Hoboken, like many other cities, was designed in terms of its streets and roads for cars.
And we're trying to change that.
Right across the Hudson River from Manhattan, the New Jersey city of Hoboken
has become an unexpected leader in pedestrian safety.
Just over a square mile big, the small urban enclave has made it six years
and counting without a single traffic fatality, making it an outlier in the US,
where around 40,000 people die on roads each year.
Part of the transformation has been led by Mayor Ravi Bhalla,
who took office in 2018.
I've been a resident of Hoboken for about 23 years.
When I was younger, I noticed carrying a stroller
with my young daughter that I couldn't even pass
main street without pushing the stroller into the middle of the road
because we simply had no pedestrian crossing signals.
So I didn't know when the light would turn in order
to cross safely with my child.
I just thought intuitively that that was a major problem.
So that's when I started thinking about pedestrian safety
and how we can do better for especially our most vulnerable population.
So when I was elected, we started to hone in on developing a plan,
which became the Vision Zero Plan, where we seek to eliminate
not only traffic-related deaths,
but also traffic-related injuries by 2030.
Cities around the world have adopted similarly ambitious Vision Zero goals, with mixed progress.
Hoboken's neighbor, New York City, signed on to Vision Zero in 2014,
but has seen more than 200 people die in each of the following eight years.
Hoboken had a slightly more targeted task.
Between 2014 and 2018, the city saw nearly 4,500 crashes on its streets,
three of which caused deaths.
We set up a Vision Zero task force to engage
stakeholders, residents, engineers, public safety
to all come together and identify solutions that are innovative.
We kind of take a bird's eye view and see what
local-cost, high-impact measures we can implement
in order to make that part of Hoboken a little bit safer.
Hoboken's redesign incorporates lots of examples
of something called daylighting, which creates more visibility at intersections
by keeping cars from parking too close to the crosswalk.
So just with a bucket of paint, you can actually create a curb extension.
You can create high-visibility crosswalks.
You can do a low cost means by putting in a bike rack or bollards.
We've implemented a program called “Twenty is Plenty”
where the speed limit citywide is 20 miles an hour.
We want to make it easy and safe for you to walk
or if you want to ride a bike.
One of the means we've implemented is partnering
with Citi Bike and New York City and Jersey City to implement
a regional holistic program to easily access a bicycle if you don't own one.
And also joining that with our program for bike lanes
so that you can not only access a bike,
but you can get from one place to another in a safe manner.
Hoboken has taken a kitchen sink approach, pairing street redesigns
with speed limit changes and a spree of bike friendly building.
In places like Resiliency Park, you can see the changes in action.
So this intersection here kind of exemplifies a lot of what we're trying to do.
In terms of daylighting, on both sides of me you have rain gardens
which serve a dual purpose of mitigating flooding
as well as providing pedestrian safety.
We have ADA-accessible, high-visibility crosswalks.
Endurablend in the center to alert drivers
that this is a highly-trafficked intersection,
as well as other forms of daylighting,
such as bollards on the left side, which come at a low cost
but also a high impact in terms of making sure cars are not parked there
and people can walk and bike safely.
Some roads are a little bit narrow
to allow both vehicular traffic as well as biking.
So for those roads we create shared spaces.
Not every road in Hoboken feels safe to share yet.
Biking down Hoboken's busy commercial main street still means weaving around double-parked cars
because efforts to build a protected bike lane have met resistance from local businesses.
Change is not easy.
We did face a number of roadblocks, so to speak.
This is change that is not happening within a day or a week.
It's very incremental, but at the same time it's also very impactful.
It's very important for public officials, no matter who you are
and really the community, to dream big.
It's not expensive to create a bike lane.
This is more a challenge
of changing the culture of mobility in Hoboken.
If we can change that culture, change that mentality, behaviors of residents,
that will outlast any changes in administrations
and governments because progress, it might be implemented
at the governmental level but it really comes from the residents.