Streetsblog New York City

Twenty years ago today, as throngs of New Yorkers were sunning themselves in Washington Square Park on the first warm day of spring, a 1987 Oldsmobile zoomed down Washington Place, gunned through the stop sign at Greene Street, plowed across the sidewalk at Washington Square East and smashed into the park. When the car finally came to rest against a couple of benches near the center of the park, five people lay dead or dying. Twenty-seven people were injured, some of them grievously.

The Washington Square Massacre, as the incident came to be known, left deep marks on NYC transportation advocacy. Members of Transportation Alternatives and Auto-Free NY had already been sounding the alarm over “off-road” pedestrian fatalities, such as that of 7-year-old Gavin Cato in Crown Heights the previous August, and were campaigning for car-free zones in Greenwich Village, including the very stretch of Washington Place that had served as the launching pad for the killer Olds. The carnage in Washington Square Park spurred us to redouble our efforts and laid the ground for the street memorials that fostered citywide awareness of endangerment of pedestrians and cyclists, several years later.

Another of those affected was Gail Collins, now a New York Times columnist but then a writer for Newsday. Collins had already decried sidewalk killings, do-nothing DAs, the “rule of two,” and windshield-privileged legislators who “drive a great deal more than they walk [and] pass laws in their own image.” On April 24, 1992, the day after the massacre, she published her classic broadside, “Pedestrians Losing the Battle.” Here are some excerpts (sadly, Collins’ Newsday columns are not available online):

We are not safe from cars anyplace, people. Not on the sidewalk, not on your front lawn.

Two weeks ago it was a blind man and his dog on Fifth Avenue. Before that, a woman walking her kids to school, and a pregnant teenager in Brooklyn. Before that, a mentally handicapped woman on her way to work in Queens. All of them hit by cars while standing on the sidewalk.

In a city this full of pedestrians, the automobile should always be on the defensive, treading carefully. But instead, the cars seem to be in charge. They can go anywhere, do anything.

When it comes to cars, New York City is wide open. Virtually nobody who speeds or runs a red light gets a ticket.

We need a level playing field between people and cars.

Twenty years later, it’s tempting to feel that nothing has changed — particularly in the wake of the three-car smash-up on Saturday night near Bryant Park in which a speeding Jaguar somersaulted onto the sidewalk, injuring four pedestrians in addition to six vehicle passengers.

That would be a mistake. NYC pedestrian fatalities have fallen by 50 percent from their early-1990s levels — with sidewalk killings apparently down at around the same rate, from a dozen a year (PDF, see pp. 37-38) to half-a-dozen.

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Staten Island’s Howard Avenue was once known as Serpentine Road. Though the moniker was mostly due to the serpentinite in the hill’s bedrock, the road also winds and writhes up Grymes Hill, the second highest point on Staten Island. The neighborhood is home to two college campuses, Wagner and St. John’s, the secondary schools Notre Dame Academy and P.S. 35, century-old homes and breathtaking views stretching beyond the north shore to encompass Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Bayonne.

Howard Avenue is also plagued by rampant speeding and careless driving, with poor accommodations for walking and biking. According to Crashstat, since 1997, 17 pedestrians and two bicyclists have been injured along Howard from Arlo Road to Clove Road — a span of less than a mile. Now, after a hit-and-run crash claimed the life of Wagner nursing student R.J. Tillman, a budding local movement for safer walking and biking is poised to make a difference in a borough where politicians are notoriously loath to buy into complete streets.

It was on Howard Avenue that Tillman was fatally struck by a hit-and-run driver while riding his bicycle on February 12. During the memorial ride tribute to Tillman that I participated in last month, the crowd of 50 had to congregate on the asphalt roadway, since there was no sidewalk on the side of the street where the ghost bike was placed. Two participants had to direct oncoming traffic around us, as cars sped around the curve and honked during the proceedings.

Last Wednesday, a group determined to improve safety along on the street gathered at the Wagner College campus for the Howard Avenue Traffic Safety Community Forum. The workshop was the latest effort in a years-long campaign to get the city to make Howard Avenue a better street for walking and biking. While several requests for safety improvements from Wagner staff had been rebuffed by Staten Island DOT Commissioner Thomas Cocola over the last three years, momentum for change is growing.

