Mayor Zohran Mamdani is expected on Tuesday to reveal a wide-ranging plan to make streets safer after a number of fatal traffic collisions, most involving pedestrians, have renewed concerns about the city’s crowded sidewalks and roads.
The plan, called Vision Zero Reimagined, is a collection of over 100 policy goals for the next decade, designed to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries while addressing the rapidly changing mix of cars, trucks, bikes and electric devices that zoom past city pedestrians.
Some near-term goals include reducing the speed limit to 15 miles per hour near hundreds more schools; the addition of barriers and other infrastructure to 1,000 intersections a year; adding new safety features to thousands of city-owned vehicles, including audible alerts on trucks and enhanced emergency brake systems; and exploring the possibility of higher tolls for oversize passenger vehicles.The city also plans to install speed-capping devices in cars caught speeding repeatedly in school zones.
Some goals require state lawmakers’ approval, but many projects can be completed by a combination of city agencies.
“We should not have to wait for another family to lose a loved one before we make a street safer,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement. “We are committed to building safe streets before tragedy — not because of it.”
But, while broad in scope, the 105-page plan remained short on details.
The policy road map supports the idea of creating pedestrian-only districts, but does not include locations; it endorses a program to fund public transportation and CitiBike expenses for low-income New Yorkers, but doesn’t show how the effort would differ from an existing program, called Fair Fares; it seeks to crack down on scofflaws who use “ghost plates” on their cars to obscure their identity, but much of that effort would require cooperation from state lawmakers.
Still, the plan includes a number of new approaches to street safety that transit advocates have praised. A transportation official on Monday said that the city could soon begin installing the speed-limiting devices in the cars of frequent speeders. The City Council must approve the plan, and it could take more than a year to implement, but the state has already cleared a path for the program in the state budget.
Most of the policies are aimed at protecting cyclists and pedestrians, the most frequent victims of serious traffic collisions. Crashes involving cars account for more than 80 percent of traffic fatalities in New York City, according to the Transportation Department, and a driver who hits a pedestrian while traveling at 30 m.p.h. is twice as likely to kill the person than when traveling at 25 m.p.h.
The approach to street safety is not new. Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2014 adopted “Vision Zero,” a safety approach developed in Sweden that focused on reduced speed limits and road redesigns as a way to eliminate fatal traffic collisions in New York City.
The initiative has helped reduce serious crashes to near-record lows. There were 209 traffic fatalities in the city in 2025, one of the lowest totals since such record keeping began in 1910, according to the Department of Transportation. Since 2014, traffic deaths are down 30 percent, city data shows.
But a series of recent collisions have worried safety advocates. In the first half of 2026, 99 people were killed in traffic collisions, eight more than during the same period last year, according to Transportation Alternatives, a transit advocacy group. Among them was a growing number of cyclists — 13 were killed, up from seven last year.
Ben Furnas, the group’s executive director, said he was pleased with the mayor’s new plan, but “there is a lot more we can and should be doing,” adding that other major cities, including London and Paris, have far lower rates of traffic deaths per capita.
The city is also exploring a raft of new laws to address the rapid growth of electric bikes and scooters, especially of devices that can far exceed the legal speed limit.
There were 715 collisions involving e-bikes and 1,063 involving standup scooters through the first week of September, up 25 percent and 32 percent respectively, compared with the same period last year, according to police data.
The Vision Zero plan is the latest in a series of announcements the mayor has made related to street safety and public transportation, two issues that he made central to his mayoral campaign.
In July, the mayor and Gov. Kathy Hochul released a plan to improve bus speeds by up to 20 percent on at least 50 major corridors in the city. The city has also restarted a number of bus and bike lane projects that had been stalled.
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