The Street Project

INTERVIEWER: Let's start with a very general question.

When we're thinking about pedestrian and cycling issues, what is the issue today?

Survival.

[laughs] FEMALE REPORTER: It's been a bloody 24 hours on New York City roads.

This is really a big problem.

MALE REPORTER: A woman is killed after being hit by a council bus.

The deadliest state for cyclists.

FEMALE NARRATOR: More than a million people die in traffic-related crashes worldwide each year.

Half of those deaths involve people outside of the car: pedestrians and cyclists.

Deaths have been soaring over the past decade, so we assumed people must be staring at their cell phones and wandering into traffic.

Well, we were wrong.

According to the last six years of available data, less than 1% of pedestrian deaths involved portable electronic devices.

MALE REPORTER: Every dot represents a person hit by a car in the Valley.

...hit a man on the road and dragged him for nearly five miles.

NARRATOR: So why is this happening?

And what can we do about it?

Stop reckless driving!

Safe streets now!

NARRATOR: Welcome to The Street Project.

A story about the global citizen-led fight to make our streets safer.

Our first stop: New York City.

For Dulcie Canton, stopping what she calls traffic violence has become a life mission.

Both Dulcie and her mother were victims of hit-and-run crashes on separate occasions, ten years apart.

Hello!

Can I get by?

Thank you.

DULCIE CANTON: I was living in East Harlem, and I was employed in the gig economy.

So I was working all these different jobs at many locations.

I bought a beater bike that you can park on the street and I started just baby steps, biking from my apartment on 117th to the next train stop.

It was dangerous, but I liked it.

It was free, I would get to work on time.

It was August 7th.

I felt fairly seasoned, biking for three years.

I felt fairly confident.

[horn honks] I was doing what I normally do.

My friend lives in Bushwick.

I live in Bed-Stuy.

The weather was beautiful.

And we were biking along, and we're talking about how great the night is.

I hear this engine rev up and something told me, "he's going to hit you."

My body flew three, four feet in the air, and I landed on the ground.

My right shoulder was fractured, my left ankle was fractured, and I had a concussion.

When I went down, I blacked out some, but if you see the videos, you see the neighbors, they tried to get the car to stop.

He didn't stop.

It looked like he accelerated.

They came back and I heard someone say, "is she alive?"

The guy, he's still driving today.

Immediately after the crash, people were telling me, "oh, you won't get on the bike again, will you?"

And I kind of felt like, "people get into car crashes all the time and no one ever tells them not to drive again.

Why should I be punished for doing something that I love?

But it took me an entire year to recover physically.

I had to do physical therapy.

My mother, she was a survivor of a hit-and-run crash.

She was walking one morning in the Bronx, and a car speed and hit her, left her there.

They broke her femur, her hip, her shoulder.

She had to learn to walk again, so she used a walker until she passed away.

My mother was walking when she was hit.

I was biking when I was hit.

– INTERVIEWER: That's just crazy.

-Yeah.

That's no coincidence.

We were both living in neighborhoods that are on the margins.

Low-income communities are more susceptible to traffic violence.

You just see that, in our neighborhoods, the streets get wider, which encourage speeding.

And as far as protected bike lanes, there are hardly any or none.

So you've got to really have some chutzpah to get in those streets and go.

NARRATOR: The idea of low-income communities being more susceptible to traffic violence was something we wanted to explore.

Jeff Speck is a city planner, author, and lecturer.

He spends a lot of time thinking about what it means to create a walkable city.

JEFF SPECK: It's very clear how poor people, and people of color, and other disadvantaged groups, are walking more, biking more, taking transit more, getting killed by cars more.

People often picture, when they think about an urban cyclist, they picture what we call the MAMIL, the middle-aged male in Lycra, right?

But actually, it's more likely a restaurant worker or a hotel worker, or someone else who actually just doesn't have the means to drive a vehicle.

Fully 39% of those people who commute to work by bike are from the lowest 25% of income earners.

You essentially have people who have no choice but to live on these roads where it's half a mile between stoplights and it's eight lanes of traffic.

And there's apartment clusters along this with bus stops.

FEMALE REPORTER: The story of a Georgia mother who could face up to three years behind bars after someone else killed her four-year-old son in a hit-and-run accident.

JEFF SPECK: So this is why we hear the stories about the mother who's actually sent in jail because her two children died, because she was trying to cross the highway with her kids, because it would have meant a mile walk to get to the crosswalk to get from the bus stop to their home.

NARRATOR: So why are cities designed this way?

JEFF SPECK: It was the 19th century in Europe, when people were choking on the soot from the dark satanic mills, and the planners said, hey, let's move the housing away from the factories.

And they did that, and lifespans increased immediately and dramatically.

And the planners were hailed as heroes.

