Streetsblog New York City

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.

I finally got around to seeing the Oscar-nominated “Silver Linings Playbook,” and it’s a charming film. It certainly deserves to be right up there with the top pictures of 2012. And as the film unspooled, I got a pleasant surprise: Neither of the main characters owns (or drives) a car.

Except for the opening scenes where Pat (Bradley Cooper) is driven home to a Philadelphia suburb after eight months in a mental health facility, Pat and Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) spend nearly the entire movie getting to know each other while on foot. Whether it’s on a date, walking home from a friend’s dinner party, going out for a run, walking to eat cereal at the local diner, or just arguing in the street, this film shows them moving as pedestrians and it’s very refreshing. You really sense that the characters need to be in this alfresco mode, and that talking while walking is therapeutic and healthy.

Of course, one could argue their carlessness plays up their mental health problems and that they are not fully integrated with “normal” society. So do the filmmakers want us to think that since both of them are going through emotionally tough times, they’re not stable enough to drive? Possibly.

But it also just might be that their constitutionals and interactions give these characters more depth and let us get closer to them. Unburdened by the automobile, they have time to sort things out, to communicate, and to let their minds breathe.

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Last Friday, CNN’s Anderson Cooper ran a segment about high-speed rail as part of his “Keeping Them Honest” series. Reporter Drew Griffin did an “exposé” of a Vermont rail project that spent .00006 percent of the federal stimulus money on needed track improvements and came in on time and under budget. Scandal!

It amounts to a high-profile smear campaign on the high-speed rail program from a mainstream media source trying to expose government corruption and waste where none exists. Cooper makes it clear they’re going to stay on the story; they already did a similar takedown of the California rail program.

I’ve counted ten ways this story was misreported. Let me know in the comments if I’ve missed any…

1. Higher-speed rail is not a failure. Perhaps the Obama administration could have done a better job making clear that their rail program was split into two halves: one for high-speed rail and one for incremental upgrades to inter-city passenger rail. Not all of the projects were intended to bring speeds up to 110 mph.

“We’ve never been very public about this but, yes, we’ve felt for a long time that the administration has done a poor job around messaging,” said Dan Schned of the Regional Plan Association. “The bulk of the money went to regional projects, but they still had the secretary going around the country and calling this the ‘high-speed program.’”

The crux of the CNN story is that while the Vermont project did everything it set out to do and was a responsible steward of taxpayer money, it’s not “the high-speed rail that you or I think of.” Well, no. There’s a reason for that.

2. It takes more than three years to build high-speed rail. Cooper embarrassed himself when he ominously intoned that three whole years after the passage of the stimulus (actually, it’s been four years), “we can’t find any high-speed rail that’s actually been built.” They show images of almond trees and dairy farms in California along the planned route. “Not a single piece of track on that line has been built.”

True – they plan to break ground this summer in California. But, as House Republicans constantly complain, highway projects can take up to 15 years to complete. There are lots of reasons for that, which I won’t delve into here. But to expect something as massive and complex as high-speed rail to instantly appear like magic the minute the deal is inked is, well, a little naïve. Federal Railroad Administration Chief Joe Szabo calls high-speed rail “a multi-generational effort,” noting that it took “10 administrations, 28 sessions of Congress” to complete the interstate highway system.

3. There is high-speed rail. Cooper says they couldn’t find any high-speed rail. I guess he wasn’t looking in the Midwest, where officials just cut the ribbon on new service between Chicago and Kalamazoo. It’s the second fastest line in the country, nearing Acela speeds of 150 mph. Other trains in the Midwest can reach 110 mph in places.

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Linden Boulevard at Rockaway Parkway, where pedestrian Gerald Green was killed by a motorist who "had the light." Image: Google Maps

Three pedestrians were killed in separate crashes in Manhattan and Brooklyn last night.

At around 7:50 p.m., 85-year-old Richard Griffin was on his way to visit a hospital patient, according to the Post, when he was apparently struck head-on by the driver of a Jeep SUV on York Avenue at E. 69th Street. Griffin, of Staten Island, was taken to Cornell Medical Center and died soon after.

At approximately 11:30, Gerald Green was hit by the driver of a Jeep SUV while attempting to negotiate the hellish intersection of Linden Boulvard and Rockaway Parkway. Here’s how the crash was described by DNAinfo and the Daily News.

Green, who cops said was crossing against the light, was taken to Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center and pronounced dead, police said.

Gerald Green, 52, was hit in East Flatbush as he tried to cross … against the light … cops said.

The Daily News story reported that another pedestrian was killed, in Harlem, some 90 minutes later. According to NYPD, a 35-year-old man was crossing W. 125th Street at Broadway when he was hit by a yellow cab driver at around 1 a.m. He was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt. Police had not released the victim’s identity as of early this afternoon.