Recently Cocola has signaled greater willingness to work with community members concerned about safety; two weeks ago he agreed to tour Wagner to assess dangerous locations. And Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro and local City Council Member Debi Rose both sent representatives to last week’s workshop.

They heard Wagner students and staff and local residents describe the dangerous speeding and disregard for public safety that prevails on Howard Avenue today. Laura Barlament, who works for Wagner doing communications and marketing, has taken a leading role in advocating for safer conditions. Barlament was struck by a driver while biking on Howard in June 2011. “This is just a neighborhood,” she said. “To feel unsafe on a daily basis is just not right.”

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Manhattan Community Board 3 signed off on a package of safety improvements for deadly Delancey Street Tuesday night, according to State Senator Daniel Squadron’s office. The plan, presented by NYC DOT in February, narrows the crossing distance at 14 out of 19 intersections between the Williamsburg Bridge and the Bowery, but doesn’t substantially alter signal timing or traffic lanes heading to and from the bridge. It’s the low-hanging fruit to prevent deaths and injuries on a street that sees a horrific amount of carnage.

Every year, dozens of pedestrians and cyclists are injured or killed on Delancey — 134 between 2008 and 2010 alone, according to Transportation Alternatives. In the past year, drivers on Delancey took the lives of pedestrians Dashane Santana and Patricia Cuevas and cyclist Jeffrey Axelrod.

Since last September a coalition of elected officials, community groups, and advocates under the umbrella of the Delancey Street Safety Working Group have been pushing for changes. Squadron’s office, which convened the working group, said work on the safety improvements is expected to begin in June.

“Our work doesn’t end here,” Squadron said in the statement, “and our working group will continue to study and improve Delancey and its surrounding streets to prevent future tragedies and protect pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers.”

One of the year’s most exciting street safety projects is on track to get better. Thanks to a recent set of recommendations from Community Board 4, the extension of the protected bike lanes on Eighth and Ninth Avenues will include additional sidewalk expansions and on-street bike parking. Though DOT didn’t adopt all of the board’s ideas — most notably, the agency is leaving a gap in the physical protection for cyclists in front of the Port Authority Bus Terminal — on the West Side, the community board’s requests are helping to build a better bike lane.

The Eighth and Ninth Avenue project, which will extended protected bike lanes from the low 30s to 42nd Street this spring and then up to 59th Street in the fall, was first approved by CB 4 last October. The chaotic Midtown streets badly need the redesign: Between 2005 and 2011, 14 pedestrians were killed in traffic crashes on these blocks. In addition to the new bike and pedestrian infrastructure, the project is expected to improve safety by narrowing each travel lane by two feet.

While the community board wholeheartedly endorsed the project, it had a number of recommendations to make Eighth and Ninth Avenues even better places for walking and biking. Some of those have been incorporated into the project and are now set to become a reality.

In three locations, pedestrians packed into cramped Midtown sidewalks are going to get a little bit of breathing room. Sidewalk extensions will be added to the west side of Eighth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets, the northeast corner of Ninth and 41st, and the southwest corner of Eighth and 57th, according to a draft of letter from the board to DOT, which the board shared with Streetsblog.

Even more sidewalk space could be cleared up by adding on-street bike racks in former parking spaces, or bike corrals. Believing that bicycles locked to poles and scaffolding were taking away too much pedestrian space, the board requested the corrals last fall. DOT said that the bike parking could be installed in 2013 (though the board wants them now), and would most likely be placed next to bike-share stations. The city’s first bike corral was just installed last summer.

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Sidewalks, bike lanes, traffic calming projects — they save lives. Not just by protecting cyclists and pedestrians (not to mention motorists), but by encouraging physical activity that leads to a healthy life.

Of course, it can be hard to convince politicians to see things in those terms when it’s time to pony up for walking and biking infrastructure. That is the brilliance of this new tool from the World Health Organization.