[applause and cheers] And they've been trying to repeat that experience ever since.

You have zoning in which only single-family houses can go here, only apartments can go here, only office can go here, medical offices separate over there.

Shopping, of course, is somewhere further afield.

And you get this typical American zoning map with these blobs.

I was an art history major, which they say wasn't the most lucrative choice.

But I can tell you, you don't want to Rothko.

NARRATOR: He's referring to Mark Rothko, the abstract expressionist known for his rectangular regions of color.

No offense to Rothko, but what Jeff means is that when you're looking at a zoning map, with large chunks of space devoted to specific single-use activities like shopping or sports, the only way you can get to those activities is by car.

Ball fields aren't in the neighborhood.

The market isn't just down the street.

If you don't have a car, you're out of luck.

Rothko-looking single-use zoning has been the norm for decades, especially in countries like the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

You don't want a Rothko, you want a Seurat.

Seurat was the pointillist.

And the more confetti-like, the more finer-grained the zoning, you're allowing the full range of activities.

Doesn't have to be a big city, it could just be a small town, or any place.

NARRATOR: But the advent of the automobile helped make Rothko-style zoning popular throughout the world, and led to major shifts in how we use public spaces.

Peter Norton is a historian who focuses on the relationship between people, cities, and cars.

INTERVIEWER: Hey, Peter, welcome.

Hey, good to see you.

I'm sure that this is the most bizarre interview you've ever done.

Yeah, I think.

I hadn't thought about that.

But I think you're about right.

INTERVIEWER: So, why don't you talk a little bit about what streets were like before the car?

If you were in a fourth-floor office, and you opened up the window and looked out on a busy street down below around 1910 or so, you would have seen people walking all over the street.

You would see streets being used like public spaces.

I think that, maybe, the biggest contrast would be that the fraction of people on foot compared to the fraction in a vehicle would have been much higher, in part because people's destinations were typically a lot closer together than they are now.

There would be a lot of motorists, too, but those people would be going quite slowly, and they would be watching out for people walking around.

People would be sharing space.

NARRATOR: As cars grew more popular, cities in the 1920s and '30s were trying to figure out how people in cars could best commingle in streets.

Pedestrian fatalities were a growing reality.

But the freedom that cars provided was exciting and new, especially for the middle and lower classes.

The proposed solution at the time?

Build cities for cars to ensure safety for all.

MALE SPEAKER: Americans have been thrown into a state of complete motorization.

The forward-looking city is conscious of the automobile and automobile traffic as key factors.

Almost overnight, suburbia was born.

A half-million homes sprang up around the country in 1946.

Nearly a million in 1947.

A million in 1948.

Still more in 1949.

Like so many people these days, we live in the suburbs, and Dave needs the car every day for business.

When he was gone, I was practically a prisoner in my own home.

But that's all changed now.

NARRATOR: In fact, it was considered not only modern and fresh, but was pitched as a more ethical way to craft cities in the mid-20th century.

MALE SPEAKER: This new age builds a better kind of city.

They're built into the countryside.

They're ringed with trees and fields and gardens.

The new city is organized to make cooperation possible between machines and men and nature.

It's here.

A new city, ready to serve a better age, you and your children.

The choice is yours.

NARRATOR: Cities in the American West are perfect examples of this trend, nowhere more so than in Phoenix, Arizona.

In the 1950s, the availability of air conditioning was a game-changer, making this hot, dry desert city more hospitable.

People began flocking in droves.

Thousands of miles of streets were added.

Over the past decade, Phoenix has attracted more new residents than any other city in the United States.

Not only is it presumed that everyone getting around Phoenix, at least historically, is getting around by car, but the way that it's been designed around cars has been, according to this model that we found, actually works worse for cars.

NARRATOR: That's because local neighborhood roads lead directly to wide, fast-moving multi-lane streets that create barriers between communities, and often make shorter, more logical paths impossible.

JEFF SPECK: The best way to define these street systems is that there's only one path from anywhere to anywhere else.

What it means is that the city really can't grow up, because it can never molt the way that traditional American cities have molted from shacks to little brick buildings, to even skyscrapers because there was that network of flexibility and choice.

NARRATOR: The result?

Miles and miles of urban sprawl.

JEFF SPECK: They invested in the American dream of single-family houses with white picket fences available to as many people as possible, which, for many people, was the American dream.

Demographically now, we're seeing major shifts where that no longer is the dream.

NARRATOR: Meet Stacey Champion.

Stacey and a growing number of Phoenix residents live in the urban core.

But the prospect of her daughter walking to the bus stop is terrifying.

STACEY CHAMPION: So this is where she does cross when she walks.

I have watched people run this light so many times.

It just freaks me out.

Bye.

- I love you so much.

- Love you too.

