Streetsblog New York City

A pedestrian and a cyclist are dead after a series of crashes in Brooklyn and the Bronx in which motorists also injured five other people. Three of the victims were teenagers. One crash left two young boys in critical condition. No charges are known to have been filed by NYPD or DAs Charles Hynes and Robert Johnson.

Zuleimi Torres. Photo: WEbook

On Friday afternoon, 16-year-old Zuleimi Torres was one of three people struck by the driver of an SUV on the Grand Concourse near Mt. Eden Parkway. From NY1:

Eyewitnesses said the car was going erratically down Grand Concourse, hit one pedestrian and then kept going and hit the other two pedestrians.

“He didn’t stop, he hit the first person, he did not stop. He just keep going and then we see the second one again got hit. We said, ‘Oh!’” a bystander said.

An off-duty officer arrested the driver as he tried to leave the car, but a breathalyzer test showed that the driver had no blood alcohol content.

Torres suffered a brain injury and died at St. Barnabas Hospital. Her friend, also 16, and the third victim, a 51-year-old woman, were hospitalized in stable condition.

Citing anonymous police sources, the Post reports that the driver “is not suspected of a crime,” and a “medical condition may have contributed” to the crash. ”Sources say the driver has a mental condition,” according to News 12. “Investigators say the driver will not face charges.”

In another crash early Sunday, an unidentified cyclist was killed by a livery cab driver in Crown Heights. From the Post:

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This weekend you might have come across the anonymous Daily News editorial in which Arthur Browne’s opinion team called Paul Steely White “smug” for defending bike-share (in an opinion piece solicited by Arthur Browne’s opinion team). But is it smug to point out that New Yorkers who don’t own cars also deserve to have a share of the curb? Or that bike-share stations made in 2013 belong in historic neighborhoods as much as 2013 model cars?

Of course not. For a dose of genuine smugness, I invite Arthur Browne and his team of cranks to read this condensed, satirical version of the attack they published on Saturday:

Moving one’s car for alternate-side parking is the single most aggravating aspect of living in New York City. Unless you’re one of those people who don’t own a car, in which case you never have to spend a second worrying about where to put your car, or whether you’ve paid up all your outstanding parking fines.

Not only do we despise alternate-side parking, we also despise every single New Yorker who doesn’t have to structure their life around it.

All of this has nothing to do with bike-share, which isn’t going to make owning a car in NYC any more or less miserable. But it fills us with rage to know that the city is making it easier to live without a car by launching this bike-share program, when New Yorkers without cars already have it so good.

Someone wipe that grin off Paul White’s face.

Now that’s smug.

Citi Bike isn't enough of an adrenaline rush for Simone Weichselbaum. This bodes well for its success. Photos: Daily News (left, right)

Daily News reporter Simone Weichselbaum likes her bikes light and fast. The self-proclaimed “proud bike snob who is rarely without her SE Draft steel-frame fixie” said in 2009 that “biking here can be a death sentence,” and that bike lanes are “battle zones.”

So it’s no surprise that Citi Bike — featuring a 45-pound three-speed with balloon tires and a low center of gravity — wasn’t her cup of tea. What she intended as a scathing review of the bike-share two-wheelers might turn out to be their best endorsement yet.

“The seat is wide and spongy. The handlebars are extra wide. The tires are fat,” Weischelbaum wrote, as if it were a bad thing. If even the Daily News’s resident bike daredevil couldn’t manage to do much beyond an easy pedal on a Citi Bike, it’s hard to see how the unfounded nightmare visions of “hell on wheels” conjured by the paper’s editorial board could come true.

To be fair, Weichselbaum did run into a common problem when she tried to take the bike out of its dock, but only because she was doing it the wrong way. “The thing wouldn’t move. I kept yanking on the handlebars. Nothing,” she wrote. If she had followed instructions printed on the bike and lifted by the seat instead of the handlebars, she could have saved herself the trouble.

Bicycling should be for everyone, not just people who keep a fixie in their apartment for a high-speed, high-stakes experience. For those just looking to get around town safely, cheaply and quickly, Weichselbaum’s review shows that Citi Bike should be exactly what they need.

