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Vacca said he would like police to seize vehicles of speeding drivers. “These cars should at least be taken away from people who act as if these streets are their own,” he said. NYPD attorney Susan Petito responded that such action would have no basis in law.

Hasn’t stopped them from doing the same for drug war spoils. I guess the problem is that here it makes sense.

The current problem, said Martinez, is the intermediate status of Hayley and Diego’s Law. Though it’s intended to be more serious than a traffic violation, legally it’s lumped in with other moving violations, which is how police have treated it so far. “Nobody wants the police to be out there writing tickets for ordinary traffic violations they didn’t see,” said Martinez, citing red-light running as an example.

To be sure, nobody wants tha… wait what? Now TA’s lawyer has backed into a weird corner of arguing that more severe crimes have a lower standard of evidence, because “nobody wants” it to be otherwise.

I want it otherwise. If someone is driving dangerously and several people are willing to testify to that fact, why not write them a ticket? It’s certainly not going to happen often that other people would be willing to go to court so that someone else is punished for driving dangerously, but if you were almost hit it might be worth it. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to have that possibility out there.

The underlying issue is that the “I didn’t see it” business is merely an excuse to not write a ticket police have no desire to write, whether they saw it or not. When is the last time you saw an NYPD officer witness a traffic violation and leap into action to stop the perp? The idea is laughable. Police write traffic tickets when they are tasked with that job, and then only. They do not view dangerous driving as worthy of their attention.

So it’s also perfectly natural that they want no part in prosecuting incidents where dangerous driving brought on death and injury. To admit that driving badly has consequences, that crashes are not Accidents caused by God, would implicate police themselves for doing nothing to reduce the danger at its source. The only thing left to do is blame the victim, which they do with gusto.

“Hayley and Diego’s Law made it clear that a driver’s license is not a license for carelessness,” said Squadron. “But we now must provide law enforcement with additional tools to effectively crack down on careless driving.”

TA and Squadron are playing some first-rate kabuki here, pretending that the police department is rearing to “crack down” on motorists who have injured or killed, if only they had the right “tools”. No one could have known that “Hayley and Diego’s tool” would be so utterly unused, I guess. But it’s weird the tool-makers didn’t check with the tool-users first, in this alternate universe where it’s all just a friendly misunderstanding.

Parisian cyclists have won the right to go through red lights following a fierce debate over their claim that the move would reduce the risk of road accidents.

A three-year campaign by cyclists’ associations — which say it is idiotic for them to stop at traffic lights — bore fruit when the Government published a decree authorising councils to change the rules.

If only our leading New York advocacy groups were similarly in touch with the murky reality of cycling in city streets. Nothing is black or white, certainly not whether it is always wrong or dangerous to cross against a light as a pedestrian, or a cyclist. As everyone who walks knows, half the time when you disregard signals it is to avoid conflicts with impatient motorists. You see that the street is blissfully, momentarily clear and you cross it—why should you not?

Our traffic laws are a central component of a system that kills hundreds of New Yorkers a year, while other cities enjoy far lower fatality rates. People who think that our laws are beyond criticism, that questioning current law is anything other than healthy democratic engagement—they need get their heads checked. Perhaps their crash helmets are on too tight.

Gale Brewer’s bill is well intentioned but should be opposed by pedestrian and biking advocates. It raises the cost of installing and maintaining plazas and bike lanes without any demonstrable benefit commensurate with the cost? If textured pavement is such a lifesaver, why not also require textured sidewalks at all curb cuts and driveways? Cars coming out of a midblock parking garage are a hell of a lot more dangerous than the edges of pedestrian plazas. Why isn’t this being proposed? It’s because the real estate industry will crush a bill mandating costly retrofitting of thousands of driveways and curb cuts.

It is bad policy to make the cost of proven safety improvements more expensive while doing nothing about proven dangers. Brewer is usually smarter than this.

Rather than pursuing registration, politicians and cycling groups need to do more to promote existing cycling etiquette guides which emphasise respect for all road users. Bike shops should give these out whenever someone buys a bike, to reinforce good behaviour. Campaigns like “Do the right thing” can help support social norms about how all road users need to slow down and be respectful of each other.

Making more laws is rarely the answer to social problems like the interaction between different road users. This is not a question of legality: it’s a matter of manners, awareness, and of mutual respect.

— Chris Rissel, professor of public health at the University of Sydney

Every time I think we have it bad I remember Australia.

I agree with Rissel about nuisance laws but I have to say that distributing pamphlets is also “rarely the answer to social problems”. We do a lot of this kind of thing without attempting to measure its success in changing behavior. It’s hard for me to believe proponents expect something to work if they don’t measure it; rather, I think they think they’re doing good PR. But it’s not even good PR if everyone perceives that it’s just for show. I just can’t take anybody’s well intentioned pleas for “education” seriously unless they are paired with a survey to determine efficacy.

As with motorists, if you design for the behavior you want you just might get it. Designs do tend to get evaluated later for desired outcomes (reduced speed, fewer injuries, etc.). This is how we know bicycle lanes save pedestrian lives. But what can we do to reduce persistent enmity for cyclists, those endless tirades about being “almost hit”? I’m not sure our good street designers put much thought into that. When they have time between saving pedestrian lives, I hope they will.

And even more importantly, whatever we can do to continue to blur the line between “cyclists” and “pedestrians” is going to help. You can’t have tribalism without tribes. When you recognize that cyclists are just pedestrians on wheels, with the same qualities we celebrate and disdain in any other New Yorker (impatience, concern with appearance…) there is literally nothing to fight about. That convergence is happening on its own and you can see the positive effects on the street and off, but it wouldn’t hurt to identify it as a policy goal.

What licensing has to do with this, I forget. Laws and licensing directed at cyclists are so far from being practical solutions to the minor problems posed by bicycle riding that it’s difficult to keep them in the frame. In terms of motivations, I have no doubt that any law that would make cycling more difficult is proposed precisely for that reason.

Police are certainly reviving their tough-on-cyclists PR campaign, bragging to the Post earlier this week about the 19th Precinct’s bike enforcement prowess on the Upper East Side. Meanwhile, the message to motorists remains the same: If you’re sober and stay at the scene, you can do just about anything, like run over and kill a 12-year-old girl who stopped in a crosswalk to retrieve her backpack, and not face repercussions.

If Michael Jackson’s Doctor can be convicted of involuntary manslaughter, why can’t these drivers?

Maybe they can, as long as the victim is a celebrity of Michael Jackson’s caliber.

Zing.