No drivers were charged for any of these crashes, despite the fact that there is no indication that the fallen Harlem pedestrian or Richard Griffin were violating any traffic rules. That’s because NYPD tends to cite possible causal factors — who “had the light,” for example — only when they are attributed to the victim, i.e. the dead or wounded pedestrian or cyclist.

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How’s this for some cognitive dissonance?

Daily News columnist Denis Hamill, whose stock-in-trade is bitter nostalgia, went off yesterday on the city’s efforts to make streets safer for biking. The rant is straight out of the John Cassidy mold — basically, Hamill wants you to know that cyclists today have it easy because, unlike himself, they never built their own bikes from salvaged scrap and hauled 100-pound boxes of meat next to roaring traffic. (Roaring traffic is a thing of the past now, right folks?)

Hamill, though, apparently has a much deeper reservoir of rage to draw from:

Anyway, I was driving my car recently along Prospect Park West, once a majestic three-lane, mile-long esplanade from one war memorial to the other. Now it’s like squeezing yourself through a crinkled tube of toothpaste.

The yuppie-ki-yay bike lane, where kids dressed like hockey goalies pedal in a danger-free fantasy lane, has literally painted car traffic into two lanes.

If you hit the lottery and see 10 feet of free space in the parking lane, you can no longer use the curb to guide your parallel parking. No, the curb is reserved as a barrier reef for the Hipster Highway for Richie Rich on his $1,500 Lance Armstrong Doperacer.

Same thing in Manhattan. Sheltered, helmeted kids getting zeroes in street-smarts pedal past with a clear path through life.

News flash: Life ain’t a smooth sail, kiddos! There’s a big crash just waiting at the end of every bike lane.

So the guy who “discovered a lifelong work ethic” on his bike can’t handle parallel parking without a curb or driving on a street with two lanes instead of three? He has to take out his rage on a project that lets kids bike to Prospect Park on their own? Pathetic.

Denis Hamill wants the kids and families using the PPW bike lane to know: "There’s a big crash just waiting at the end of every bike lane." Photo: Doug Gordon

Here’s the weird thing about this bitter, bitter man. He actually gets the fact that traffic is a barrier to physical activity and a drag on public health.

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The nightmare continues: Some day soon, people might be enjoying themselves and spending money here.

In case you missed it, the Brooklyn Paper ran a by-the-numbers NIMBY react piece on a public plaza that has been proposed for Broadway near Bedford Avenue.

Though DOT has installed dozens of successful, community-backed plazas across the city, reporter Danielle Furfaro leads her story with typical narrow-minded complaints and baseless predictions. Furfaro says the plaza will take parking in an area where “every space is prime real estate,” implying that the space in question belongs to motorists and no one else. An employee of an area business — one of the two critics cited in the piece — even claims that the plaza will cause crashes.

Thing is, Furfaro or her editors lay bare the fallacy of their own narrative with this paragraph:

The city has reclaimed street space for a handful of pedestrian plazas in Brooklyn in the past couple of years, including Albee Square in downtown, Fowler Square in Fort Greene and Pearl Street in DUMBO. Some of those plazas, such as Fowler Square, brought the ire of drivers who complained that the pedestrian area would make driving a nightmare. Now, people who frequent the west end of Broadway are making the same predictions.

The article doesn’t challenge those predictions, or report whether the other plazas have, heaven forfend, made “driving a nightmare.” The Brooklyn Paper is only interested in repeating the tired storyline.

To her credit, Furfaro at least hit up Juan Martinez at Transportation Alternatives for a bit of reality-based perspective. Still, how many successful plazas do the Brooklyn Paper and other media outlets have to see before they stop leading every story with NIMBY bellyaching?

Any member of AAA who is at all concerned about road safety should take note of comments made in the New York Post this weekend by AAA New York spokesperson Robert Sinclair.

In a typically shallow anti-bike piece filed by Jennifer Fermino and David Seifman, the Post calls on Sinclair — along with Michael Sampo, electrician/plumber and noted transportation pundit from Brooklyn — to respond to Mayor Bloomberg’s enthusiasm over Citi Bike, now set to launch in the spring.

Now, we’re accustomed to nonsense from New York AAA. Sinclair, after all, once declared that New York City is “undercarred.” But not only does AAA New York oppose proven safety measures like speed cameras and red-light cameras, Sinclair does not seem to grasp the reality of the dangers posed by reckless driving.

“The idea that bike sharing is going to be wildly popular remains to be seen,” said Robert Sinclair, a spokesman for AAA.

“New York brings a different set of challenges than perhaps might be found in any other city in the country,” said Sinclair.