The grass might be greener in San Francisco, but bike-share stations don't actually exist there yet.

I wish I could say I was surprised that the Times published Ginia Bellafante’s collection of stereotypes and gripes about bike-share in the Sunday edition. But it’s exactly the kind of shallow kvetchfest I’ve come to expect when the Times tries to encapsulate the state of bike-related public policy. Mostly I’m just embarrassed, as a New Yorker and a journalist, that the most prestigious newspaper in our city keeps publishing stuff like this.

It’s 2013 and public bike systems are operating in 500 cities worldwide, according to the Earth Policy Institute. Two of those cities — Boston and Washington, DC — are less than 250 miles from New York and have a few years of bike-share experience under their belts. Once bike-share launches here, it’s going to help a lot of people overcome some quintessential New York transportation problems. Ever try to cross Manhattan at faster-than-walking speed? Wish you could get to the train quicker on your morning commute? A bike-share membership is going to save you a lot of time.

So it’s cringe-inducing to read Bellafante’s lede about bike-share bringing New Yorkers “the opportunity to show the world that they are just as virtuous, well-intentioned and offended by sloth as people in Copenhagen or Geneva or any other of a number of cities where mindful living and wonderful yogurts reign.” Meanwhile, those yogurt-loving sophisticates in Columbus, Ohio, will be getting a downtown bike-share system this summer.

Bellafante’s rehash of pre-launch bike-share complaints here in NYC could have used some perspective from other cities. Here’s Greater Greater Washington’s David Alpert reminiscing about the pre-launch apprehension in DC, and how it melted away once people got familiar with the system:

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BEDLAM! A lunatic cyclist is brought under control by a slacking city employee.

Given the Post’s unequivocal hatred of people who ride bicycles, you’d think Col Allan’s tabloid would applaud DOT for assigning a small number of employees to encourage cyclists to ride in the direction of traffic and stop for pedestrians. Instead, the Post today attacked the “Street Safety Manager” program as a waste of taxpayer money, even as the same story insisted that cyclists are out-of-control maniacs.

It’s like the reporters (it took two) just packed in as many tropes as they could. You’ve got the rogue cyclists, lollygagging city employees, and a sideways jab at bike-share, punctuated by ready-made quotes from random bystanders — this piece has it all. Never mind that it also has more disconnected story lines than a J.J. Abrams teleplay.

We could point out how ridiculous it is to single out a handful of bike lane monitors when the city employs a small army of Traffic Enforcement Agents whose job is basically to wave traffic into pedestrians who have the legal right of way. Or that there hasn’t been a fatal collision between a cyclist and pedestrian in years, while motorists injure and kill scores every day. Or that it makes no sense to attack the city for loosing thousands of “reckless bikers” and also attack the city for taking steps to improve bike safety.

But to make those arguments would be to presume that the Post is actually interested in safer streets.

This is how the Times of London editorializes about bike safety.

So yesterday the Daily News published an opinion piece on bike-share that framed it not as a new option for New Yorkers to get around, but as another tense, dangerous showdown in the eternal confrontation between bikes and cars. Yawn.

Of course, the fact that bike-share systems from London to DC have excellent safety records is anathema to Arthur Browne’s editorial page. When you don’t actually care about making streets safer for people, this is the kind of stuff you publish:

Bicycling has developed many devoted, if not rabid, supporters.

While they’re to be congratulated for going with a healthful, no-pollution form of transportation, the virtues of their mode of getting around is no free ticket to commandeering the roads.

Like so much else in New York, bicycles versus motor vehicles comes down essentially to a competition for real estate. There is only so much of it between the curbs. Already, the contest is playing out uneasily. Injecting 6,000 additional bikes — eventually 10,000, if all goes to plan — will only heighten the jockeying.

So, too, the dangers.

The opinion writers who’ve never met a street safety overhaul they like and never make a peep about real dangers like oversize big rigs crushing children on their way to school — these same guys want to make bike-share out to be a scary thing.

