Abreu questions Vision Zero Task Force coordination

Thank you.

Vision Zero is incorporated.

into the operations of all the agencies on the Vision Zero Task Force, which is a location, which is a coalition of agencies, including DOT and YPD

and the Business Integrity Commission, which I'll refer to as BIC for the rest of the hearing, that meets every other week to review upcoming and ongoing projects, study progress on key measures, and share agency updates.

Could you give us an overview of how the various agencies that are part of the Vision Zero Task Force work together?

What happens in these meetings?

Happy to, Chair.

My name is Madeline Labade.

Can you get closer to the mic?

Sure thing.

Madeline Labade, Chief of Staff at DOT.

The biweekly meetings have all of the agencies under the umbrella, including additional agencies that have been added under this administration, including the Fire Department, the Mayor's Office for People with Disabilities, and formerly the Department of Education, New York City Public Schools.

It is a coalition where every piece of the toolkit is employed when it comes to addressing the trends that all of us are seeing from the data of collisions on the street, our enforcement trends,

novel policy discussions, really everything driven by what we are seeing and novel ways that we can address it.

So imagine it is the full sort of kit and caboodle of government all working together.

These meetings really do look at the fatality numbers.

DOT provides a monthly fatalities dashboard and the Mayor's Office of Operations, which convenes the Vision Zero Task Force, tracks metrics for all agencies to ensure that we are on track for the commitments we have made publicly,

as well as our general MMR level metrics as well.

It is a highly collaborative group of staff members from each agency well positioned to work across agency and across the city in order to drive fatalities down.

So it's fair to say there's a lot of data sharing happening?

A ton of data sharing, yes.

And are there updates regularly on project updates that you have?

Yes, absolutely.

So as there are large programs, you know, for example, from DOT, perhaps a large street reengineering project, one might say Queens Boulevard, a legacy capital project,

updates on things like that, as well as discussions on novel issues such as crashes, you know, the one that has been discussed a lot lately, I believe in the public advocate's testimony and in past hearings that occurred in September,

as well as the one in July, where there are notable trends, even small numbers.

That is when the Vision Zero team gets together to really figure out how to address it and discuss the best path forward.

And have you in this past year, have you seen these meetings lead to policy changes?

Yeah, a great example is actually the cease and desist work that the mayor announced recently.

That work was really driven by the task force monitoring the illegal device trends that we have seen both in enforcement and in collisions

and really working together to see what additional tools can be brought to the fore, bringing in the law department to really expand the pie when it comes to ways that we can get at reducing traffic fatalities.

Thank you.