“For many cyclists, the rules of the road don’t apply. You see it day in and day out. If motorists engaged in a similar level of behavior, we’d have carnage on our roads,” he said.

Because, as we all know, motorists don’t hurt anyone on NYC streets.

Since Fermino and Seifman aren’t about to challenge even an assertion as ridiculous as this with actual data: In New York State, of the 1,077 fatal crashes in 2011, 914 were caused by careless or illegal behavior, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Of 116,575 crashes resulting in injury, 94,307 were caused by motorists. In New York City alone, over 69,000 people were injured and 268 were killed in traffic in 2011.

Contrary to sensationalist “bike bedlam” crapola propagated by the dailies, motorists cause about 100 times more injuries on city streets than do cyclists. Clearly, there is carnage on our roads on a massive scale, and most of it is caused by drivers who ignore the rules of the road.

These are the kinds of readily-available facts one would think it would be Sinclair’s job to know. That, rather than pretending it does not exist, he would acknowledge traffic violence as an epidemic that costs thousands of lives a year, and alters the lives of countless others.

We gave Sinclair an opportunity to amend his comments for this post. He declined.

A go-to NIMBY argument against safe street improvements is that bike lanes, pedestrian plazas, and ped refuge islands interfere with emergency responders.

We await the exclusive CBS 2 report retracting all their nonsense about safer streets slowing down emergency vehicles.

In 2009, one complainer at an event sponsored by then-Council Member Alan Gerson claimed that pedestrian islands on Grand Street “put lives in danger” by slowing down fire trucks and ambulances. Opponents of the Prospect Park West bike lane lobbed the same accusation at DOT and got Marcia Kramer to give them a megaphone. Assembly Member Dov Hikind spearheaded a successful campaign to make Fort Hamilton Parkway more dangerous for seniors based on nothing more than specious complaints from Hatzolah ambulance drivers, again amplified by Kramer.

A data set released by the city Wednesday blows another hole in what has always been a weak and cynical criticism. At an event on Randall’s Island yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg and Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano announced that in 2012, FDNY achieved the fastest average EMS response time in the city’s history. Fewer civilians died in fires last year than ever before, which the mayor and fire chief attributed to another near-record low average response time. From a City Hall press release:

The FDNY’s Emergency Medical Service averaged an ambulance response time for life-threatening medical emergencies of 6:30 — a second faster than the previous record of 6:31 set in 2011.

Structural fire response time in 2012 was 4:04, two seconds higher than last year when it was 4:02 due in part to the large call volume that occurred during and after Hurricane Sandy when the FDNY responded to nearly 100 serious structural fires.

Compared to the total amount of street space in the city, the square footage dedicated to pedestrians and cyclists in recent years is actually quite small. But there are still hundreds of places with new sidewalk extensions, pedestrian islands, and bike lanes, and at the very least the FDNY numbers suggest that new measures designed to make streets safer for walking and biking are not having the detrimental effect prophesied by the likes of Dov Hikind, NBBL, Marty Markowitz, and Marcia Kramer.

In the last six days, five pedestrians have been killed by motorists and a sixth victim was reported “likely to die” in crashes in four boroughs.

Police at the scene of the crash that killed Brooklyn senior Nicoletta Gargano, one of at least five pedestrians killed in the city since December 13. No charges have been filed for any of the crashes. Photo: Brooklyn Daily

At 3:15 this morning, a 31-year-old man was struck by a driver at Francis Lewis Boulevard and 246th Street in the Rosedale section of Queens. The killer fled the scene. Police are looking for a beige Honda or Acura with damage to the front end, according to the Daily News.

Three seniors were killed in crashes that appear to have been caused by a motorist who failed to yield the right of way. Tuesday morning, a school bus driver making a turn hit a 78-year-old man at Kings Highway and Ocean Parkway in Sheepshead Bay. Witnesses told NY1 the victim was struck by a side mirror. DNAinfo reported that he was thrown some 20 feet by the impact, and said that according to NYPD, “No criminality was suspected.”

Nicoletta Gargano, 76, was on her way to church Sunday evening when she was hit by a motorist on Avenue M near East 57th Street. She died at Brookdale University Hospital. From Brooklyn Daily:

Upon investigation, detectives concluded that the motorist’s 1990 Ford was zipping down E. 57th Street when it made a right turn onto Avenue M, striking the victim as she stepped into traffic.

The motorist wasn’t facing any criminal charges by late Sunday night, police said.

Last Thursday afternoon, 69-year-old Ignacio Cubano, out to buy his grandson a birthday cake, was killed by the driver of a semi truck at E. 138th Street and St. Ann’s Avenue in the Bronx. The Daily News reported that Cubano “died in the middle of the crosswalk.” From DNAinfo: “Police were still investigating Thursday night but said no criminality was suspected.”

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