New Yorkers are dying in the streets and not enough is being done.

In the past two months, the toll from dangerous driving has reached a breaking point. On January 6th, a driver with a suspended license, racing to beat a red light, killed nine-year-old Ibrihim Ahmed in a crosswalk in Ozone Park. On January 22nd, in a crash that has shocked the city, a delivery driver in Chinatown left his vehicle running and unattended on a busy street, setting off a chain of events that killed preschoolers Hayley Ng and Diego Martinez and injured more than a dozen other children while they were walking with chaperones. On January 30th, a hit-and-run driver ran down 16 year-old Dwayne Jackson and his four year-old brother Dillon on a Bedford-Stuyvesant sidewalk. And on February 11th, Guido Carabejo was struck by a car in a crosswalk in Corona then dragged by a van to Brighton Beach, more than 20 miles away.

These horrific tragedies are just the most notable. According to data from the NYPD, every 36 hours one New Yorker is killed in traffic and 300 more are injured.

Disregard for traffic laws is rampant. A recent study by Transportation Alternatives found an average of 39% of drivers exceeding the city's 30 mph speed limit. A 2003 study by then-New York State Comptroller Hevesi estimated that cars run 1.23 million red lights in the city each day. NYS Department of Motor Vehicles 2007 accident data show that speeding, red-light running, driver negligence and other dangerous driving behavior cause over twenty times more motor vehicle crashes than drunk driving in New York City.

Enough is enough. The City needs to get serious about keeping its citizens safe. From the top tiers to the lowest rungs, reforms that prioritize the safety of vulnerable street users must be implemented. Albany needs to make it easier to convict drivers that kill or seriously injure through negligence. District attorneys and the NYPD need to treat serious traffic crashes as carefully as they do drunk driving incidents, and every day New Yorkers need to stop speeding and start thinking that when you're behind the wheel in a city of eight million, one small mistake might take a life.