Streetsblog New York City

DOT is proposing to add a two-way, jersey barrier-protected bikeway to a block of Bruckner Boulevard that's currently a high-speed asphalt free-for-all. Image: DOT

The Bronx River Greenway, threaded along the waterfront between expressways, railroad tracks and busy arterial avenues, is difficult to access for many of the surrounding South Bronx residents. A proposal from DOT [PDF] would improve park access while providing some order to the area’s streets.

“It’s hard for folks in the neighborhood to get to these parks,” said Joe Linton, greenway director for the Bronx River Alliance. “We’re going to need these on-street improvements.”

The plan has four components. The first will add a two-way barrier-protected bikeway along a block of Bruckner Boulevard, immediately adjacent to the Bruckner Expressway. It would connect a sidewalk near the southern end of Concrete Plant Park to north-south bike lanes on Bryant and Longfellow Avenues. The lane is carved out of the massive expanse of asphalt currently used for a 41-foot wide travel lane.

While this is a huge safety gain for a location that currently sees a lot of wrong-way cycling on a high-speed road, the lane connects to a pedestrian bridge across the Bruckner Expressway that has no ramps. Instead, bike riders have to carry their bikes up a sloping set of stairs.

“They can still do more to seamlessly connect it,” said Richard Gans, a volunteer on the Transportation Alternatives Bronx committee. “In general, we’re happy with the improvements that are proposed,” he added.

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Of the five boroughs, Brooklyn saw the most pedestrian fatalities from 2009 through 2011. Many of the victims were seniors, as indicated by pink icons on this TSTC map.

The Tri-State Transportation Campaign’s latest “Most Dangerous Roads for Walking” report [PDF] is another urgent reminder that roads and streets designed for maintaining auto capacity are not safe for people who travel outside a car.

Drawing on federal data from 2009 through 2011, the report ranks the region’s most dangerous roads in terms of total pedestrian fatalities — 1,242 in all during the three-year time frame. Reads the report:

Almost 60 percent of these fatalities occurred on arterial roadways, high-speed roads often with multiple lanes in each direction and few pedestrian amenities such as marked cross-walks or pedestrian count-down signals.

NYC streets with the most pedestrian deaths were as follows:

• The Bronx: Broadway (5); East Gun Hill Road (5); Grand Concourse (4); Baychester Avenue (4)
• Brooklyn: Ocean Parkway (6); Eastern Parkway (5); Kings Highway (4); Utica Avenue (4); Bedford Avenue (4)
• Manhattan: Broadway (12); Amsterdam Avenue (7); Seventh Avenue (5); Second Avenue (5); First Avenue (4)
• Queens: Woodhaven Boulevard (7); Jamaica Avenue (5); Union Turnpike (4); Queens Boulevard (4); Northern Boulevard (4); Lefferts Boulevard (4)
• Staten Island: Richmond Avenue (3); New Dorp Lane (2); Hylan Boulevard (2); Port Richmond Avenue (2)

Of Broadway’s 17 pedestrian fatalities, only one occurred south of 96th Street. There was a concentration of fatal collisions in Washington Heights, where drivers head to and from the George Washington Bridge, and where Broadway’s tree-lined medians and pedestrian islands disappear.

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Quick, what aspect of police work and law enforcement were mayoral contenders addressing when they said the following at Friday’s candidate forum?

• Bill de Blasio: “It’s hard to report crimes and get the kind of response that you deserve…The police need more training to treat these crimes with urgency…Police need better training and we need to strengthen the laws.”
• Christine Quinn: “If we see any situation where police or DA’s are not taking those crimes seriously, we need to take action no matter what elected position we are in.”

Were they talking about traffic violence and NYPD’s lackluster crash investigations? Nope, they were responding to questions about assault against bus operators and harassment and crime against bus and subway passengers.

Safety on the transit system is important, but so is safety on the streets. And so far the candidates haven’t approached the NYPD’s failures on traffic violence with the same fervor they displayed Friday evening for tackling transit crime.

Tom Allon called for “GropeStat” to pinpoint problem harassment locations. “If there’s somebody who’s a serial offender, the DA’s office should take away his MetroCard. Ban him from the subway, ban him from the bus forever,” he said.

Streetsblog followed up with Allon after the forum to ask if this banned-for-life standard should apply to deadly drivers. “There should be a zero-tolerance policy. We have to crack down on people who are a menace to other people,” he said. “It’s one of those crimes that doesn’t get enough attention.”

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One of ten tables at last night's workshop. DOT is using input gathered at the meeting and on its website to form a plan for Fourth Avenue in Park Slope. Photo: Stephen Miller

Last night, DOT staff led a public workshop sponsored by Borough President Marty Markowitz’s Fourth Avenue Task Force on how to improve 28 blocks of Fourth Avenue in Park Slope, between 15th Street and Pacific Street. DOT expects to have a draft plan for the avenue, one of the borough’s most dangerous streets, within two months.

