Abreu questions DOT on Sammy's Law speed limit rollout

Regarding Sammy's Law, Sammy's Law expanded New York City's authority to lower speed limits on certain streets.

Lower speed limits are a central component of Vision Zero and reducing the severity of crashes.

17 community boards representing nearly 2.5 million New Yorkers and 63 elected officials have now formally demanded SAMHSA's law slow zones in their districts.

The Vision Zero Reimagined Plan commits to expand 20 miles per hour speed limits within entire neighborhoods or other defined zones.

What is the expected scale of this rollout?

How large will the zones be and how many neighborhoods will get a slow zone each year?

Thank you, Chair.

Yeah, we're really excited about this one.

You know, we, as we all know, speeding is one of the largest contributors to fatal traffic crashes.

So we certainly support the goal of bringing speeds down across the city.

Something we've learned through experience is that generally lowering the speed limit is most effective when it's paired with traffic calming improvements.

And that's why we've kind of positioned it that way in the Vision Zero reimagined.

As you know we took the big step of announcing that we will do these lower speed zones outside of essentially all New York City schools by the end of

the term of this administration the first term of this administration and we're excited to build on that and so yeah in Vision Zero Reimagined we talk about doing it at a neighborhood scale in terms of the actual

I guess, magnitude of that.

It's something that's in development.

This is a entirely new program, basically.

So we're working out some of those details.

But I think, you know, we want to do it at a scale that makes sense.

And we want to learn from some of our global peers as well in terms of it should be a large enough scale that

You get that area-wide effect, but it should be also contained enough that we can put in the traffic calming that's going to make it most effective.

And, yeah, I mean, I guess I would just– I didn't mention it.

But, you know, it's been really, it's wonderful for us to see kind of this groundswell of support from community boards and to hear that this is something that so many New Yorkers want to see in their neighborhood.

And we want to absolutely have that be a part of our decision-making process.

We also want to follow the data and make sure that every neighborhood can benefit and that we're focusing these where they can have the greatest safety impact.

So it's both.