Roads Czar Polly Trottenberg who Made Roads Safer, to Leave Next Month

By Yehudit Garmaise

   Polly Trottenberg, the commissioner of the New York City’s Department of Transportation, announced today that she would be leaving the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who appointed her in 2013, next month. 

   This morning at a press conference, the mayor graciously thanked Trottenberg, and said she “has done an extraordinary job with many accomplishments.” 

   Trottenberg’s greatest legacy, the mayor said about her term as roads czar, was Vision Zero, a program that she and the mayor created in 2014 to eliminate all deaths and serious injuries caused by traffic and transportation on the city’s streets.

   Among the items on the agenda of the Vision Zero program was the reduction of some speed limits; criminal charges, punishable by imprisonment, against traffic violators who endanger the lives of pedestrians; the increased the use of speed cameras; a quicker response to repair broken traffic signals, and increasing the number of “countdown timers” on stoplights to signal when pedestrians can walk across crosswalks, and stricter enforcement on the safety of taxi drivers. 

   “[Trottenberg] did an amazing job with her team: bringing Vision Zero to life: working with NYPD, Taxi and Limousine Commission,” the mayor said. “This is something for the ages, that this city in place known for such intensity and activity has actually been the place leading the nation in terms of how to be safer, how to protect people with an entirely different concept.

  This morning, the mayor remembered that when he and Trottenberg first talked about Vision Zero, they both knew it would be extremely difficult.

    “Nothing like this had ever been tried in such a large American city,” the mayor said.

   Although the program had not yet been tried anywhere in the U.S, a similar program of the same name had been successfully implemented in Sweden, where urban planners had hypothesized that pedestrian deaths are not as much "accidents" as they are a failure of street design.

Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office.