Streetsblog New York City

Fourth Avenue could get a road diet along 13 blocks in Bay Ridge, with added pedestrian islands and curb extensions. Images: DOT

Elevated from today’s headline stack: The Brooklyn Paper has a recap of DOT’s presentation to the Fourth Avenue Task Force last week, outlining options for the major avenue in Bay Ridge. The changes include a left-turn lane at 75th Street, a concrete pedestrian island at 86th Street, and a road diet along 13 blocks that would replace a four-lane configuration with two lanes plus turning bays.

The recommendations came after a January 24 workshop [PDF] where residents said their top concerns included speeding, double parking, and pedestrian safety. DOT’s measurements back up the concerns: on Fourth Avenue between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., up to 63 percent of drivers clocked in over the 30 mph speed limit.

A source who attended the meeting says the ideas were mostly well-received, and Bay Ridge has an active contingent of neighborhood street safety advocates, led by Maureen Landers. But of course, a presentation about traffic calming in Bay Ridge wouldn’t be complete without an appearance from Community Board 10 member Allen Bortnick, who infamously lobbied to acquire the curbside parking space in front of his home. While DOT’s models show the change will have a minimal impact on the street’s automobile capacity (as engineer Dan Burden explains in this Streetfilm, road diets help traffic flow in a smoother, more orderly fashion), Bortnick saw a conspiracy. “Sadik-Khan is really Sadist-Khan, and she never met a car she liked,” he told Brooklyn Paper. “They’re duping the public.” So, mystery solved. Bortnick, appointed to CB 10 most recently by Council Member Vincent Gentile, is the one person in New York who takes Post columnist Andrea Peyser seriously.

Fourth Avenue, running six miles from Atlantic Avenue in Park Slope to Shore Road in Bay Ridge, has already received a makeover in Sunset Park, and a companion effort is underway in Park Slope. The next step in Bay Ridge: DOT will modify the plan to address feedback before presenting to CB 10. A date has not yet been set.

A tipster sends in this photo of Katonah Avenue at P.S. 19, where pedestrians have waited more than a month for crosswalks.

In early February, DOT repaved Katonah Avenue in the Woodlawn section of the Bronx, leaving a smooth black surface with no markings. Shortly after a nearby resident called 311 a few weeks ago, a crew was sent out to mark where the crosswalks should be, and the double-yellow stripe was installed. Residents are still waiting for crosswalks. It’s a particular worry at P.S. 19, where students cross Katonah Avenue daily.

“I waited several weeks, and nothing,” our tipster says. “I just called it in. They still haven’t done the crosswalks.”

The hold-up, which brings to mind the national road paint shortage of 2010, doesn’t seem to be caused by other road work scheduled for Katonah Avenue: the only road construction permit for the street is for one block of gas line work over the next month.

Streetsblog has a few inquiries in about the delay. We’ll let you know if we get an explanation.

Eight city council members have put a portion of their discretionary capital funds up for a vote as part of an exercise in participatory budgeting, which allows residents to decide how the money will be spent in their own neighborhoods. Votes in each district are approaching soon, and there’s an opportunity to support livable streets projects.

With participatory budgeting, residents of a City Council district have a say in how $1 million in discretionary capital funds are spent. Photo: Daniel Latorre/Flickr

The participating council members are David Greenfield, Brad Lander, Stephen Levin, and Jumaane D. Williams of Brooklyn; Dan Halloran, Eric Ulrich, and Mark Weprin of Queens; and Melissa Mark-Viverito of Manhattan. Each has put up $1 million in discretionary capital funds, with residents submitting ideas that will appear in early April on a final ballot, open to district residents age 16 and older.

In Lander’s district, stretching from Cobble Hill to Borough Park, there are five projects related to pedestrian safety and livable streets:

• A Safe Routes to School project at Yeshiva Torah Temimah, on Ocean Parkway near 18th Avenue [PDF];
• Extending an upcoming DOT capital project on Church Avenue by adding curb extensions at Coney Island and McDonald Avenues [PDF];
• Constructing a larger plaza space at the triangle intersection of Church Avenue, 14th Avenue, and 35th Street;
• Adding capital funds to an existing DOT project on Hicks Street, to gain concrete curb extensions and improve visibility at the intersection with Congress Street;
• Creation of a new concrete pedestrian plaza adjacent to a community garden at Van Brunt Street and Hamilton Avenue.

Lander is hosting a science fair-style expo where residents can learn more about the projects on the ballot, this Thursday from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Park Slope branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.

Council Member Stephen Levin’s office identified two projects that may be of interest in the district, stretching from Park Slope to Greenpoint along the East River waterfront:

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Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer holds a petition signed by over 500 LaGuardia Community Colllege students in July asking DOT to improve pedestrian safety along Thomson Avenue. Photo: Stephen Miller

This morning, with constant horn honking and engine noise in the background, Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer called on DOT to study and implement traffic calming improvements along Thomson Avenue in the wake of the death of 16 year-old Tenzin Drudak, who was standing on the sidewalk when a driver jumped the curb and plowed into a group of pedestrians on Monday.

Van Bramer was joined by students from LaGuardia Community College, area high school students, Community Board 2 Chair Joseph Conley, and Transportation Alternatives.

