Did Cooper Stock really have to die?

Cooper Stock was holding his father’s hand. That’s what he always did when he crossed the street, even though he was already 9 years old, even when the street was right in front of his apartment building at West
End Avenue and 97th Street in New York City, even though he had been crossing this same street his whole life.

He did this because it was the right thing to do, and his parents had taught him to do the right thing. So he held his daddy’s hand, looked both ways and stepped off the curb toward home.

His father, Richard Stock, was also doing the right thing shortly before 9 p.m. that drizzly January night. After a father-son dinner of fried chicken and chocolate cream pie, he and Cooper opted to take a cab back uptown, and the driver dropped them off at the southeast corner. Usually they got out on the northeast one, giving them one less street to cross, but really, what difference did it make? So Richard took Cooper’s hand, waited for the red neon hand to become a white neon man, then looked both ways and walked.

Koffi Komlani was doing the right thing, too. At least he insisted so to the police. He’d also had the light on 97th Street, and he drove his taxi, a 2010 Ford, License 6796A, into the intersection just as the Stocks started to cross. He didn’t see them, Komlani would tell the officers who were on the scene minutes after he made his left-hand turn into the crosswalk; after the father and son were knocked onto the bright yellow hood; after Richard rolled off to the left, then down the passenger’s side, injuring his leg; after Cooper was thrown to the right, in front of   then completely under  first the front and then the rear driver’s-side wheels. 

“Didn’t see them?” Dana Lerner, Cooper’s mother, would cry whenever she told the story, which she has done continuously since that night  after she had raced out of her building, summoned by a doorman who called up to say “Cooper has been hit”; after she saw her boy surrounded by paramedics, blood streaming from his ears; after the ambulance, and the ER, and the doctor who said “I’m sorry”; after spending time with her son’s body, wetting her fingertip and wiping off the smudge of blood on his otherwise eerily untouched face, the way a mother would.

“Didn’t see them?” she says, sitting in the living room now cluttered with photos of Cooper and studies about traffic safety. “My husband is 6 foot 3. How is that possible?” Cooper Stock was one of two pedestrians killed within blocks and minutes of each other on the night of Jan. 10. (The second, 73-year-old Alexander Shear, was struck by a tour bus at West 96th Street half an hour earlier.)  That made him one of 11 killed in New York City in the first 15 days of this year, one of 37 citywide so far in 2014, and one of more than 4,000 expected to die this year across the United States. In all, 75,000 New Yorkers and some 100 million pedestrians worldwide have been killed crossing streets since Henry Bliss was struck (also by a taxi) in 1899, at the corner of 74th and Central Park West, the first recorded pedestrian death in the country. After each of those deaths someone probably wailed, “How is that possible?”

It is possible, even probable, experts say, because of the way Americans have designed their streets for hundreds of years — essentially viewing pedestrian fatalities as the cost of doing business, as the collateral damage of speed and progress.

“Traditionally we build assuming that drivers and pedestrians will do the right thing even though we know that humans are flawed,” says Claes Tingvall, the director of Traffic Safety for the Swedish Transport Administration, in an interview with Yahoo News. “You don’t design an elevator or an airplane or a nuclear power station on the assumption that everyone will do the right thing. You design it assuming they will make mistakes, and build in ways that withstand and minimize error.”

For nearly 20 years, Sweden has been building on that latter assumption, rethinking and revamping its transportation system, both the philosophy and the nuts and bolts. They call this 1997 legislation Vision Zero — meaning the goal is to reach zero pedestrian deaths in all of Sweden — and under the program people are valued over cars, safety over efficiency. Streets have been narrowed; speed limits have been lowered. Above all, the Swedes have declared an end to the argument over whether safety violations should be punished or prevented. Voting for problem solving over finger pointing, they view collisions as warnings that some fix — a differently timed light, a better lit intersection — is needed.

In these ways, Sweden has lowered its pedestrian death rate dramatically. It is now the lowest in the world, with 2.7 deaths per 100,000 people annually, compared with an average of 6 across the European Union and 10 in the U.S.

And now it may be poised to transform a city near you. Already, cities in 23 American states have laws incorporating some of the lessons from Sweden. In New York, for instance, much of Times Square is a pedestrian mall, and in San Francisco, police have stopped classifying pedestrian deaths as “accidents” (implying they are unavoidable), and now classify them as “collisions” (which require investigation). Until now, all these changes have been piecemeal, but at the start of this year, city officials in New York, San Francisco and Chicago announced they would embrace Vision Zero more fully.There's been an epidemic of traffic fatalities and it can’t go on,” said New York Mayor Bill de Blasio at a news conference five days after Cooper’s death, announcing a commission that would unveil the city’s 62-point Vision Zero implementation plan a month later. “Every one of us thinks: ‘What if that was my child?’”

And in San Francisco, where the push has been led less by Mayor Ed Lee than by the combined forces of the Board of Supervisors, the Municipal Transportation Agency, the Police Department and the Department of Public Health, Ed Reiskin, the SFMTA’s director of transportation said, “People should not be dying in the streets as they merely try to make their way around our great city."

Safe-street activists, many of whom have spent years urging the adoption of the Swedish model in the U.S. and wooing candidates and city managers to their cause, are responding with cautious hope.

“Bringing Vision Zero here is a powerful statement that it is unacceptable for anyone to die because they are walking or biking on city streets,” says Paul Steely White, executive director of New York’s Transportation Alternatives, which has been working toward that goal since it was founded in 1973. “We may not get to zero deaths, but we can create more human streets, more humane streets.”

 *******

Seven months before Cooper died, Marlene Lieberman stood at the same corner of 97th Street and West End Avenue and waited to cross. She lived in the same building as the Stocks and was also heading home. When the same traffic light turned green and the same walk sign turned white, she stepped into the street. A 2007 Chrysler, making the same left-hand turn, hit Lieberman at about the same spot in the crosswalk, pushing her onto the hood and back down onto the asphalt. The driver said he didn’t see her.

The collision left Lieberman bruised, but alive. And since Jan. 10 of this year, it has also left her with a question: Why did she survive while Cooper died?

There was no official police investigation into Lieberman’s “accident” because current city laws do not require one in collisions that don’t result in fatality or serious injury. But even without exact details, many in the traffic community say the answer is clear.

“Speed,” says Nicole Schneider, executive director of the pedestrian advocacy organization Walk San Francisco, in an interview with Yahoo News.

Speed is most regularly the difference between life and death when cars collide with people. “It’s like falling from the first floor or the tenth floor,” Tingvall explains. “It’s not the fact that you are hit but the speed at which you hit.” A ten percent increase in speed with which a car hits a pedestrian increases the fatality risk to that pedestrian by 40 to 45 percent.