Streetsblog New York City

It’s been nearly a year since we first ran Robin Urban Smith’s Streetfilm on the Prospect Park West redesign. A lot has happened since then, but the lane is working as well as ever and I can’t think of a better way to wrap up this important day for NYC street safety policy than to have another look at this video of DOT’s work in action.

After the jump, a reminder of Prospect Park West’s prior incarnation as a three-lane speedway…

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Every afternoon, all four lanes of Varick Street are packed solid with traffic heading to the Holland Tunnel. Drivers block crosswalks and cross-streets as they press forward, hoping the traffic would continue to move ahead and guessing wrong. On Friday afternoons, you can hear the honking from Streetsblog HQ, ten blocks over and twelve stories up.

The unpleasant and unsafe conditions created at the mouth of the tunnel are a top priority for the Hudson Square Connection, the business improvement district in charge of the area between Houston and Canal and Sixth Avenue and Greenwich Street. The BID’s latest focus is on keeping crosswalks clear for pedestrians in this gridlocked part of the city.

“Unlike other business improvements districts which were created to address security or sanitation issues, in this neighborhood our businesses want something done about the traffic,” said BID president Ellen Baer in a statement. “We need to even the playing field so that pedestrians can safely get from one place to another in the district.”

Already, the BID has worked with the Department of Transportation to install yield to pedestrian signs, move stop lines for vehicles back from crosswalks, and create exclusive pedestrian phases into the signal timing at area intersections.

In its most recent effort to make the area more friendly for pedestrians, the BID is hiring pedestrian managers to keep intersections on Varick clear. NYPD traffic enforcement agents are already stationed on Varick below Spring Street, said Baer, but the gridlock extends all the way north to Houston. The pedestrian managers will keep drivers from blocking crosswalks or intersections along the rest of Varick.

Said Baer, “Our priority here, with our pedestrian traffic managers, is to assure the convenience and safety of pedestrians.” Compare that to how an NYPD officer near the Lincoln Tunnel described his job: “My objective is the cars, not the people.”

The BID is also working toward a comprehensive reimagining of the area’s streetscape, said Baer, which should be unveiled towards the beginning of next year. “This area, which was originally the printing district years ago, was an area that worked well for printers,” she said. “Now you have a more dense population here.”

Baer wouldn’t reveal what might be in the plan while it’s still under development, but a few clues are available on the BID’s website. Signe Nielsen, a principal at the landscape architecture firm leading the streetscape redesign work, suggested in an interview that “Other ideas include street closings or shared streets that can become seasonal or weekend places that can offer different opportunities for interaction and engagement.” One flyer for a public meeting on the plan brought up the idea of “reclaiming/rebalancing road space” as a topic for discussion. This definitely seems like a plan and a neighborhood worth keeping an eye on.

On July 18, Governor Cuomo signed into law legislation requiring that all large trucks driven on New York City streets have crossover mirrors to allow their drivers to see what’s directly in front of them. The law will take effect 180 days after the governor signed it, in mid-January.

Once installed, the crossover mirrors will save lives. Nationally, 71 percent of all pedestrians killed by trucks were struck by the front of the truck, often because the driver couldn’t see into the blind spot in front of the cab. Moses Englender, a four-year-old killed by a truck while tricycling in Brooklyn this May, became the tragic face for the law.

The extra mirrors might have saved the life of the cyclist killed by a truck driver in East Williamsburg yesterday. According to the Daily News, the driver struck the cyclist with his vehicle’s front fender without even noticing the impact. We don’t have enough information to know precisely what happened in that crash, but if the cyclist had been more visible to the driver as he rode in front of him, the driver might have been able to take action at the last second and avoid the worst.

Three other important transportation bills still require Governor Cuomo’s signature: complete streets legislation, Mayor Bloomberg’s taxi bill, and the transit lockbox. Cuomo is expected to sign the complete streets law, which his office helped craft. The taxi bill requires some technical amendments in the legislature before it can be presented to the governor. Cuomo has not publicly taken a position on the lockbox bill, which would make it harder for the governor and state legislature to steal dedicated funds from transit riders to use elsewhere in the budget.

