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Syracuse has grappled with vehicular violence for over a century, just like almost every other American city has since the introduction of automobiles on American roads. In 1913, a deaf pedestrian was struck and killed by a speeding car as she was exiting the trolley on South Salina Street, causing a massive public outrage and various stakeholders forming a “Safety First” Committee to oversee the use of automobiles on streets.

An initiative named “Sammy’s Law,” that was inspired by the death of Samuel “Sammy” Cohen Eckstein, has been proposed to raise awareness for pedestrian safety laws and put a stop to vehicular violence.

It’s been over 10 years since Amy Cohen and Gary Eckstein lost their 12-year-old son who was struck by a speeding van driven by an unlicensed driver in Brooklyn, New York. Since then, the family has founded several organizations and initiatives to raise awareness of pedestrian safety laws. Their organization Families for Safe Streets with Transportation Alternatives draws specific attention to the unusually high number of deaths and injuries of cyclists and pedestrians due to unsafe street design that are centered exclusively around the benefit of automobiles.

“The United States fares abysmally in pedestrian safety and traffic fatalities compared to every other industrialized nation – we’re at the bottom of the West and four times as dangerous per capita as all of Europe, Australia and Japan, and twice as dangerous as Canada,” Cohen said in an interview with New York Post.

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In order to turn the vision of zero pedestrian deaths into a reality, Cohen began to organize protests in Albany, New York, urging the governor to pass a slate of new policies, known as “Sammy’s Law,” in their executive budget.

Sammy’s Law, represents a groundbreaking approach to urban mobility and safety. Spearheaded by State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal in 2020, and passionately supported by the Cohen-Eckstein family and advocacy groups like Families for Safe Streets, the legislation seeks to grant New York City the authority to set their own speed limits, aiming to reduce the current limit to 20 mph.

This move comes after a previous success in lowering NYC’s citywide maximum speed limit from 30 to 25 mph which, according to advocates, was not sufficient to curb the fatalities. The proposed reduction to 20 mph is not merely a regulatory change, it’s a fundamental shift towards prioritizing human lives over vehicular convenience.

In New York state, despite gaining majority support from the City Council, Sammy’s Law has faced obstacles at the state level with suburban and rural lawmakers opposing its passage. To urge lawmakers to pass Sammy’s Law, Cohen and another grieving mother, Fabiola Mendieta-Cuapio, initiated a hunger strike on the New York State Capitol building in the summer of 2023. While Governor Hochul did decide to include Sammy’s Law in her executive budget, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie sabotaged the negotiation and continuously refused to even hear a vote for the measure despite the hunger strike.

Joshua Darr, an associate professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, focusing on political communications, believes that merely including the measure into the governor’s executive budget is not “meant to be the endpoint of negotiations.” While the action means the governor is taking this measure seriously, its negotiation and eventual passage still depend on the legislature’s efforts from the State Assembly. Given that the negotiations in the past year ended disastrously, Darr contends that “the representatives who stopped it last time know that they can do so again and still get a budget passed unless something changes.”

As an executive measure signed by the governor of the entire state, Sammy’s Law can potentially create a ripple effect across different cities in the state, including Syracuse. In January 2023, Syracuse mayor Ben Walsh announced that he will also make the city of Syracuse a Vision Zero city, which led to the creation of measures such as installing more bike lanes, speed bumps and automated enforcement of speeding in school zones and expanded sidewalks. Most ambitiously, Walsh has long demonstrated his support for the removal of the I-81 viaduct and the creation of the community grid, a project that will create a large amount of greenspace and massively reduce intercity segregation and inequality.

In recent years, deaths from vehicle crashes in local Syracuse streets have surged from an average of five annual deaths in 2016 to nine in 2021. This disturbing trend underscores a broader crisis as nearly 1,000 people have been seriously injured over the last decade, including 28 pedestrians, in Syracuse due to crashes.

Mid-sized cities in New York, such as Syracuse, need a seat at the table when discussing the proper policies that can be used to reform street design to enhance pedestrian safety, just as much as New York City, argues Darr.

“Advocates might have more success at the local or county level. Fixes to New York City’s problems seem unlikely to apply neatly to other parts of the state, but it’s difficult when so much of the population and political representation comes from that metropolis,” he said.

The potential enactment of Sammy’s Law in New York City marks a vital shift towards prioritizing pedestrian safety over car-centric city planning. This move, advocating for cities to set their own speed limits, presents a model for mid-sized New York State cities like Syracuse. By adopting this approach, these cities can significantly enhance pedestrian safety, aligning with the Vision Zero movement’s goal to make traffic fatalities preventable and setting a precedent for cities across the nation to follow.

If successful, Sammy’s Law will not only honor the memory of those lost to traffic violence but also forge a path toward a future where such tragedies are preventable artifacts of a bygone era.

Allen Huang is a second year Media Studies masters student. He can be reached at xhuang49@syr.edu.

Published on February 6, 2024 at 12:54 am