Who can prove that the van driver HAD to double-park his vehicle that day, in this Truck Loading Zone, because of placarded vehicles taking most the curbside parking?

No dude, it doesn't. You don't need to rebut at length every little slur posted on the internet about you. Your ego isn't that fragile.

One change that would both solve your Grand Street problems and make East Broadway safer: well-designed loading zones. I proposed this last month, but no response from you or your allies. Should I expect one to be forthcoming?

This odious, unwarranted and completely erroneous personal attack on me and the SoHo Alliance by commenter #1 must be addressed. Clearly the commenter's arrogance is exceeded only by his ignorance.

For the record, the SoHo Alliance (with the financial assistance from a local philanthropic environmental and cycling activist) sued the owners of World Farm in SoHo to prevent the very accident that occurred in Chinatown yesterday.

World Farm was a food delivery company that brought thousands of illegal 18-wheelers delivering fresh Asian vegetables for the Chinatown market into our neighborhood before dawn, running the motors and polluting our air for hours until the business opened.

Smaller vans, like the one that killed the children, would then arrive, illegally park, sometimes on the sidewalk, and then speed down Broadway to deliver to the restaurants(sound familiar?).

World Farm forklift trucks would careen and ply our SIDEWALKS with impunity from the police till the lawsuit was filed.

Indeed, one unlicensed World Farm driver killed a pedestrian on the very block where this week's tragic accident occurred!

Thanks in part to our efforts, World Farm and other of these rogue food delivery companies are no longer in business. SoHo and NYC is safer thanks to our efforts.

Read the NYT account of the legal actions:http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE5DF113DF931A2575AC0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Marty Barfowitz owes an apology, not only for his unprovoked juvenile ad hominem attack, but for his incredible lack of knowledge on this subject.
Why do I expect none will be forthcoming?

And I generally agree with Doug. Accidents do happen because of personal error and infrastructure which allows them to take place. I have bike accidents, or engage in behavior that makes me more likely to have bike accidents on a weekly basis. The difference is on my bike that usually only means I don't leave myself enough stopping room so I have to swerve whereas in a car it means lives are at stake. I really do feel sorry for some of the drivers. Some of them were doing things we all have done while driving but we were _lucky_ enough to not have caused any harm (hopefully). Maybe the rest of you are better than me but I know while driving I have done things and then quickly realized "wow, if X had been in Y place I could have caused some real damage". But, yes, I think sentences for these people... _at least_ tickets and fines... are in order, but I think we would be better to focus on infrastructure. My friend left his car in drive in our high school parking lot and it lurched and hit the back of another car. $200 in damage and it was over. It was his fault and it could have been worse. But in NYC it's pedestrians next to cars when you leave your car in gear and people get hurt. We need to organize our traffic patters to protect against that because if people are allowed to have cars like they do now in the city then there will be accidents. But, leaving your van in reverse is extreme negligence in this case and not one of the accidents I feel sorry for. It should be the same punishment as accidentally firing a shot from a pistol you thought was empty.

But analogies and semantics don't really matter. Two kids are dead. How are we as a society going to learn form this, and how are we going to respond? History would indicate that nothing will change, and that's not acceptable.

LJ

Guns don't 'go off', the trigger needs to be pulled, usually with many pounds of force. You can throw a loaded gun across the room and odds are extremely good it won't go off.

This seems like criminally negligent homicide, not that I'm a lawyer.

I think the angry response that you got from the driver shows that your question about coming close to his kids made him realize the truth of your argument --

I often wonder what the best rejoinder is to an angry response with this (if you can even can another word in at this point.)

Maybe it's just a calm "I can see that this made you angry -- I hope you'll keep this in mind when you see other people on the road."