Meanwhile, the Times of London – which launched a campaign toward the end of 2011 to make cycling safer in British cities — is  cranking out pieces that stem from a sincere interest in people’s well-being. Here’s what it looks like when a major daily actually cares about preventing traffic deaths and injuries, and making city streets safe enough for people to use them the way they want to:

This time last year, The Times began to advocate cities fit for cycling. The response has been overwhelming. Thirty-six thousand members of the public have pledged their support, as have all three major political parties. Winning Best Media Campaign award at the National Transport Awards, this newspaper’s campaign was described as “relentless, informed and passionate”.

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To read the Daily News analysis of 2012 summons data, you’d think NYPD has reckless driving completely under control. While the story throws out a lot of purportedly high figures, as usual the tabloid’s perspective is distorted by the windshield.

NYPD may have stopped as few as 19,119 speeding drivers in city neighborhoods in 2012. Overall traffic enforcement was down 20 percent from four years prior. Photo: Daily News

NYPD issued a total of 1,020,754 moving violations last year [PDF]. That’s down slightly from 2011 (1,062,889 total), and a marked drop from other recent years — roughly 1.2 million per year from FY ’05 through FY ’08. And as we’ve reported before, merely counting tickets is not helpful in measuring the extent to which motorists are breaking traffic laws.

NYPD wrote 71,305 speeding summonses in 2012 (down from 76,493 in 2011). We asked analyst Charles Komanoff for his estimate of how many instances of speeding there are in NYC in a year, based on the Transportation Alternatives 2009 finding that 39 percent of city motorists clocked with radar guns and speed cameras were speeding.

There are roughly 24 billion motor vehicle miles traveled per year citywide, says Komanoff. “If the average trip is four miles, we have six billion motor vehicle trips per year. If 20 percent of those trips have at least one ‘speeding moment’ — halving TA’s 39 percent figure, to account for study bias toward arterials — then 1.2 billion trips include speeding.”

Seventy-one thousand speeding summonses for 1.2 billion “speeding moment” trips would equate to just six summonses for every 100,000 trips during which a driver exceeds the speed limit, Komanoff says. Even with a significant margin of error, that’s a lot of motorists getting away with putting others at risk.

For some idea of how enforcement stacks up against violations in a specific neighborhood, our back-of-envelope calculation for Manhattan’s 34th Precinct found that, in Inwood alone, 5.3 million drivers a year could be ticketed for speeding, again based on TA’s 39 percent figure. The 34th Precinct issued 52 speeding summonses in 2012.

There’s more. The News reported that 52,186 speeding tickets were issued on highways. If that figure is counted among the 71,305 total, in 2012 NYPD stopped just 19,119 motorists for speeding through neighborhoods.

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You don't normally hear from NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly or Manhattan DA Cy Vance when a child is killed by a motorist.

In case you missed it, after years of bashing the city’s efforts to make walking and cycling less dangerous, the editors of the New York Post have decided they care about children’s safety. But in its Saturday editorial persecuting the crossing guard who was not present when 6-year-old Amar Diarrassouba was fatally struck by a truck driver, the Post chose not to acknowledge that if police and prosecutors were doing their jobs, the NYPD crossing guard program would not be necessary in the first place.

Look at today’s headline stack: a young couple and their baby killed by a hit-and-run driver in Brooklyn; a 61-year-old pedestrian in critical condition in the Bronx; another pedestrian seriously hurt by a curb-jumping motorist in Midtown. All this death and suffering, and more, since Amar Diarrassouba was killed last Thursday. The fact is reckless driving is rampant in NYC, it happens at all hours of the day and night, and the law enforcers charged with bringing it under control — NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, and, in little Amar’s case, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance — have failed to do so.

From the Post editorial:

New York’s criminal-justice system has a duty to hold this guard liable for her words and her actions. The authorities need to probe this case thoroughly — and pursue the full measure of punishment allowed by the law.

New York City employs more than 2,000 crossing guards to keep its schoolchildren safe as they navigate Gotham’s busy streets and cross dangerous intersections. Those who take these jobs take on an important public trust. Amar Diarrassouba’s death is a reminder of the terrible price that the innocent pay when someone in a position of public trust blows off that responsibility.

It’s much easier for the Post to scapegoat Flavia Roman than to take on the players responsible for the city’s deficient traffic justice system, and though editorials trashing street safety measures are common, we can’t recall the last time the paper called for the prosecution of a killer motorist. But forget the cowardice and rank hypocrisy on display here. Let’s talk about public trust.

