By Patrick Hedlund
DNAinfo News Editor
MANHATTAN — Less than a day after a local transportation advocate was struck and killed by a cab on the Lower East Side, the NYPD and city politicians engaged in a heated debate over whether the police should be required to publicize detailed data about traffic crashes that advocates believe will help improve travel safety citywide.
The City Council introduced a bill earlier this year that would force the NYPD to make certain traffic statistics available online, including information regarding the number and types of summonses issued, and data broken down by the types of vehicles involved in crashes and the contributing factors of each incident.
Community Board 3 member and transportation advocate Harry Wieder was hit by a cab on Essex Street in front of his shocked colleagues after leaving a board meeting on Tuesday night.
Wieder, a vocal community activist and advocate for the disabled, had been crossing the street on crutches when the vehicle struck him, marking the second pedestrian death on the block in almost as many weeks.
“It is abundantly clear that the NYPD has access to critical traffic management data and that they should be making that available to the public,” East Side Councilman Dan Garodnick, one of the measure’s co-sponsors, told DNAinfo.
“They have information on accident locations, time of day, dates, precinct, cross-street, and they have it all in electronic form.”
The NYPD testified at a hearing of the Council’s Committee on Public Safety Wednesday that the measure would place a burden on the already overtaxed NYPD, which is facing further budget cuts, as well as nullifying the transportation analysis it currently performs.
The bill is “seeking a tremendous amount of raw data from which it is assumed the public will gain a benefit,” James Tuller, the NYPD’s chief of transportation, testified at the hearing.
“We respectfully suggest that such an assumption is misplaced, and that publishing the data required by the bill would not further our mutual goal of making the city’s streets safer,” Tuller added.
But Transportation Alternatives spokesman Wiley Norvell disagreed.
“It’s really maddening, the lack of information that’s there right now," he said. "To have a crash like [the Essex Street incident] happen and not know how many crashes that have happened on that block the last week, the last month, the last year, the last two years, is really frustrating.”
Transportation Alternatives recently released a comprehensive map tracking crash data over a 10-year period on the Lower East Side, with most of the information culled from Freedom of Information Law requests.
In a statement from the NYPD Thursday, Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne called the bill ill-advised.
“It would result in the misguided use of scarce police resources at a time when the department is already addressing the issue,” he said.
However, the department’s former transportation chief testified in favor of the measure at the hearing.
“The simple fact is that this information already exists in a form that could be easily released and made available to the public and other agencies focused on reducing traffic causalities,” stated former chief Michael Scagnelli in provided testimony.