Last Thursday, the New York City Council enthusiastically passed legislation in support of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Vision Zero initiative, aimed at eliminating traffic-related deaths and serious injuries by 2024. In an impassioned address to the council’s Transportation Committee and the gathered public, the Bronx councilman James Vacca said, “We are in a fight to take back our streets…. We mean business on this Council, we mean business when it comes to Vision Zero, we mean business when it comes to protecting our citizens and saving lives throughout this city.”

In 2013, two hundred and eighty-six people were killed in traffic crashes in New York City. While the number of traffic fatalities has dropped considerably since 1990, when seven hundred and one people died, the shock and senselessness of people dying while crossing the street continues to motivate advocacy groups, and now the city government, to fight to eradicate these preventable deaths.

Vision Zero is a traffic-safety principle pioneered in Sweden that pairs a variety of safety improvements, from speed limits to vehicle design, with wide-ranging education. (New Yorkers have undoubtedly already noticed the Vision Zero ads playing on taxicab TVs and on local channels.) The group of Vision Zero bills and resolutions that passed through the City Council on Thursday sought to reduce traffic speeds to between fifteen and twenty miles per hour at seven intersections per year and around schools, install red-light cameras without approval from the state government, enact tougher penalties against reckless drivers, and ramp up the enforcement of existing traffic rules to enhance safety.

The legislative package affirmed the commitment of the Mayor’s office and sent a clear signal that Vision Zero would not just be rhetoric. There have been some questions, however, about the city’s ability to turn the legislation into reality. Significantly, the City Council and the Mayor’s office do not have the power to unilaterally reduce the speed limit on all streets in the city—the state of New York maintains unified and uniform speed laws, which govern all cities within the state. Steven Vaccaro of Vaccaro and White, a firm specializing in traffic law, told me that “in order to achieve a lower speed limit, the city either has to install expensive infrastructure in the roadway”—such as speed humps—“or petition the state directly to amend its laws.” Albany has not yet guaranteed its coöperation. As with the Mayor’s plan to fund universal pre-kindergarten, which called for a state-approved tax increase on New Yorkers making over five hundred thousand dollars a year, the city is at the mercy of the state; the state legislature has a long history of stymying attempts by the city to take control of its own affairs, especially when it comes to transportation reform. (In 2008, for example, the state torpedoed Michael Bloomberg’s congestion-pricing plan, which sought to alleviate traffic problems in Manhattan south of Sixtieth Street.)

Speed limits are critical to improving road safety because vehicular speed determines the severity of a crash. According to 2011 study by the A.A.A. Foundation for Traffic Safety, the average risk of serious injury to a pedestrian hit by a vehicle travelling at thirty-one miles per hour is fifty per cent; the risk of death is twenty-five per cent at thirty-two miles per hour. At twenty miles per hour, the preferred speed limit of road-safety groups like 20’s Plenty for Us and Families for Safe Streets, the risk of death drops below ten per cent. For Vision Zero to fulfill its promise, or to even come close, de Blasio’s administration will have to insure that the promising legislation passed by the City Council will not be rolled back and diluted by the state government.

Drivers are generally opposed to any lowering of speed limits, and changing traffic laws at the state level has traditionally required an undue amount of legislative maneuvering. Recent state legislation to reduce the speed limit to twenty miles per hour was met with stiff opposition. Martin Golden, the leader of New York City’s Republican delegation, called the bills an “overreaction,” and told the Daily News that “traffic would go nowhere.” The twenty-five mile per hour proposal passed by the City Council on Thursday constitutes a compromise, but there still has been no indication that opponents in Albany will meet Vision Zero advocates in the middle.

But, while the viability of zero traffic-related deaths is still uncertain, the Mayor’s commitment to Vision Zero, both in his election campaign and throughout his first year in office, has already done some good by reframing the traffic debate—what was once generally a conversation between economists and transportation experts has now extended to the public. While drafting Vision Zero legislation, the City Council relied heavily on the testimony and insights of New Yorkers who understand traffic safety but who, perhaps, aren’t familiar with the field of traffic engineering. During a council meeting I attended in April, Ydanis Rodriguez, a Manhattan councilman and the chair of the Transportation Committee, said, “Vision Zero is not about a statistic; it’s about real people and real stories of individual tragedies of innocent victims and of loved ones left behind.”

The council honored Rodriguez’s sentiment by giving the families of people killed in traffic crashes a number of opportunities to participate in the debates over a new speed limit and the need to increase driver accountability. The Departments of City Planning and Transportation, the agencies responsible for developing long-range transportation plans based on changing demographics and land-use pressures, have also tapped the local knowledge of New Yorkers by asking them to design bike routes in Northwestern Queens and identify dangerous intersections in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Rather than limiting the public-participation process to one or two meetings, these charrettes and the City Council’s hearings on Vision Zero have nurtured an ongoing dialogue between the city and its residents.

All this sounds like progress. Even if opponents in the state legislature try to dilute Vision Zero’s full potential, the conversations that have already taken place around New York City should insure that road safety generates the robust debate and discussion it deserves, and wards off the unabated advance of the automobile that Lewis Mumford, the celebrated urbanist and New Yorker architecture critic, argued was “nothing less than a license to destroy the city.”

Photograph: Education Images/UIG via Getty