“We cannot risk our lives to come into school any more. Please do something,” said LaGuardia Community College student government president Shah Amanat.

Last July, nearly 500 LaGuardia students signed a petition asking DOT for more signal time to get across the street. In November, DOT replied, saying that the signals were functioning properly and that it would not adjust them.

“We should never, ever, ever in this city sacrifice lives or put lives at risk in order to move cars faster. That is wrong,” added Van Bramer, who called on DOT to immediately study Thomson Avenue from Van Dam Street to Skillman Avenue for traffic calming, signal retiming, and additional bollards.

In the last few years, DOT has added safety improvements to other bridge approaches, including Delancey Street near the Williamsburg Bridge, on the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge, and nearby, at Queensboro Plaza and along Queens Boulevard – but not on Thomson.

DOT said it is in the process of evaluating curb extensions at the intersection where Drudak was killed. ”The agency was already working with LaGuardia Community College to improve pedestrian safety and access at this location as part of the college’s planned expansion,” said spokesperson Scott Gastel. Streetsblog asked DOT if the agency has a timeline for implementing traffic calming measures but has not received a reply.

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In front of an audience of about 60 residents at I.S. 145 last night, city representatives and advocates answered questions about traffic safety in Jackson Heights. The forum was held in the wake of the death of 11-year-old I.S. 145 student Miguel Torres, who was run over by a dump truck driver at Northern Boulevard and 80th Street while crossing with the light.

115th Precinct commanding officer Michael Michael A. Cody speaks at Tuesday night's forum. Photo: Stephen Miller

“It broke my heart when I had to see the mother on the corner of 80th Street, hysterical because she had lost her 11-year-old son,” Council Member Daniel Dromm said. “The urgency to have this kind of forum became even more apparent.”

Organized by Dromm, the Jackson Heights Green Alliance, and Transportation Alternatives, the forum featured the council member, DOT Queens Borough Deputy Commissioner Dalila Hall, TA’s Ya-Ting Liu, and Deputy Inspector Michael A. Cody, commanding officer of NYPD’s 115th Precinct.

“Speeding, unequivocally, is the number one cause of traffic deaths in New York City,” far outpacing distracted driving, alcohol and illegal drugs, Liu said as the meeting began.

Deputy Inspector Cody, who started at the 115th Precinct six weeks ago, said the precinct has issued 39 speeding tickets so far this year. That’s on par with last year, when it issued 177 speeding tickets — about one every other day. By comparison, the precinct issued 1,090 tickets for tinted windows in 2012.

The department’s current lack of attention to speeding stands in contrast with how Cody spoke about intoxicated drivers. “A lot of times when I was a young officer, DWI was not considered a fashionable arrest,” he said. “We’ve come a long way … it’s a key part of our crime-fighting strategy.”

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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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Melanie Canon, a doctor based in East Harlem, was the first person to aid 6-year-old Amar Diarrassouba after he has fatally struck by a tractor-trailer driver Thursday morning. The New York Times’ City Room blog published her wrenching account today.

The driver who killed Amar Diarrassouba was operating an oversized truck on a street that is not a designated truck route. Photo: 1010 WINS via Gothamist

Canon raises the question that the city’s tabloid press has been too fixated on an absent crossing guard to bother with: What are big rigs doing on city streets where children walk every day?

People often ask me how I keep calm in such dreadful situations, how I keep thoughts of my own child and her safety from clouding my mind. For me, the anger and sorrow come later, as I reflect on the statistics that tell us that accidents like this are preventable.

We now know that Amar was hit by a tractor-trailer turning from congested, narrow 117th Street onto First Avenue. The driver of that huge truck said he hadn’t seen the boy, couldn’t see him, from the high perch of his mammoth truck. He didn’t hear the sickening thud, either.

This is where I come back to my training – not my medical training, but my training as a mother and community activist — where my sorrow and anger will drive me to act, to join my community in pushing for change.

Trucks this size shouldn’t be on residential streets, especially as kids are walking to and from school. ?In this country, cars and trucks kill more children than guns do. We can do better, for Amar and for all of us.

Looks like Walk Score has some competition in the business of rating walkability.

A new app from Walkonomics seeks to rate streets for walking according to their physical characteristics. Image: Walkonomics

The U.K.-based startup Walkonomics recently unveiled an app that aims to measure the walkability of streets based on physical characteristics. The new Walkonomics app — currently available only for Manhattan, San Francisco and the United Kingdom — uses open source data to rank streets on a scale of one to five.

Whereas Walk Score bases its rankings largely on the accessibility of nearby amenities, Walkonomics looks at sidewalk-level measurements such as street widths, traffic levels, 311 cleanliness reports, crime statistics, and pedestrian injuries. So you could say that Walk Score, which has been a valuable tool in the real estate industry, is geared toward measuring the walkability of neighborhoods, while Walkonomics tells you about the pedestrian-friendliness of specific blocks.

So far Walkonomics has rated some 600,000 streets, factoring in characteristics such as traffic safety, crossing distance, and sidewalk width.

The mobile app, which is available for iPhone and Android, is still rough around the edges, and it will be interesting to see how it evolves in future releases. Walkonomics’ Adam Davies says his company is working to add all major cities in the U.S. This year they hope to provide data for Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston.

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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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?”