(C) Verite News New Orleans This story was originally published by Verite News New Orleans and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Could more traffic enforcement protect New Orleans bicyclists? [1] ['Bobbi-Jeanne Misick', 'More Bobbi-Jeanne Misick', 'Verite News'] Date: 2024-01-08 One night last May, Jack Talton left a Faubourg Marigny bar, got on his bike and started to head home. He made it about two miles, reaching the I-610 overpass on Elysian Fields Avenue. He remembers that much. But then he was struck from behind by a white pickup truck and flung from his bicycle. And everything went blank. The next thing Talton remembers, he was waking up from a medically induced coma several days later at University Medical Center. A police report later filled in some of the missing pieces. Witnesses at the scene told police that after the crash, the truck’s driver exited the vehicle, walked over to Talton for a brief moment and then got back in his car and drove away. Police classified it as a hit-and-run. Talton suffered a traumatic brain injury from the crash, along with several fractures to his leg and a damaged optic nerve in his left eye. He is now permanently blind in that eye. As long and difficult as his physical recovery was, Talton said getting past the emotional trauma of the crash was even worse. He said it took a long time for him just to feel safe even walking down busy streets. “The PTSD was the worst part of it,” he said. The incident is hardly unusual in a city recently named the deadliest in the country for bicyclists on a per capita basis. New Orleans also leads the state of Louisiana in injuries from crashes, with 181 bicyclists non-fatally injured in crashes last year — accounting for about 25 percent of all such injuries statewide — according to state crash data. As far as Talton’s attorney Charlie Thomas is concerned, those poor standings result directly from what he says is a lack of enforcement of traffic laws in the city. Thomas is affiliated with Bike Law, an organization of independent bicycle collision lawyers. Talton contacted him to get help identifying the driver of the truck — a witness took a picture of it, capturing a temporary dealership tag — and recover damages. (The police have yet to positively identify the driver of the car. Thomas said the investigation is ongoing.) “The fact that there’s a very low perception that there’s traffic enforcement just leads to people doing riskier and crazier things in their cars,” Thomas said. “It’s like a kindergarten class and the teacher’s left.” Anecdotally, many New Orleans residents will say it’s common to see cars on the road without any license plates, or moving at several miles per hour above the speed limit or accelerating through red traffic lights and rolling past stop signs with impunity. According to the New Orleans Traffic Stop Dashboard, traffic stops have gone down significantly in the last several years. In 2019, police gave citations to 14,683 people in traffic stops. That number dropped significantly in the COVID-19 pandemic, to 3,177 for all of 2020. Even as the city has fully reopened, citations have still not fully recovered. In 2023, traffic stops resulted in 4,333 citations. The New Orleans Police Department did not provide anyone for an interview about this story. While transportation experts agree with Thomas that stepped-up enforcement can yield some benefits, they caution that it’s only one part of making the streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians. “In a systems approach when we’re really tackling this traffic violence problem holistically, it would ideally be the smallest piece and maybe sort of the last piece,” Tara Tolford, a research associate at the University of New Orleans Transportation Institute said. “But right now, it’s definitely just a missing piece.” And some police watchdogs worry about the potential downsides of increased focus on traffic stops — steep fines for minor infractions levied against people who can’t afford them or even violent confrontations between police officers and residents, particularly Black residents, who are stopped and ticketed by officers at disproportionate rates. What experts say about enforcement Tolford and her students have been studying traffic at the Lafitte Greenway and Carrollton Avenue, where a pedestrian-crossing signal was recently installed. She said they’ve observed that road users aren’t fully sure of how to use the signal. She said targeted traffic enforcement works best when combined with other measures, most importantly improved infrastructure that helps to “reduce conflict among road users,” but also increased education for all road users on how the road should be shared and how updated street designs work. “In an ideal resource-unconstrained world, we’d like to do everything at once,” Tolford said. “You build the new countermeasure, and then you go back in with information and an education campaign and make sure that people get it, and then you follow up with the enforcement piece.” Thomas agreed, saying that the police should prioritize safety, not tickets. “The goal isn’t to make people have to go to traffic court and pay fines,” he said. “It’s so that they understand what the laws are, and they drive in accordance with them and