STACEY CHAMPION: Standing at a crosswalk.

There's a crosswalk, everyone.

Hi, hi, crosswalk.

Crosswalk.

Hi, this is a crosswalk.

Okay, there's one person stopped.

This is one of the most dangerous crosswalks in my neighborhood.

Nobody stops.

It's amazing, huh?

MAN: Get the hell out of the road!

STACEY CHAMPION: Get the hell out of the road, somebody just said to me.

Crossing the street in Phoenix, Arizona, everyone.

There you go.

INTERVIEWER: How common is a road like this?

This is the norm.

NARRATOR: It is, in fact, really dangerous to walk across the road in this town.

JOE: I'm going to be walking sideways, - so bear with me.

- Okay.

Wait, stop, or you're going to get run over.

Stop.

NARRATOR: After just a few hours in town, our cameraman, Joe, was almost run over in a crosswalk.

Okay.

You would have gotten hit if I hadn't stopped you, because-- JOE: That person wasn't even slowing down.

STACEY CHAMPION: Yeah.

NARRATOR: Just standing on a street corner for 15 minutes, we filmed car after car running red lights and ignoring people trying to cross the street.

Even a city bus driver didn't bother to stop.

I saw you over here on the corner, and this is such an issue for all of us in the Melrose area here.

I was out here three years ago and a gentleman was struck and left for dead.

They took off in the pickup truck.

He had both arms broken, both his legs were broken.

I took my shirt off to put it under-- this was in July, and his face was being burnt by the asphalt.

There were three children that live in the apartment buildings down here.

They came to get ice cream and candy, and they were hit in this crosswalk.

Three children.

NARRATOR: Data compiled by the Arizona Republic shows where pedestrian fatalities and injuries have occurred since 2010.

The frequency is shocking.

When you zoom in to their map, the yellow dots show serious injuries.

The red dots show fatalities.

In fact, being struck by a car now ranks among the most common causes of death in the state.

MALE REPORTER: In one deadly day last month, three people were killed crossing a Phoenix street.

FEMALE REPORTER: ...story tonight at 10:00, a fourth pedestrian hit by a car in just four days.

A car has struck a man who was riding a bike.

MALE REPORTER: One man was killed out here this morning.

FEMALE REPORTER: Arizona ranks as the most dangerous place in the country for pedestrians.

MALE REPORTER: That's one dead pedestrian every four days.

You take your life into your own hands when you cross a Phoenix street.

Hi, I'm Stacey Champion.

- Hi.

- Nice to meet you.

I live in the neighborhood, and for the past ten-plus years, I've been pushing the city of Phoenix to make our streets safer for people.

Yes.

And what I'm doing is organizing all of the businesses, and I'm going to be creating a petition.

I've actually witnessed someone get hit by a car crossing this crosswalk right up here.

They just flew right past the stoplights that they have at that crosswalk.

- Keep me posted.

- I will, for sure.

Thank you so much.

Have a good one.

INTERVIEWER: What I would really love to see-- - Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa.

- Yeah, see?

Right here.

Look.

So, here, we have a person who was on a bike, trying to cross, and got stuck because the other side was not stopping.

That crosswalk over there at Turney is suicide by crosswalk 24/7.

I have acrylic under my big toenails right now, because, right here, at this corner, a white Grand Am turned the corner on top of me as I was walking through, and it ran over my feet, and I lost my nails.

STACEY CHAMPION: Oh my gosh.

I'd bet my life on it, if I went out there right now, just as soon as I put my foot in the gutter, a car will fly through the light.

Happens every single time.

STACEY CHAMPION: Yeah.

MAN: There was one day, there was a guy that crossed.

And I was outside, and watched him get hit by a car.

- Oh, gosh.

- He went up in the air.

It was horrific.

I called 911.

And literally, what I did is I went out and prayed with that man.

And I could have gotten hit too.

I mean, it was insane.

That messed with my head.

- That still lives in my head.

- Yeah.

And that's three years ago.

But I remember it like it was yesterday.

That's a horrific thing to witness.

STACEY CHAMPION: And if people weren't going so fast, I don't think that would have happened.

And they're asking how we can have less pedestrian fatalities.

Well, come out and look.

- Yeah.

- Good for you.

So, yay.

Thank you.

- You're welcome.

[laughs] - Can I hug you?

Yes, you can.

Thank you and God bless you for doing what you're doing.

That was good.

FEMALE SPEAKER: The jaywalker.

He crosses the street anywhere he likes.

In the middle of the block, he just walks into the traffic.

FEMALE NARRATOR: For years, jaywalkers have been an easy target to blame for pedestrian injuries and fatalities.

PETER NORTON: The automobile clubs liked the strategy of ridiculing people who walked in streets as doing something that was out of date, something that didn't belong in the motor age anymore.