Whose job is it to protect children when crossing guards are not on duty? Ebrahim Kebe, Timothy Keith, Kevin Rodriguez, Dashane Santana, Moses Englender, Andrew Ramirez, Aniya Williams, Joshua Ganzfried, Max Mendez, Axel Pablo, Diego Martinez, Hayley Ng — all children killed by city motorists. In none of these cases was the driver known to have been charged for taking a child’s life.

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A 7-year-old boy was killed by a truck driver this morning while walking to school in East Harlem. While no charges were filed against the driver, police and media are focused on the actions of a crossing guard, who was reportedly on a break when the crash occurred.

Trucks over 55 feet are not allowed on NYC surface streets without a permit. According to reports, the truck driver who killed Amar Diarrassouba was driving on a street that is not a designated truck route. He was not charged. Photo: 1010 WINS via Gothamist

Amar Diarrassouba and his 10-year-old brother were crossing First Avenue at E. 117th Street, east to west, when, according to reports, the westbound driver of a tractor-trailer ran over the younger boy while turning right from 117th to First. The driver was stopped by witnesses some distance away. The Post writes:

“It was crazy. I saw a man chasing the truck on 119th Street,” said neighborhood resident Vinny Brasero, 49.

“I saw the boy, there was just so much blood, I knew he wasn’t going to make it. I couldn’t even get too close because when I saw he wasn’t moving and all that blood, it didn’t look good.”

The victim’s big brother was “hysterical, crying” at the scene, according to Brasero.

“I was crying a little bit because I have kids,” he added.

East 117th Street is a narrow, one-way street. It is not a truck route. Trucks exceeding 55 feet in length, like the one involved in this crash, are not allowed on surface streets without a permit. McClane trucking, which apparently owns the truck, is based in Texas. Trucks registered outside New York are exempt from the state’s crossover mirror requirement. It appears from a Post photo that the truck is not equipped with the mirrors, which allow truck drivers to see what is directly in front of them.

Of all the factors that contributed to this fatality — massive trucks allowed on city streets, a loophole in a state law, the truck driver’s failure to yield to two kids while driving on a neighborhood street not designated for trucks — reports say authorities are investigating why a crossing guard stationed at the intersection was not present at the time of the crash. Naturally, this is the detail the city press corps has zeroed in on.

While NYPD focused on the crossing guard, police defended the driver. From DNAinfo:

“Tractor trailers often have to make very wide turns,” said a police spokesman at the scene. “It’s possible, given the height of the vehicle and the kind of turn he had to make, that he just didn’t see the kid.”

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The current DMV data archive page ...

... and the page as it appeared in June 2012.

A sharp-eyed reader pointed out to us that the New York State DMV has stopped using the word “accident” in its annual statistical summaries.

On its 2011 data web page, and in each of its 2011 reports, DMV refers to traffic crashes as “crashes.” “Accident” does not appear in any of the agency’s 2011 materials. The header on the statistical summaries archive page was also changed from “Motor Vehicle Accidents” to “Motor Vehicle Crashes.”

To describe a traffic crash as an accident is to relieve all parties of responsibility. Though there are laws against drinking and driving, for example, as of 2010 the DMV listed alcohol-involved crashes among “accidents with human factors.”

Even when a motorist uses a car as a weapon, the media can’t break the habit. “It looked like the accident happened intentionally,” said a local reporter of a 2008 crash in the Bronx, in which a driver mowed down a man after an argument.

DMV communications staff couldn’t tell us why the change was made at this particular time, but said they expected the agency will use “crash” from now on. The department gave us this statement:

A vehicle crash encompasses a wider range of potential causes than does the term accident. An accident implies something that is not preventable. A majority of crashes are caused by intoxicated, speeding, distracted, or careless drivers and, therefore, are not accidents. That is why the term “crashes” is used not only by the New York State DMV, but also by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Good stuff. Today the DMV, tomorrow the Daily News.

(h/t to Keegan Stephan of Time’s Up!)

Update: Thanks to Transportation Alternatives, which urged the DMV to make this change.