This project follows DOT’s pedestrian safety improvements on 50 blocks of Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park, which included wider medians and shorter crossing distances. These types of fixes may be likely for Park Slope, depending on the feedback that comes out of these meetings. DOT also has an online portal for the project, where people can suggest what type of improvements they want to see and where.

At the workshop last night, about 70 people gathered at ten tables arrayed with maps and diagrams at Holy Family and St. Thomas Aquinas Church. Their suggestions for Fourth Avenue ranged from bike lanes and median expansions to better lighting and more street trees.

DOT’s Christopher Hrones noted that traffic volumes increase as Fourth Avenue approaches Downtown Brooklyn, which will lead to some tension between needed pedestrian safety improvements and the agency’s desire to keep traffic flowing. The agency is still collecting traffic data for the project, Hrones said.

Fourth Avenue at Sackett Street. Image: Google Maps

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Shu Ying Liu was killed by a driver turning right at Ninth Avenue and 41st Street. Community Board 4 asked DOT for exclusive pedestrian crossing time here in 2008. Image: Google Maps

Manhattan Community Board 4 has renewed its call for safety improvements at the Hell’s Kitchen crossing where an elderly woman was killed by a driver last week. The request comes five years after a resolution that asked for exclusive crossing time for pedestrians at the deadly intersection, and is the latest episode in a years-long, and largely futile, campaign by neighborhood residents for split phase signals.

Shu Ying Liu, 69, was struck by a dump truck driver on the morning of February 5 as the driver made a right turn from Ninth Avenue to 41st Street, according to reports. Jack Montelbano, of Bayonne, was later arrested for leaving the scene.

“Ms. Shu Ying Liu lived on 54th Street in Hell’s Kitchen,” wrote Christine Berthet, of CB 4 and CHEKPEDS, in an email to Streetsblog. “She used to be the managing editor of a large magazine in China. According to both her attorney and her son, she was an optimist, cheerful with an outgoing personality.”

“She was doing research in healthy food, healthy living and was coaching and teaching her children to live a healthy life. Her son would talk to her once or twice weekly and relied on her for advice on health.”

In early 2008, a resolution adopted by CB 4 said that a recent reconfiguration of the intersection of Ninth and 41st, which sees heavy traffic from New Jersey-bound cars, trucks, and buses, posed a danger to pedestrians. The board asked for “emergency interim measures,” including a neckdown on 41st Street, to reduce crossing distance, and a shift in location for the crosswalk on the south side of the intersection, to increase pedestrian visibility.

Finally, the resolution stated: “On the west side, install a turn arrow red signal to give pedestrians a dedicated phase to cross safely.” If the crash that killed Liu occurred as described by the media, with adequate exclusive crossing time it’s less likely she would have been in the driver’s path.

“This issue is not new — there have already been 46 injuries and two fatalities in recent years at this corner,” reads a letter from CB 4, sent to DOT yesterday [PDF]. “The time has come to tackle this issue with urgency.”

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Why should these women be able to cross the street safely when we can prescribe them drugs instead? Photo: Ilya Boyandin/Flickr

Once in a while, a story comes along that perfectly encapsulates how dangerous traffic forces people to re-orient their lives. This example, relayed to us by a reader, comes from a recent lecture at the psychiatry department of a major Manhattan hospital about anxiety disorders in the elderly.

The lecturer brought up the case of an 80-year-old woman who uses a walker. The woman told her doctor that she was afraid to cross First Avenue to make her appointments because of the traffic. She wasn’t afraid of leaving her apartment or walking across smaller streets; it was First Avenue that scared her.

So the doctor prescribed Xanax to help her deal with her anxiety.

Xanax was not endorsed by this group of doctors due to its side effects, but our reader was taken aback when no one — neither the presenters nor the audience — raised concerns about applying the diagnosis of an anxiety disorder to an elderly person simply because she is concerned about crossing a dangerous street.

“Nobody said, ‘This is an inappropriate response to a dangerous situation,’” our tipster recalled. “Have we so given up on managing our streets in a rational way that we’re now just medicating people?”

Today NYC DOT announced its progress on a series of measures designed to promote safer riding habits among commercial cyclists. The agency has held 17 multi-lingual forums around the city to educate businesses and commercial cyclists about how to ride safely, and distributed kits with reflective vests, bells, and lights to 1,500 commercial cyclists through a partnership with delivery.com.

DOT also announced that enforcement of a package of laws passed by the City Council last October will start in April. The new laws, which include a requirement that commercial cyclists take an online safety course, were touted by City Council Transportation Chair James Vacca as a way to end the “wild, wild west” environment on city streets.