We have an update from NYPD on the curb-jumping motorist who struck and injured a pedestrian in Midtown this morning. Police said the driver hit a 73-year-old woman on the sidewalk while attempting to back into a parking space on 58th Street. The victim was sent to New York Presbyterian Hospital with serious head injuries, according to NYPD; she is now in stable condition.

The driver remained at the scene, the police said, so as usual, “no criminality is suspected.”

Reader Liz Patek sends this account from a crash scene in Midtown this morning:

As I was biking through Midtown, I came across this scene on West 58th Street between Seventh and Sixth Ave. It happened before I got there, I am guessing about 9/9:30 a.m. A pedestrian, a woman, was hit by the car. She was on the sidewalk when she was hit. According to witnesses, she was sent flying through the glass door of the restaurant, and according to their accounts, she was in pretty bad shape (her leg was severed). The driver was still on the scene. There was also a camera person from CBS 2 and another reporter on the scene. According to another witness account, the woman appeared to be about 55-60 years of age.

Also, according to witnesses, they are not sure if the driver was trying to execute a three-point turn or trying to parallel park and possibly lost control/accelerated in reverse into the woman. The woman was alive when ambulances took her away. Again, this is all accounts from people who either witnessed the accident or arrived just after it happened.

Streetsblog will be following up with NYPD on the outcome of their investigation.

One year ago, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal stood on a traffic island in the middle of the intersection of Amsterdam Avenue, Broadway, and 71st Street to urge the Department of Transportation to install a slew of safety features at what they called “the bowtie of death.” That September, DOT put out a plan to expand sidewalks, add crosswalks and remove traffic lanes from both Broadway and Amsterdam.

This afternoon, Stringer and Rosenthal stood with Upper West Side community leaders on that same traffic island, urging DOT to finally put that safety plan into place. “Not next year, not during the fall, but now,” said Stringer.

Over the last two years, there have been 34 crashes at the intersection, according to Stringer’s office.

DOT had promised to make the safety improvements by this spring, Stringer said. The only change that’s been made so far are the installation of countdown timers on the walk signals. Knowing how much time you have to cross, he said, “is not the same as actually having more time.” Stringer explicitly called for each piece of the DOT safety plan to be installed, including the curb extensions, crosswalks, and the removal of traffic lanes.

“We shouldn’t be standing here today,” said Rosenthal. She’s been pushing for a safety fix for the intersection since 2007, when her office released a report on senior pedestrian safety in the neighborhood with Transportation Alternatives. The dangers of the crossing are so glaring that the Los Angeles Times led off a story on unsafe streets for the elderly with a discussion of that very corner, Rosenthal pointed out.

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Pedestrians over the age of 60 are particularly at risk when walking on the streets of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, a new report from the Tri-State Transportation Campaign shows. According to “Older Pedestrians at Risk,” an updated version of similar research from last year, the pedestrian fatality rate for those over 60 is more than 2.5 times as high as for those under 60. Senior citizens over the age of 75 are likelier still to be killed by cars while walking, with a fatality rate 3.1 times higher than for those under 60.

Between 2007 and 2009, 433 pedestrians over the age of 60 were killed in traffic crashes in the tri-state area. Two hundred and seventy one were killed on roads in downstate New York. Programs like New York City’s Safe Streets for Seniors have saved lives, said Tri-State, but they need additional funding for more widespread implementation.

Bill Ferris, the legislative director for AARP in New York, said the Tri-State report “showed some disturbing trends in how older persons are disproportionately killed walking in their own communities. This is unacceptable to AARP.”

The Tri-State authors identified four reasons that older pedestrians were disproportionately in danger from traffic. Older people are less able to quickly move out of the way of an oncoming vehicle and likely to sustain greater injuries from the same crash, two factors which contribute to an elevated pedestrian fatality rate nationwide. Design-wise, seniors suffer when streets are designed for a younger population, as when traffic lights don’t provide enough time for a slower person to safely cross the street.

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Traffic deaths need to be treated as an ethical imperative to save lives, said representatives from Transportation Alternatives, the Drum Major Institute, and the medical community today at the public release of the new report, “Vision Zero” [PDF].

“It is simply unacceptable for people to die in traffic,” said T.A. Executive Director Paul Steely White, who called for the number of fatalities and serious injuries caused by traffic crashes in New York City to be brought to zero by 2030.