FEMALE SPEAKER: And you know what a jay is?

Well, besides being a bird, it also means a silly person.

And that is just what the jitter-brain jaywalker is.

They adapted some Midwestern slang.

The word "jay" was like an insulting term.

A very harsh, insulting term, meaning country idiot, or hick, or rube.

And we're going to call people who walk around in streets wherever they want jaywalkers because these people don't know how to walk in the big city in the motor age.

[tires screeching] MALE SPEAKER: This could happen to you any time.

Don't take foolish chances.

Don't jaywalk.

NARRATOR: The term stuck.

Everybody from teens to senior citizens trying to jaywalk in this area.

FEMALE REPORTER: Pedestrians crossing where they're not supposed to.

Jaywalking.

NARRATOR: Pedestrians are often blamed for not wearing bright clothing, for being lazy or distracted, for not crossing in the right place.

FEMALE REPORTER: Smack dab in the middle of the road.

The common answer they give?

Laziness.

NARRATOR: China has taken pedestrian shaming to a whole new level, broadcasting the faces of people who cross against the light on giant screens, or spraying them with water.

And jaywalking laws can have negative consequences.

MALE REPORTER: ...investigation in Tulsa tonight.

The disturbing police confrontation, newly released body camera video showing two white officers stopping two black teenagers for jaywalking.

FEMALE REPORTER: Two Vancouver police officers are facing assault charges.

Two years after a stun gun was used on a man arrested for jaywalking.

FEMALE REPORTER: African American resident stopped over jaywalking, walking home after the end of his dishwashing shift at-- JEFF SPECK: It's important to understand who's walking, and historically, how jaywalking tickets have been used principally as a means to harass people of color, and certainly they've been applied disproportionately to people of color.

Criminal investigation.

JEFF SPECK: It's almost like another kind of stop and frisk scenario if you just target people who are jaywalking or biking illegally.

FEMALE REPORTER: Chandler is proposing a $25 fine-- FEMALE NARRATOR: When communities consider instituting fines for jaywalking, often, they are fining people who can least afford to pay.

FEMALE REPORTER: A ticket in Detroit will cost you $105.

In Warren, it's $140.

MALE REPORTER: The city of Phoenix is considering a change.

Doing away with jaywalking warnings and going straight toward the ticket.

NARRATOR: In Phoenix, for example, jaywalkers are fined $250 after the first offense, and $2,500 after the second offense, with the possibility of jail time.

Good morning.

My name is Stacey Champion.

$250 is a month's worth of groceries.

$250 is medication.

And the manner in which the city continues to shame pedestrians is outrageous.

NARRATOR: Countries with some of the best pedestrian safety records have no jaywalking laws at all.

The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the UK.

As we dug further into this project, one reason for the dramatic uptick in pedestrian and cycling deaths became obvious.

JEFF SPECK: There's no doubt that the rise of SUVs has had a huge impact.

The difference between being hit by a lower vehicle where you end up on the hood, and hit by a higher vehicle where you end up under it, can often be the difference between life and death.

NARRATOR: Another concern: SUVs have much larger blind spots.

WOMAN: Make sure you have the perspective.

NARRATOR: To prove this point, we did an experiment.

INTERVIEWER: So just, you're looking at me... NARRATOR: We enlisted the help of Amy Watkins from Connecticut Children's Injury Prevention Center.

CAMERAMAN: I'm rolling.

NARRATOR: And SUV owner Rebecca Beebe.

We took a standard larger-size SUV and parked it safely, and got some children to sit in front of it and show how far out they can really be before they're seen by the driver.

All right.

NARRATOR: We added one child, then another, then another.

Can you see?

REBECCA BEEBE: I can't.

NARRATOR: One more.

Still, no one.

NARRATOR: And we kept adding children, all between the ages of three and six.

I can't see them at all.

NARRATOR: It wasn't until we got to the 10th child.

MALE INTERVIEWER: So when you sit up like that, who do you see?

REBECCA BEEBE: I see that tiny, tiny little hand.

INTERVIEWER: Waving.

Wow.

AMY WATKINS: 17 feet.

It does surprise me.

It's scary.

I know that my tiny little dog disappears when he runs in front of my car, but I never thought that a line of children would disappear.

NARRATOR: Speeding is also a problem.

As our vehicles have gotten faster, so has our driving.

You're roughly seven times as likely to die being hit by a car going 35 miles an hour than by a car going 25 miles an hour.

What makes you drive more slowly?

Well, the presence of bicycle facilities make streets safer for everyone, especially cyclists.

Narrower lanes, frequent intersections, two-way traffic versus the one-way traffic that we see in many of our downtowns.

Parallel parking.

Not only does it slow traffic and give you a reason you might want to stop to park your car, but it's an essential barrier of steel that protects the sidewalk from moving vehicles.

