Our stories share certain similarities: We looked up at faces looking down, asking if we were O.K. None of the drivers who hit us were charged by the police with any misdoing — significant because part of Mr. de Blasio’s plan is stricter enforcement of traffic laws. Passers-by, belying the reputation of our area, rushed to help. And we were all deeply moved by the support of our friends and co-workers.

Still, though we have all mostly recovered, we travel around our city with a sense of permanent vulnerability. Nearly four years after she was hit, Denise Fuhs, a news design editor, put it this way in an email account of her accident: “I still cannot cross very many streets without looking both ways about four times and looking over my shoulder a dozen times while crossing. If a car gets too close, or if I think a driver turning my way doesn’t see me, I panic, sometimes freeze.”

Among the cards and well-wishing messages from colleagues that lifted my spirits while I was recuperating was one that I will never forget. It was from Neil MacFarquhar, now a foreign correspondent, whom I had then never met. He had been hit 10 years earlier by a runaway bus on Fifth Avenue when he was on his bike. A bystander had described his body bouncing off the bus “like a dummy.” He had been unconscious for 10 days and still had lingering physical effects from his injuries. “I don’t mean to alarm you,” Neil wrote in an email, “but your life will probably not ever be quite the same.”

In a 2010 report on traffic accidents, the city found that among the 6,784 pedestrians who were seriously injured by motor vehicles from 2002 to 2006, about three-quarters, or about 5,000, were in accidents at intersections, and over half of them, or more than 3,500 of the total, were crossing legally. In this, my colleagues and I were typical.

I was crossing the street in Times Square, heading to the gym before work. The light changed to green and I began to cross going east. Suddenly and seemingly out of the blue, a food delivery truck came barreling by. Its front tire rolled over my right foot and I was dragged down while the rear wheel rolled over my left side.

Ms. Fuhs, 47, was hit in April 2010 crossing West End Avenue at 95th Street, also with the light. “The driver of a Prius turning left onto West End has said she was distracted and didn’t notice me and only stopped when she had heard a bump,” my colleague said. “The ‘bump’ was me.” (“Driver inattention” was the most common cause of accidents according to the city study.) She never saw the car coming. “I did not even know I had been hit by a car until I became conscious of myself lying in the middle of the street honestly thinking, ‘Oh, my God! What the hell am I doing in the middle of the street? I’m going to be hit by a car!'”