New York City has made impressive gains at improving traffic safety over the last decade, and has the safest streets in the United States. Yet compared to international leaders, the city still lags. In New York, 190 people are injured in traffic crashes on city streets every single day. Ten of them suffer life-altering injuries, losing a limb, perhaps, or receiving traumatic brain damage. Every 35 hours, someone is killed.

“These are all preventable injuries and preventable deaths,” said Mt. Sinai pediatrician Michael Chatham Stevens. “As the CDC [Centers for Disease Control] says, this is a winnable battle.”

To save lives and prevent as many serious injuries as possible, the report authors argue, New York City needs to first comprehend and then communicate the moral implications of allowing violent traffic crashes to continue, when available solutions have already been demonstrated and proven. While dramatic reductions in traffic deaths are within reach, the necessary changes require a coordinated response — including engineering, enforcement, and legislative actions — that cannot succeed without widespread public understanding and buy-in. At a time when local electeds are mobilizing against proven safety measures, the Vision Zero report suggests that the moral necessity of stopping preventable deaths and injuries should guide a campaign to capture the public imagination and sustain political commitment.

The report calls for the mayor to make a high-profile speech committing the city to a “vision zero” policy where traffic deaths are no longer tolerated. Right now, said White, life-saving traffic redesigns are routinely weighed against the convenience of an additional parking space. “By adopting Vision Zero,” he said, “we put this on a moral plateau.”

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It’s getting to the point — probably well past the point, actually — where the non-stop cyclist hate spewing from the New York Post has attained a level of self-parody. So free of fact and full of bald-faced vitriol is the paper’s latest editorial, praising Ray Kelly’s NYPD for a marked increase in cyclist summonses, that it’s tempting to dismiss it as unworthy of thoughtful response.

Basically, the editorialists at the Post believe that everyone on a bike in New York City is an outlaw who has at one time or another endangered the life of a pedestrian. No surprise there. But things get hairy when they aim to support their position with what seems to be an attempt at empirical fact:

Even Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan’s ubiquitous bike lanes haven’t made the streets any safer.

Whether the Post is ignorant of safety gains brought about by bike lanes, or simply chooses to pretend they don’t exist, this is unadulterated crap. Here are a few actual facts to the contrary:

• Since the installation of the protected bike lane on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, injuries to pedestrians are down by 29 percent.
• The protected bike lane on Grand Street has reduced pedestrian injuries by 21 percent.
• A 2008 traffic-calming project on Skillman Ave. and 43rd Ave. in Queens, including bike lanes on both streets, resulted in a “65% reduction in the number of crashes involving injuries to pedestrians on the corridor,” according to city data.
• On First and Second Avenues in Manhattan, injuries to all users are down 8.3 percent following the installation of bike lanes.
• A city study released last summer found that citywide, controlling for other factors, serious crashes on streets with bike lanes were 40 percent less deadly than on other streets.

It could be that the Post is inept at the whole pedestrian safety thing because the paper is so new at it. After years of blaming the victim and doing its damnedest to tear down street designs that have saved lives, it will take a while to turn the ship around.

Unfortunately, the Post has plenty of material to work from. As Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson pointed out on Twitter, over the last five years 766 city pedestrians have been killed by drivers, along with 98 cyclists, while three pedestrians died from collisions with cyclists. Now that the Post editorial board has taken up the cause of street safety, we await a commensurate response. That’d be one motorist-bashing editorial a day for the next two-plus years. And counting.

Over the last decade, nearly 48,000 people were killed in the simple act of walking. Many of them were on streets built only to accommodate fast-moving cars, without safe places for people to walk or cross the street.

Transportation for America’s new report, “Dangerous by Design,” includes rankings of states and metro areas, but you can zoom in even more precisely on your neighborhood or your kids’ school. Check out their interactive map to find pedestrian fatalities and identify trouble spots near you.

And don’t stop there. T4America is encouraging everyone who supports safer streets to take action and tell Congress to preserve funding for bicycle and pedestrian projects.

If a jumbo jet went down every month, Congress would pass laws left and right. If a consumer product injured someone every seven minutes, the feds would shut down production.

Well, that’s exactly how many Americans are being killed and injured in the act of walking pedestrian-unfriendly streets, according to our report, out today. But in the case of pedestrian safety, our federal tax dollars actually go to build streets that are designed to be perilous to children, the elderly and everyone else.

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