Trees, trees close to the street make people drive more slowly, and there are fewer collisions.

So those are some of the things.

There are others.

NARRATOR: Copenhagen is an example of a city that has redesigned its streets to make them more pedestrian- and cycling-friendly.

In fact, it is now considered to be one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world.

We're going to turn right, and remember, please, to look left.

And for that good reason, so we don't bump into all the cyclists here.

NARRATOR: Meet Bike Mike.

He runs a bike touring company in the city.

MIKE SOMMERVILLE: We are on top of what is Denmark's most busy train station.

Get a good feel here for all the bicycles and the strong bicycle culture in Copenhagen.

NARRATOR: In Copenhagen, bikes, pedestrians, and cars seem to coexist seamlessly.

Queen Louise Bridge is the most cycled-across bridge in the world on a daily basis.

NARRATOR: It is a city filled with cars and trucks, yet people feel completely safe biking here.

Cycle through a little innocent gate.

And then you travel 300 years back in time.

This is an old monastery.

Onwards and upwards.

Life in a nutshell.

Also when you're on a bike, always another chapter.

MIKAEL COLVILLE-ANDERSEN: Good design keeps people safe.

I've been all around this world and I've seen some really bad infrastructure.

I always say that if your engineers or your planners in the city had been tasked with building infrastructure for bikes, they should be forced to ride to work every day for a month on a bike before they even put a pen to paper.

This might be kind of wild for people in other countries, but this is a standard bike lane.

This is three and a half meters wide.

There's a lot of volume on this street leading from the western neighborhoods.

We also have the all-important buffer.

They have really taken it seriously here.

You have a very wide sidewalk now.

There's new trees planted, a wide bike lane in one direction, heading that way, and on the other side of the street, there's one leading in the other direction.

Best practice is also the all-important physical barrier.

Here we have curbs.

In other cities around the world, they're putting in bollards, they're putting in plastic armadillos.

Everything to separate the cars from the bikes, and to stop the damn motorists from coming into the bike lane.

This is all important.

You don't feel safe if you're on a painted lane.

You have to physically separate bikes from the sidewalk, from the pedestrians, and from motorized traffic.

But let's remember, we're talking about bikes, bikes, bikes here.

It's not about the bike.

It's how the bicycle fits into the role of the future city.

For us here in pragmatic Scandinavia, it is how do we move people most efficiently down the street?

On a bike lane like this, we can move 6,000 people per hour in the rush hour.

On a car lane, universal, around the world, we can only move about 1,300 cars per hour when the traffic is flowing smoothly, which it never does.

And then you have buses with 100 people per bus, 40-50,000 a day.

It's all about how to move people through a city, and the bicycle is the king of that equation.

In the 1950s, when there was a massive urban transformation, we all believed in the car as the only vehicle that we'll ever need in the future.

This transformed cities all over the world, and not least Copenhagen.

These streets were car-clogged for a couple of decades.

Half of the infrastructure in the city proper for bikes was removed in order to find space desperately for the automobile.

Sidewalks were narrowed.

Some buildings were knocked down.

And a lot of people look to the Nordics and say, "oh yeah, they just ride bikes because they're all so environmentally conscious."

The bicycles, the little pink unicorn for a better future.

No.

The catalyst here was really the oil crisis in the 1970s.

We had no money for anything, no money for people to ride the buses.

and there was no money for gas, and there was no gas.

People were just literally trying to survive.

NARRATOR: People began biking.

But much of the bike infrastructure that had existed in the past had been removed to make way for cars.

People started getting killed.

MIKAEL COLVILLE-ANDERSEN: So, slowly but surely, starting in the 1980s, they started to put in some infrastructure.

It was really in the 1990s where Copenhagen went all in, chipping away at that space that the cars had taken away from the rest of us.

Widening the sidewalks, putting back in the infrastructure, narrowing the car lanes.

Making it a more democratic street.

NARRATOR: Making more democratic streets.

That's something people are talking about in cities throughout the world.

Transportation equity, creating infrastructure so that people can travel safely in a variety of ways, by car, bike, bus, on foot.

In Queens, New York, for instance, there was once a place called the Boulevard of Death.

JULIA KITE-LAIDLAW: Really, really bizarrely, no one thought there was anything odd about having a road that was the Boulevard of Death.

NARRATOR: The street's real name is Queens Boulevard.

And it used to look like this.

A highway running through neighborhoods.

Between 1990 and 2014, 186 people were killed by cars.

JULIA KITE-LAIDLAW: One year in the '90s, we actually had 18 pedestrians killed in one year.

NARRATOR: For years, citizens pushed for change, and the city finally listened.

In 2014, the city finally acceded to the demands that they'd been hearing for many years from the neighborhood.