The WHO, which is on a mission to rein in the worldwide epidemic of traffic deaths and injuries, has developed a tool that measures the health impacts of bike and pedestrian infrastructure projects, calculating cost-benefit analyses as well as the economic value of reduced mortality.

Of course you need to do a little advance preparation before using the tool. You’ll need to have a fair amount of information about local travel habits at your disposal. (For example, you’ll be prompted to estimate the percentage of people who currently take walking trips and the average length of the trip.) But it’s the type of info your local metro planning agency should have publicly available. Worst case scenario, you have to perform a survey.

The tool is recommended for planners and engineers as well as advocacy groups.

This is the first in a series of reports about sustainable transportation policies in Mexico City. Last week, Streetsblog participated in a tour of the city led by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Upcoming installments will cover the city’s transit expansions, particularly its new bus rapid transit lines, and its bicycle planning.

Reclaiming Mexico City’s Calle Regina for pedestrians proved more difficult than simply closing the historical street to traffic. If anything, drivers had more trouble passing through the area than those on foot.

“All the space was taken by vendors,” said Walter Hook, the CEO of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. “It was a little bit like a war when they got rid of them.” As the administration of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, a former police chief, cleared the area, authorities found caches of drugs and guns, said Hook. Different colored tarps announced which gangs protected each vendor. Only after removing the vendors could officials turn their attention to making Calle Regina car free.

On the Calle Francisco I. Madero, the challenge to pedestrianization was more traditional: the opposition of small businesses along the narrow street. Madero is “the most symbolic connection, maybe, in the country,” said Daniel Escotto, head of Mexico City’s Public Space Authority. On one end of the street is the Zócalo, the central square that has been the spiritual heart of the country from when it hosted the chief temple of Tenochtitlan through Spanish colonization to the political turmoil of today. On the other end is the city’s single busiest intersection, its fine arts museum, and its oldest park.

Despite enormous pedestrian volumes, Madero’s business owners, largely local shopkeepers, resisted all efforts to take away motor vehicle access, said Escotto. “Let me just have one day, with cones,” Escotto recalled asking the local chamber of commerce.

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After a long and circuitous path, the fate of protected bike lanes on East Harlem’s First and Second Avenues may be decided in a community board vote Tuesday night.

First the city promised protected lanes and pedestrian refuge islands to the neighborhood along with Select Bus Service. Then it walked back that commitment, limiting new bicycle and pedestrian facilities to downtown segments of First and Second. The neighborhood mobilized, going so far as to rally on the steps of City Hall with City Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito and State Senator José Serrano, eventually winning back an offer of the safety improvements. Community Board 11 quickly endorsed the plan in a vote of 47-3, only to rescind its approval when local businesses complained.

Now, after some consensus-building in a working group suggested by Borough President Scott Stringer, CB 11′s transportation committee has again endorsed the bike lanes unanimously. If the full board votes for the street improvements another time tomorrow night, the Department of Transportation will move forward with installation of the parking-protected lanes in East Harlem.

East Harlem is a neighborhood badly in need of this kind of pedestrian and bicycle-friendly redesign. It has some of the highest levels of cycling in the city despite woefully inadequate bike infrastructure. Public health officials have rallied around the proposed protected lanes, hoping that they get more people riding and walking in a neighborhood that struggles with high asthma and diabetes rates.

Community Board 11 will meet tomorrow night, March 20, at 6:30 p.m. The meeting will be held in the auditorium of P.S. 30, at 144-176 E. 128th Street (between Lexington and 3rd Avenue).

Staten Island’s North Shore is one of the city’s great sites of opportunity. The neighborhoods along the Kill Van Kull are twice as dense as the rest of Staten Island, but lack any transit option beyond the bus. There are historic town centers at St. George and Port Richmond, but car-centric planning deadens street life. The waterfront, much of which still hosts a vibrant maritime industry, is only accessible to the public at three locations in six miles.

