The Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Program (DVAP) just reached the end of the road. The mandated safety course initiative, which opts for the carrot instead of the stick for the city’s most reckless motorists, expired last Thursday, Oct. 26, without a meaningful replacement.
The program targets New Yorkers with five or more red light camera violations within a year, which the DOT deem as “extreme outliers.” Fewer than 1% of vehicles with violations qualify for DVAP and most are recorded with no more than two infractions.
Beyond DVAP, pedestrian safety concerns are currently a hot topic citywide. The expiration coincides with the same day an NYPD tow truck fatally struck 7-year-old Kamari Hughes in Fort Greene. Police say the driver, Stephanie Sharp, was arrested and charged for failure to yield and failure to exercise due care.
NYC Comptroller Brad Lander, the program’s driving force—pun intended—is calling for a renewal. DVAP stems from a bill-turned-local-law sponsored by Lander when he was a City Council member.
“Reckless driving kills many New Yorkers every year…and people really saw [during the pandemic] that one challenge is we need to improve the safety of our streets through infrastructure and design,” said Lander. “But reckless driving behaviors [like] speeding [and] dangerous driving cause one-third of all crashes and we need more action to do something about it.
“The Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Program was designed to be one such policy that used information from red light cameras and speed cameras to identify the most reckless drivers—the drivers who ran red lights—and require them to take a course shown to have an impact on changing behavior.”
Under DVAP, participants are enrolled in a 90-minute in-person course detailing the “human impact” of reckless driving, such as pedestrian deaths and injuries, along with how the extreme offenders can remedy their unsafe behind-the-wheel habits. Vehicle seizures and impoundment by the Department of Finance only occur after failure to enroll in or complete the DVAP course.
The program prides itself on not being “punitive” in nature and is the brainchild of the Center for Justice Innovation’s Driver Accountability Program, which enrolled mostly male Black and brown New Yorkers residing in Brooklyn and Staten Island. The model initiative argues that fines and incarceration don’t tackle the root causes of reckless driving and exacerbate socioeconomic and racial disparities already existing in the criminal justice legal system.
To be clear, citywide traffic accidents often occur in Black and brown neighborhoods with some of the lowest percentages of car ownership and higher rates of public transit use, according to Alexa Sledge, Transportation Alternatives associate director of communications. While there’s less data about who is behind the wheel in these communities, she said white New Yorkers boast higher rates of car ownership and self-report the highest rates of reckless driving behaviors, like speeding, and texting and calling while driving, to the Department of Mental Health and Hygiene in 2015.
“There’s all these neighborhoods where predominantly people of color are living, and they’re constantly being faced with traffic violence, serious injuries, and fatalities in these neighborhoods, even though they are not the people owning or driving cars,” said Sledge. “We’re trying to get a lot of these reckless drivers off the streets to make these neighborhoods safer. Obviously, street design is the number one way to make your community and your neighborhood safer. But also having these repeated reckless drivers not behind the wheel or at least thinking more about their actions is also really important…ultimately, we see that we really do need to use restorative justice to keep our streets safe, and just locking them all up is not the answer.”
Despite Lander’s recommendation to collaborate with the Center for Justice Innovation on DVAP, the DOT operates the program independently. The Department said contract efforts fell through after sustained attempts, due to the organization’s availability. The Center for Justice Innovation provided a statement by senior director Amanda Berman, but declined further comment.
“At the Center for Justice Innovation, we work alongside communities and systems to advance safety in all forms, including on our streets,” Berman said. “It is critical to continue to invest in innovative approaches that center equity, accountability, and the need for positive behavior change in drivers so that our roads and neighborhoods are safer for all.”
The comptroller was also critical of the DOT’s rollout, which was hobbled by the COVID-19 pandemic. The City Council intended DVAP to cover 5,000 vehicles, but only 1,605 notices had been mailed as of this past March and more than 700 were ignored. Only 12 vehicles were impounded after 159 seizure warrants were issued as a result, 10 of which were returned after the drivers enrolled in and completed the program.
While the DOT acknowledges a verifiable drop in speeding violations by DVAP participants, the department points to a general decrease in such infractions among all city drivers, including among frequent offenders not enrolled in the program. Coinciding with the program’s rollout was the city’s speed camera expansion. The DOT believes both the course and the new surveillance contributed to a 55% decrease in speed violations among 88 DVAP enrollees. A “control group” of 30 other offenders saw a 37% decrease in speed violations without any form of “educational” intervention.
The findings, which were published in an agency evaluation of DVAP, concluded that more punitive measures to remove program-qualifying offenders from the road, like state legislation authorizing the DMV to suspend vehicle registrations, should be the priority, given the high cost of the course per participant.
“Our comprehensive evaluation of the Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Program, which included a rigorous analysis of the driving records of hundreds of participants, found that the program—while well intentioned—was ineffective at meaningfully reducing unsafe driving,” said DOT spokesperson Vincent Barone by email. “We welcome the comptroller’s partnership in advocating for new state laws to get dangerous drivers off the road and plan to do other targeted driver education.”
Lander also advocated for city and state cooperation on addressing reckless driving, pointing out challenges DVAP faced due to red light cameras identifying offending vehicles by license plates rather than by driver. But he says non-punitive programs provide a first layer of prevention.
“We could have an escalating series of steps [where] reckless drivers get the opportunity to take a course and change their behavior,” said Lander. “If they don’t do that, [they] get a license suspended or a speed delimiter installed in their car, or their insurance goes up and ultimately their car is impounded. And all the while, data [would] be kept that helps us see what works to change driver behavior, and what works to identify and get the most reckless drivers off the road. And what impact that has on saving lives.”
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member and writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.
Author’s Note: Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso provided a quote after print press time:
“To let DVAP expire is a mistake,” he said. “Instead of doing away with the program altogether, we should be discussing how we can strengthen and supplement existing protections for pedestrians so that no more innocent lives are lost. Our city needs every tool in the box to ensure all New Yorkers are safe on our streets.”