JEFF SPECK: They spent $4 million.

We organized the street, put in protected bike lanes, did other things to calm the traffic.

There's not been a death there since 2014.

If you think about what DOTs value human life at, which is more than a million dollars per life, and they finally spent $4 million to stop 186 people from dying over a 25 year period.

It's shocking, the choices that we don't make in so many of our cities to make places safe.

PETER NORTON: There's an untold story where, for decades, right at the peak of what's supposed to be the era of car enthusiasm in America, the 1950s and '60s, there were protests all over America, not widely covered.

People saying, we want our streets to be safe places for people walking and for our children.

There were very common protests that the press took to calling baby carriage blockades.

Mothers, typically with baby carriages, who would physically block streets illegally, demanding slower speeds, stop signs, traffic lights, whatever it took to make their streets safe for their kids.

And that battle was about 20 years, 30 years long.

NARRATOR: Countries around the world have had their own version of baby carriage blockades.

In the Netherlands, it was called "stop de kindermoord," or stop the child murder.

After World War II, the Dutch began widening roads and reconstructing cities to make way for cars.

By 1971, hundreds of Dutch children were dying each year.

Change didn't come overnight.

But because of the efforts of ordinary people, the government started to realize that change was necessary.

And a grassroots movement continues today around the world, and here in New York.

[chanting] Safe streets now!

MAN: When you skip red lights, when you zoom past schools, when you don't care about a baby carriage or a five-year-old, I actually don't think you should ever drive a vehicle again.

Enough is enough.

[crowd cheers] Safe streets now!

[horns honking] [chanting] - Whose streets?

- Our streets!

- Whose streets?

- Our streets!

MAN: Thanks, everybody, for being out here.

INTERVIEWER: Why is it important that we're out here?

And why 100 body bags?

We're out here, the 100 body bags are representative of the 40,000 people we lose annually to traffic violence.

It's got to stop.

I'm a survivor of traffic violence.

A car hit and left me for dead, broke my shoulder, my ankle, I had a concussion.

I remember going to one of my dog-sitting jobs in Greenwich Village.

And there were these crazy people in the street.

They had a table set up and free coffee.

They said, "do you want free coffee?"

I said, "sure, what am I drinking this coffee for?"

They're like, "we're trying to get a protected bike lane on Fifth and Sixth Avenue.

We're Transportation Alternatives."

So I said, "hey, okay."

And that's when I became a member.

Now, I'm the Brooklyn organizer.

Our grassroots organizing, we go into communities and we show people how to use electoral power to make the changes in the city that we seek.

A lot of times, people will ask me, "well, how do you do this?"

I'm a rabble-rouser.

I call people up.

We send emails, we get people to come out.

- This is where you [inaudible].

- Oh, yeah.

Like, in terms of shared lanes-- And if you're on a bike, people give you heat for taking a lane.

- Exactly, they do.

- Yeah, yeah.

There's no bus that goes along the main part of Flatbush.

There's literally not.

DULCIE CANTON: Many of these major bike lanes that take place, sometimes they take four to eight years to come into fruition.

I had no idea how this works.

Community boards, even city council, what was that?

My parents, they're from-- I'm first generation.

They came from the Caribbean, they work full-time jobs.

Despite being in an absolutely horrific crash, Dulcie continued to ride.

She continued to find power within being cyclist.

And even more powerfully, in trying to get others to ride as well.

That incident was just horrible.

I see it as like the worst thing that happened to me, and kind of one of the best things.

It kind of helped ground me with a mission.

I do what I do because I wouldn't want anybody else to experience that type of loss.

JULIA KITE-LAIDLAW: Having advocates like Dulcie that can take their own pain and their own tragedy and turn it into action is just kind of a sign of how powerful the advocacy community can be.

NARRATOR: Before 2007, New York City streets were the domain of taxis and cars.

But a push by activists led to massive changes.

The city began carving out space for protected bike lanes, a relatively new concept at the time.

It turned asphalt into pedestrian plazas, and it closed key streets to automotive traffic.

All part of their Vision Zero plan.

Vision Zero began in Sweden in the 1990s when transportation engineers came up with a thought so simple it feels obvious.

What if we assume that humans make mistakes, and factor that into road design instead of expecting them to perform perfectly?

This simple change in perspective, they believe, could help them reach their goal of zero people dying.

Since implementing Vision Zero, Sweden has cut traffic fatalities in half.

JULIA KITE-LAIDLAW: We don't do it exactly the way Sweden did.

So I understand, you wouldn't want to do it exactly the way New York does.

Every time we're thinking about doing something that's going to change the way a street works, we start doing it with temporary materials so that if we find out maybe it doesn't work, we can easily move things away.

Planters, paint on the streets, little plastic flexible posts.

