Abreu asks DOT about barriers to broader Sammy's Law implementation

What are the barriers?

What barriers are you finding you may have for broader implementation?

Of reduced speed areas?

I mean, yeah.

If any.

Yeah, I think it's just, it's part of the same overall, you know, it's kind of what Deputy Minister Beaton and others we've been talking about.

Always trying to calibrate and target our investments to have the greatest impact.

So, you know, again, it's, I don't know that there's any specific barriers.

I think it's more just about how do we balance that program with several dozen other approaches that we take to improve safety.

Certainly.

You were sort of getting into the criteria that DOT uses to prioritize SAMHSA law locations like shared streets, open streets.

Can you speak to any other factors that DOT considers when prioritizing locations?

Sure.

And one of them is related to the barriers that you're talking about, one of which is the law itself does have specific.

Roads on which we are not allowed to do them, right?

It's roads over three lanes outside of Manhattan.

And those are often the most dangerous roads in those neighborhoods.

So we do want to make sure that we are addressing the most dangerous roads, some of which are just, you know, we're not included, we're specifically exempted from the state law.

Beyond that, I think it's really we do want to look at the places where we're also doing the traffic calming at the same time.

I think what we've seen over time is that just putting up signs has a pretty limited

effect that, you know, we're lucky when New Yorkers see signs at all, if there's something on a couple blocks, you know, most people just don't notice it.

But we want it to be reinforcing with the street design itself.

So places where we want to do traffic calming, places where there's been crashes or neighborhood-wide issues, we want to do the speed limit changes.

And we want to pair it with the traffic calming that really makes it real.

Thank you.