would conduct targeted outreach in 500 schools each year, working for safer school zones. It would be great to hear from the city where these resources are being committed, including where they plan to deploy crossing guards, beef up school zones, implement traffic calming measures, and improve traffic control and enforcement strategies at schools citywide.
We appreciate the important efforts of our Queens legislators in Albany (including Sen. Jose Peralta and Assemblyman Michael Den Dekker) to secure additional funding for the hiring of school crossing guards. These initiatives are helpful as long as they don’t draw funds away from NYPD’s other street safety and traffic enforcement efforts. And we believe that Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams’ proposal to expand the role of crossing guards to aid senior citizens deserves study as well.
But on major arterials, crossing guards aren’t enough. Additional police assistance is needed to calm and direct traffic and enforce the law during school arrival and dismissal hours. In our experience, many drivers on busy roads simply don’t heed crossing guards. Only Traffic Enforcement Agents have the training needed to direct traffic and the authority to ticket vehicles that violate the law.
We’re especially concerned about the safety crisis on Northern Boulevard, which hundreds of children cross daily to attend PS 152, IS 230, the Garden School, IS 145, PS 148, PS 149, IS 227, PS 228, PS 92, and PS 330 and other schools. This situation requires immediate action: traffic enforcement agents are needed alongside crossing guards on key intersections throughout the corridor starting the first day of school. Our understanding is that these Traffic Enforcement Agents are generally not assigned at the precinct level, so we call for action from NYPD headquarters or the Queens North command to assign appropriate officers to these locations, supplementing crossing guards that can be assigned by the 115th Precinct.
Finally, deployable and permanent street design and traffic operations interventions are also very important. Last year, NYPD and NYCDOT developed some innovative approaches, such as the closing of a block to traffic to create more space to organize safe arrivals and dismissals. We’d like to see the successful experiments from last year made permanent, and an ongoing effort to explore additional opportunities to make school zones meaningful. And we urge the city to roll out implementation of its school zone speed cameras as quickly as possible.
Best wishes to all for a fun and safe school year!