These things are not at all expensive.

And if we decide that we like something and we want it to be permanent, we can build it out in concrete.

NARRATOR: Cities around the world have had success developing their own Vision Zero plans.

Oslo, Norway, a city of more than 600,000 residents, had one full year of no pedestrian or cyclist fatalities.

But it can be controversial.

MALE REPORTER: Mayor Kate Gallego and the Phoenix city council could take their first steps Tuesday to protect pedestrians.

The city-wide Vision Zero plan would use technology enforcement and street design to make streets safer.

A yes vote would authorize city staff to produce a Vision Zero plan.

MAN: Over the last ten years, pedestrian fatalities have risen 125%.

NARRATOR: Opposition to Phoenix's proposed Vision Zero study was led by City Councilman Sal de Ciccio...

In my district, I want the roads repaired.

NARRATOR: ...who told his thousands of Facebook followers that Vision Zero would double your trip times around town, and likely your taxes.

MALE REPORTER: Proponents of this insane scheme, he warns, want to make driving as difficult as possible and slowly force people out of their cars by slowing traffic to a crawl.

If you end up narrowing the roads, here's what's going to happen.

You're going to increase congestion and you're going to lose economic development.

Like it or not, the reality of Phoenix, the history of Phoenix, is that this city was built around the individual automobile.

KATE GALLEGO: With that, we want to turn to Councilwoman Mendoza, who has an announcement-- SAL DE CICCIO: Mayor, could I ask for a roll call on that?

KATE GALLEGO: All right, roll call.

I want to make sure that when I vote on something, that there's resources attached to it.

So it's a no.

WOMAN: I don't feel comfortable voting for this at this time.

MAN: That's four yes and four no.

KATE GALLEGO: It fails.

MAN: That's correct.

MALE REPORTER: The Phoenix city council, late today, rejected a plan to deal with the alarming rise in pedestrian deaths.

SAM STONE: We don't have the funds to go out and do a comprehensive, citywide program all at once, or even within a handful of year period.

If voters want that, they're going to have to take it to the ballot box and dedicate a special tax, whether it be a sales tax or something like that.

I've realized that, through many years of doing this, that my biggest job is really just myth-busting.

I don't get paid for it, unfortunately.

And if you look at the investment that you have to do for bicycle infrastructure, it's the cheapest thing you can do in a city.

We have a new motorway extension just in the north of the city, three kilometers of more motorway, and that cost 280 million euros.

But that is also the same amount that we've invested in a bicycle city over ten years.

That is the choice of a new generation of politicians and policymakers, three kilometers of motorway, more of that stuff, or ten years of investment to get everything that you see here in this city.

MALE REPORTER: In New York City... [siren wailing] ...the sounds of sirens are haunting.

NARRATOR: Here's where the story takes an unexpected turn.

Halfway through filming this documentary, the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

We have about six days of ventilators in our stockpile.

NARRATOR: New York City became one of the hardest-hit cities in the world.

Yeah, March 2020 was pretty bleak.

Everything shut down.

MALE REPORTER: New York City alone now accounts for about a quarter of all confirmed coronavirus cases in the US.

People living in parts of Queens and the Bronx have found themselves in the epicenter of the virus.

New York City's what they call the epicenter of the epicenter of COVID in the United States.

All you heard was ambulances and sirens, bringing people to our overpacked hospital.

INTERVIEWER: How is it?

Hell.

Biblical.

We had refrigerators for bodies outside of our hospital.

Most of us who got hit early in this neighborhood, our symptoms weren't even official symptoms yet.

When we lost our sense of taste and sense of smell, it wasn't part of COVID yet.

MALE REPORTER: And due to high poverty rates and a lack of affordable housing, many families can't afford to self-isolate.

WOMAN: There's very little social distancing, because if you're in a room, where are you going to go?

We learned about the six feet, and we learned about masks.

There was no space to keep six feet apart in our neighborhood.

When you're trapped in a studio apartment, or a one-bedroom apartment, like many of us were, sometimes with two or three generations?

And you're looking, and you're bouncing off four walls, you dream of space.

NARRATOR: That desire for space, for fresh air, exercise, a safe way to connect to community, forced people to rethink how they use their streets.

JIM BURKE: A lot of us got together, and we just did a little experiment.

And we closed one street with a sandwich board, and it said "for emergency vehicles only."

And the kids started chalking in the street, and people started having fun.

And the cars saw the sign and they continued on.

And the world did not fall apart.

And you didn't need several salaries to get it done.

It was all done by the community.

NARRATOR: Thanks to Jim Burke and an army of volunteers, 34th Avenue became a 26-block car-free zone, closed to through traffic 12 hours a day.

DULCIE CANTON: 34th Avenue is one of the better open streets that we have city-wide.