The opportunities aren’t lost on the city. With the release of North Shore 2030, a plan put out in December by the New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Department of City Planning, the stage has been set for opening up the waterfront, fostering mixed-use development, and making streets safe and friendly for pedestrians and cyclists. Realizing the full extent of that vision, however, largely hinges on the success of plans to restore rapid transit to the North Shore.

To learn more about the plan, this Wednesday I headed over to the North Shore, where Staten Islanders Meredith Sladek and Nick Rozak took me on a half-day bike tour of the area. North Shore 2030 is a broad planning effort, looking at everything from transportation to bolstering the North Shore’s significant maritime industry. At the center of the plan is a proposal to encourage traditional mixed-use developments, with residences on top of retail, along certain corridors, including Richmond Terrace, Castleton Avenue, and Victory Boulevard.

Pedestrian-oriented housing and commerce would be clustered in four “neighborhood centers.” Along the North Shore, there are a number of older neighborhoods with walkable bones, especially where rail and ferry stations existed prior to the opening of the Verrazano Bridge. As Staten Island has shifted toward the automobile, however, those areas have fallen on harder times, with commercial activity moving into malls and shopping centers. At the corner of Port Richmond Avenue and Richmond Terrace, for example, one block from a former rail station and ferry terminal, older pedestrian-oriented buildings have shuttered windows and “for rent” signs. North Shore 2030 reimagines the intersection full of pedestrians walking between the waterfront, shops, and their apartments.

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It might not be as bold or attention-grabbing as the overhaul of Times Square and Herald Square, but a set of changes made to New York City’s third-busiest pedestrian intersection is having its own quiet success. In Downtown Flushing, a 2010 project that expanded sidewalks, daylighted dangerous intersections, and introduced numerous turn restrictions is boosting safety even while traffic flows more smoothly, according to a new evaluation from NYC DOT [PDF].

Downtown Flushing’s streets needed an upgrade perhaps more than anywhere else in Queens. The Main Street subway station, fed by 21 bus routes, is the busiest outside Manhattan. In one 12-hour period, DOT counted 97,000 pedestrians on a single block of Main Street. And in 2009, more pedestrians were hit by cars at the corner of Union Street and Northern Boulevard than any other location in the borough.

Few of the changes installed by DOT in July of 2010 reshaped the street, but together, they have noticeably improved how the area’s transportation system functions. In four locations, DOT used paint and bollards to expand the sidewalk, creating 700 square feet of new pedestrian space. At seven locations, parking spaces were removed to daylight intersections and improve visibility. New turn restrictions at five intersections reduced conflicts between automobiles and pedestrians crossing the street, but buses are allowed through at certain locations.

The overall safety effect has been substantial, according to DOT’s recently released evaluation. Crashes with injuries declined by 20 percent in the study area (Prince Street to Bowne Street, 35th Avenue to Sanford Avenue). Total injuries fell by 29 percent. Drivers and their passengers benefited the most from the safety gains, with injuries falling by more than a half. The improvement to pedestrian safety was more modest, with only an eight percent reduction.

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Photographer and blogger Jay Mallin, whose video of Woodbridge, VA police ticketing injured pedestrians was picked up by Streetsblog NYC a year ago, has turned his attention to the congressional transportation debacle.

Mallin’s new video is entitled “Get a Car,” and is named for the apparent message of the House transportation bill, and, to a lesser degree, the Senate bill. “The new bills are called ‘transportation’ bills,” Mallin says, “but the reality is they would pretty much limit Americans to their cars.” Walking and biking, it seems to Mallin, “are strictly for kids” according to Congressmen like Bill Shuster, who claimed during this month’s marathon T&I markup that his fellow Pennsylvanians loved their kids as much as anybody, right before voting to eliminate the Safe Routes to School program.

Of course, walking and biking aren’t just for kids, and Mallin uses powerful stories to get that point across, like the car wash attendant who was killed while biking to work on a street with paltry sidewalks and no bike lane, and Raquel Nelson, who was charged with vehicular homicide after a drunk driver ran down her son as he tried to walk from a bus stop to his home on the other side of the street.

With its transportation legislation, Congress seems to have just one answer for Americans who struggle in a car-centric system: Get a car.