if everybody obeys the laws, nobody’s going to get hurt. It’s that easy.” Clark Thompson rides a bicycle to work from the Bayou St. John neighborhood to the Central Business District every day. When he’s not assessing how the systems of a naval ship operate together, he can sometimes be found welding and painting bicycle memorials for cyclists in New Orleans who have been killed in traffic collisions. Thompson, 53, has lived in New Orleans all his life. He remembers what traffic enforcement was like when he was learning how to drive. “When I was learning to drive I was terrified to run a red light,” Thompson said. “Today, that’s ridiculous.” He said that while he thinks traffic enforcement is at an all-time low, increasing enforcement would be a “band-aid solution” to the problem of high rate of traffic accidents involving cyclists and pedestrians. He said infrastructural solutions, such as improved signage, are always better and cheaper. Thompson lives near the site where in 2019, following the Krewe of Endymion parade, a drunken motorist drove through a group of cyclists on Esplanade Avenue. The crash killed two people and injured several others. He said since then the Faubourg St. John Neighborhood Association paid for and placed signs at crosswalks along Esplanade Avenue that remind drivers to stop for pedestrians. Members of the association take turns maintaining the signs. Thompson said the community invested roughly $5,000 in the signs and he’s seen fewer traffic accidents in the neighborhood since then. If the city really wants to save lives, he said, it can implement temporary traffic-calming infrastructure as it works to create more permanent features. Critics of enforcement Fischer Shaffer is another client of Charlie Thomas, the Bike Law attorney. He was riding his e-bike on Washington Avenue and reached the corner of South Tonti Street when a turning vehicle hit him, sending him flying off of his bicycle and breaking his collarbone. Shaffer has used bicycles to commute since he biked to school as a child living in China and as an adult in cyclist-friendly San Francisco. When Shaffer first moved to New Orleans, the city’s flat terrain felt like “perfect city to bike everywhere,” he said. “And then because of the roads and the lack of driving enforcement and how dangerous cars are, tt quickly becomes the most dangerous place to bike,” he said. But Shaffer said he doesn’t want to see more traffic enforcement that could increase police interaction with motorists who might be vulnerable to fines and arrests. “I can’t say that having more police pull people over via traffic violations is the best solution. It’s probably the most obvious one,” Shaffer said. “I’m really interested in making car trips very unattractive for people [by] increasing public transportation and other modes of getting around [like] walking or biking. Because if it’s easier, or just as easy, to get somewhere on the bus, or the streetcar or on your bike, a lot of people wouldn’t drive.” The city of New Orleans is about 57 percent Black, according to census data. But roughly 70 percent of the people cited during traffic stops in New Orleans from 2019 to 2023 were Black. And Black people represented between 79 and 85 percent of the people arrested during traffic stops every year. “The hesitation that people feel towards increasing those types of interactions is frightening if you’re not a police officer, if you’re not someone that typically benefits from that system,” said Bob Murrell, a member of the group Eye On Surveillance. “That’s just gonna put more money into the criminal justice system and not into materially benefiting people, or even trying to prevent them from being in those positions in the first place.” Traffic cameras Although traffic stops have gone down, the city issued about 461,000 traffic camera citations — or about 1.2 for every resident — in 2021, the last full year for which such data was readily available. Yet those cameras are not distributed evenly throughout the city. Most of them enforce school zone speeds. Only 11 enforce speed limit and traffic light laws at intersections around the city. Drivers receive camera citations through the mail. Tolford said traffic cameras have proven to be an effective traffic-calming measure in other cities. But Tolford can’t assess their effectiveness in New Orleans because the city does not publish any analysis connecting citations from cameras and traffic violence, she said. Tolford said relying more on traffic safety cameras could actually mitigate inequities in traffic enforcement. But Murrell, whose organization focuses on curbing the city’s expanding surveillance systems — including crime cameras and traffic enforcement cameras — said the city has historically used its cameras to bolster traffic fines and advance criminal prosecutions. “What we’re saying is that there is surveillance that already exists, and it doesn’t prevent deaths, and rarely does it even get used in response to deaths,” Murrell said. “It’s only being utilized in very specific circumstances — that one would argue only helps further the incarceration of a very specific population of the city.” Related Stories Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. 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