There's always a big sense of community in this neighborhood.

So, the demand was there.

But the pandemic helped fuel the desire for it, and people had time.

[laughs] So, Dulcie, so we just got these tables and chairs from DOT.

Okay.

We put them out.

Within ten minutes, every single table and chair was used.

You can sit outside, have a conversation with your friends, play dominoes, chess, just relax.

People bring out their beach chairs with a drink, a cup of iced tea.

Maybe something different, I don't know.

And you guys are using it how we intended open streets to be used, just to hang out, sit, chill, eat.

JIM BURKE: You have people playing in the pool, people playing in the fire hydrant, all the kids over there learning how to draw.

The lockdown, for the children, I think it was way harder for them.

Their sense of time is different than ours, but for them to have some sort of normalcy, to come out here and see their friends or their neighbors.

Because that was a long year and a half.

I think, to create this, it's overwhelming.

That's how it was when I was a kid in the Bronx.

You played in the street.

You played Skelzie, you played Punchball, you went to the park with the wooden see-saws.

Half of this stuff is outlawed now.

We played Kick the Can, we played Manhunt, - Yeah, all of that.

- We played Ringolevio.

- Yeah.

- Right.

We played everything you can imagine on the street.

And the hydrant was a big party.

- For free.

- Yeah.

And the car drivers were pretty-- they would stop and slow.

We still own the street, so that's what we're trying to put it back - Take it back to that.

- where the actual people, people who live here, are the people who own the street, not the people who are driving to somewhere else.

Probably cost us between 10 and $20,000, closer to $20,000 to date.

And that that was raised by people here on the street for chalk, for the drawing paper, for the chess games.

Are you going to carry the funeral when a kid gets killed on a car?

You're all crazy.

He obviously doesn't live here, he just passes through.

We find anybody who actually lives in the neighborhood, shops in the neighborhood, has friends in the neighborhood, uses the churches, synagogues, and mosques in the neighborhood, all of those people completely understand it.

If you don't really use the neighborhood, and you're not part of the fabric of the community, it's probably not for you.

No, this is great.

Can you do that?

Yeah?

[crowd clapping] [crowd cheering] EMCEE: Thank you for coming out for the circus and enjoy our open streets.

[cheering] Have you been here the whole time?

JIM BURKE: I've lived in Jackson Heights-Elmhurst area since 1990, and in this area probably for almost 20 years.

And I met more people in the last 14 months than in all those years combined.

And now, I don't think I can walk-- I don't think I can walk a block now without someone saying hello or brightening my day.

Sorry, I tear up.

But it's just that when we had COVID devastating this neighborhood, and all these people are dying, you would come out here and the kids are having the best summer of their life.

[cries] [coughs] NARRATOR: The COVID-19 pandemic forced communities around the world to adapt, to create open streets, outdoor dining, to add bike lanes, to redesign in order to make their communities safer.

Not every street can or should close to through traffic.

But 34th Avenue is an example of how streets can change to meet the needs of a community without starting from scratch.

It's also an example of how the dialogue around streets as public spaces has changed.

DULCIE CANTON: This is my first time ever, each mayoral candidate, they had a transportation policy.

They were worried about mass transit and biking.

You'd never see that.

[bicycle bell dinging] Even when I started biking in 2011, there's way more women.

We're the indicators of safety.

When you see women and children and elderly, that means you have a safe bike system.

NARRATOR: This isn't just a large city issue.

Communities of all sizes can make their streets safer.

Adequate street lighting, crosswalks in places where people really want to cross, traffic signals that allow enough time for people to cross, curbs with ramps so wheelchair users aren't stuck in the street, protected bike lanes, bus stops in safe places.

These are some basic safety measures that make streets safer.

STACEY CHAMPION: This is a heavily populated pedestrian corridor, and there's no crosswalk.

NARRATOR: In Phoenix, Stacey Champion continues her fight for safe streets however she can, like insisting on this crosswalk on a busy street.

And after the US government promised billions in funding to communities that create Vision Zero plans, the Phoenix city council finally agreed to incorporate those goals into a new road safety plan.

MALE SPEAKER: This new age builds a better kind of city, ready to serve a better age.

The choice is yours.

PETER NORTON: Whatever we grow up with seems normal.

And this can make it really hard to recognize better possibilities.

If we can recover a lot of this lost history, we'll find that a lot of alternatives that seem far-fetched to us right now, like a world where you can walk where you want to walk, you can bike where you want to bike, we can find out that those were normal.

They can be normal again.

In looking for a future where we have better alternatives to driving everywhere, we are not having to create something we've never had before.

DULCIE CANTON: I feel that cars, people, bikes, can all get along.

It's just we have to design better.

And more people-centered design.

Look at this, look.

They're going.

See?

[chuckles]