Now that Vacca’s laws are about to take effect, it’s worth looking back at what’s happened since he started his big safety push.

Back at the end of 2011, Vacca told the Post that he wanted to ramp up bike enforcement in the year ahead because, “My priority is protection of the pedestrians, and my mantra is that the pedestrian is always right, even when the pedestrian is wrong. Everything I do is governed by that basic foundation.”

In the year after Vacca proclaimed that everything he does is governed by the imperative to protect pedestrians, more than 130 pedestrians have been killed by drivers in New York City. None have been killed by cyclists.

But it was the commercial cyclist legislation that sailed through Vacca’s committee in the fall, while bills urging reforms to NYPD’s broken crash investigation procedures, which let deadly drivers get back behind the wheel without so much as a slap on the wrist, continue to languish.

So you’ve got to question whether protecting pedestrians is really a priority for the chair of the transportation committee, since improving pedestrian safety seems to fall somewhere below “making it legal to park in front of your own curb cut” on Vacca’s to-do list.

Image: Google Earth/GGW

Earlier this week we looked at the intersection of Route 355 and Shady Grove Road near Rockville, Maryland, flagged by Ben Ross at Greater Greater Washington for being especially hostile to pedestrians, even though it’s the site of a bus stop. We asked if it might be the worst intersection in the country and put out a call for readers to send their nominations for the title.

As some readers pointed out, the Rockville intersection at least has sidewalks on all four corners and some refuges for pedestrians caught mid-crossing, so it certainly can’t be nation’s worst. Several other submissions landed in our inbox where the engineers let the sheer car-centricity of the roads overwhelm the meager provisions for pedestrians even more.

Wouldn’t you know it: We received three nominations from Florida, which Transportation for America has singled out as the most dangerous state for pedestrians. One reader sent us this stunner: State Route 7 and Forest Hill Boulevard in Wellington, Florida. From this satellite picture, it looks like a walk around this intersection would cross 45 lanes, plus — is that a bike lane? Wouldn’t want to be in the middle of that on a Cannondale:

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Residents of the Bronx’s Norwood section have long dealt with missing sidewalks and crosswalks on the street encircling Williamsbridge Oval Park, the neighborhood’s central green space. After getting stonewalled by DOT’s Bronx Borough Office, neighborhood leaders are now hoping a Slow Zone application will get DOT to take action.

DOT's Bronx Borough Office has not been receptive to calls for crosswalks and sidewalks around Williamsbridge Oval Park. Photo: Google Maps

Since 2009, advocates have been asking for basic improvements that would slow speeding traffic and make it safer for people crossing to the park. ”They’re narrow streets and yet, it’s amazing how fast people will go around it,” said Assembly Member Jeffrey Dinowitz, who recently helped secure a Slow Zone for nearby Riverdale.

Instead of a long-term solution, the neighborhood has received piecemeal fixes: a striped buffer at the intersection with Bainbridge Avenue, which drivers have learned to ignore, followed by a fresh coat for existing road markings that had faded away. A speed hump was installed at the request of Council Member G. Oliver Koppell in July 2012, while crosswalks and a sidewalk remain elusive.

In August 2012, fed up after the borough office had failed to make progress, Friends of the Williamsbridge Oval sent a letter to Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan asking her to intervene and deliver the requested safety improvements.

On January 23, DOT and Community Board 7 hosted a forum to discuss potential fixes for intersections next to the park. DOT staff spoke about temporary solutions, such as painted curb extensions and chicanes, but not crosswalks or sidewalks. The agency says it is processing feedback from the workshop and will have a proposal for the community board in the future. DOT did not provide a timeline for the proposal.

Meanwhile, enthusiasm is building for an application to DOT’s Slow Zone program, which would lower the speed limit to 20 mph and introduce traffic calming measures to the neighborhood.

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Photo: Nathan H.

The Times reported yesterday that DOT is in the process of taking down all of the city’s “Don’t Honk” signs. Ostensibly the signs are being removed in tandem with efforts to declutter the visual environment. For better or worse, it’s also a tacit admission that they probably don’t do very much good.

Other signs we’d like to see disappear are these victim-blaming pedestrian warnings. Posted in 2011 as part of the “Curbside Haiku” series, one sign cautions women against wearing dark clothing at night, lest they be struck by a motorist. Another one, in Midtown of all places, likens stepping into traffic to buying a lottery ticket.

These signs reinforce the false premise that motor vehicle traffic is a force of nature, as impervious to human intervention as ball lightning. They also perpetuate the notion that city pedestrians are asking to be injured or killed simply by walking outside.

Instead of brow-beating victims of traffic violence, maybe DOT could consider adding a message to the streetscape, as suggested by Streetsblog reader Jeff: “Can we just hang signs that say ‘Please don’t kill people’ from all traffic signals?”

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