Lurching Into Reverse

Just last night, my 11 year old son and I were riding home from his performance in a school play, one block from our home. We were riding about 1/3 of the way into the traffic lane next to the parking lane, which was full of parked cars. My son was riding about 4 bike lengths in front of me, and there was a car passing in the traffic lane to our left. An SUV drove past us at a speed I estimate at no less than 40 mph, and probably closer the 50 mph. The SUV's passenger side-view mirror came within a foot of my son's head as it squeaked past the car on its left and my son on its right, with the dashed line dividing the two traffic lanes underneath the SUV. In a moment, I went from musing over my son's wonderful performance that evening to contemplating his sudden death.

The light ahead was red, so the SUV was racing simply to get position over the other traffic headed toward the red light (including us). The SUV was still waiting at the red light by the time my son and I got there. I engaged the driver in conversation and asked why he needed to speed 40 mph past an 11 year old and nearly hit him. He said "show me your radar gun." I told him he knew he was speeding and asked him if he had kids. He looked into the back of his SUV and I saw indeed that he had some kids in the back, in child seats. I asked him how he would feel if someone came as close to his kids as he just came to mine. He told me, in front of his kids and mine, for me to "take [my] bicycle pump and shove it up [my] ass, you f*ing faggot." I noticed that he was wearing an blue MTA jacket with the patch on the shoulder.

This is all too often the attitude you get from motorists when you call them on the deadly risks they take. Motorists often are completely unwilling to accept that they have any responsibility for the safety of others. In the minds of these motorists any harm they do is an "accident", because the harm was not specifically intended by them. It seems to me that this style of driving, in SUVs where the motorist can barely see objects close to the vehicle, with virtually no enforcement of speed limit, in the context of a pedestrian-rich, crowded urban environment including bicyclists, is as close as you can get to intending to cause harm without actually so intending. To insist on using the word "accident" in order to ensure that a motorist that harms others is not mistakenly viewed as intending to cause harm (if in fact that is the case), is to completely obscure the problem and ignore the realities of the situation.

And now it appears that the driver wasn't in the vehicle:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/nyregion/23crash.html

Which in my view makes it no more or less worthy to be dismissed as an "accident". If most fatal crashes are caused by everyday driver negligence coupled with bad luck, something that "could happen to anyone" (who drives regularly), then those are the circumstances we should not be forgetting and moving on from but the ones that are due the greatest attention, so as to save the most lives.

I was unhappily surprised by Stringer's Park Row non sequitur as well. It's wrong on the point of congestion, which will never be fended off by increased (or restored) downtown capacity alone, and wrong on congestion being a factor in this crash. If the driver left his van running unattended in a bicycle lane (not saintly behavior, by any means), it would point to the need for loading zones and parking reform. Even a congestion solution that would work, like pricing, wouldn't free up legitimate load/unload spaces for businesses to stop and TURN OFF their vehicles.

The actual story is a whole lot different than "a maniac wielding an out-of-control van on a busy sidewalk filled with kids -- I suspect it won't draw a single utterance from the mayor." (from Post #1)

Mr. Chao first realized that the vehicle had moved “when he came out of the store and it had already crashed,” Mr. Browne said.
...
The line of children, 14 in all, had stopped outside a store and had just started to walk again when the accident occurred. The van began moving in reverse, Mr. Browne said, and traveled several car lengths backward. Then the wheel started to turn to the left, the van climbed the curb and plowed into the children, “killing one on the spot,” Mr. Browne said.

Investigators later saw video of the empty van moving, and then striking the children.

Witnesses who were not aware that the van was unoccupied said they thought it was attempting a three-point turn.
-----------------------
Full article here - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/nyregion/23crash.html

I'm assuming the video refers to footage taken by a security camera since I doubt some tourist was conveniently taking footage of the event. But it's not a case of "he said / she said" since the police have indisputable evidence.

I suspect the van slipped into reverse because if it was in reverse gear from the beginning it would have begun moving right away. I've driven rental trucks where the shift lever was imprecise.

There was no 3 point turn and the driver didn't deliberately drive up on the sidewalk.

The driver's tragic mistake was that he left the engine on.