Streetsblog New York City

Streetsblog reader Chad Kellogg, a cyclist who lives and works in Fort Greene, came upon this scene earlier today. He writes:

A police car hit a cyclist (who had the right of way) at the corner of Myrtle and Vanderbilt at around 11:40 a.m. this morning. The cyclist was knocked to the ground and injured his elbow and shoulder. His front wheel was crushed under the right front wheel of the car as the car was turning right onto Myrtle. I witnessed the incident from from a very clear vantage point across Myrtle.

FDNY was called to the scene at 11:22. A spokesperson said the cyclist suffered “non-critical” injuries and refused medical attention.

This crash occurred in the 88th Precinct. To voice your concerns about neighborhood traffic safety directly to Captain Scott M. Henderson, the commanding officer, go to the next precinct community council meeting. The 88th Precinct council meetings happen at 7:30 p.m. on the third Tuesday of the month at various locations. Call the precinct at 718-636-6526 for information.

Council Member Letitia James and Assembly Member Joseph Lentol joined local residents on Park Avenue in Brooklyn yesterday to push DOT and other city agencies to implement recommendations from the Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Partnership’s pedestrian safety plan. The plan calls for a set of pedestrian safety improvements and traffic enforcement measures to make Park Avenue less of a BQE service road and more of a neighborhood street.

“Government’s most primary responsibility is to protect its citizens,” Lentol said. “We definitely need traffic calming measures.” Lentol also called for an expansion of speed cameras in the city. “Speed kills,” he said. “We’ve got to slow these cars down.”

Over a two-hour period on a recent afternoon, MARP clocked 40 percent of drivers on Park Avenue speeding, with the fastest hitting 53 mph. When a student from Benjamin Banneker Academy broke out the speed gun yesterday afternoon, the first reading came back at 38 mph. New York City’s speed limit is 30 mph.

M. Blaise Backer, executive director of MARP, called on city agencies to begin design and implementation of the report’s recommendations. “Park Avenue is broken, and it can be fixed,” he said. “We have to get DOT’s attention.”

Council Member James echoed the sentiment. “We really need to get all of the entities involved to focus on this,” she said. James and Lentol were joined by representatives of Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and Transportation Alternatives at the event.

Community participation in formulating the plan has been significant. If you’d like to learn more about how MARP and its partners collaborated on the report, the Center for Architecture will host a panel Friday morning featuring architects, planners and community members.

In 1959, when the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was under construction, Park Avenue in the Wallabout section of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill was converted from a neighborhood street to a service road that would run underneath the new elevated highway. Walking on the street hasn’t been the same since. With 160,000 cars roaring by overhead each day, two lanes in each direction on the surface, and more than 300 parking spaces in the median, the street is not what you would call pedestrian-friendly. It’s also dangerous, with a crash rate higher than three-quarters of Brooklyn streets.

More than 50 years after Robert Moses and the BQE changed Park Avenue, the Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project Local Development Corporation (MARP) is pushing to enhance the street for walking and public activity, unveiling a slate of proposals to reduce speeding and improve pedestrian safety [PDF].

In 2009 and 2010, MARP hosted three community workshops as part of an effort to reuse spaces beneath the BQE. Based on community feedback at those events, the group decided to focus on traffic safety. In late 2010, Architecture for Humanity New York joined the project, working with MARP throughout 2011 to conduct research and host workshops. An advisory committee comprised of residents, community organizations and city agencies also helped guide the recommendations. Funding for the report was provided by the Brooklyn Community Foundation.

The recommendations are comprehensive and address everything from litter to traffic signal timing. In May, MARP went before Community Board 2′s transportation committee, which voted unanimously to support the proposals.

Intersections would receive significant upgrades. The plan calls for neckdowns and crosswalk markings on cross-streets along the median. Access points to parking underneath the BQE would be marked as pedestrian crossings, with raised crosswalks and stop signs. At North Portland, Clinton and Clermont Avenues, the report recommends closing auto access to parking under the BQE to improve safety for the higher number of pedestrians crossing Park Avenue at those intersections.

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Last night, Brooklyn Community Board 2′s Transportation and Public Safety Committee voted 8 to 1 (with one abstention) to support DOT’s proposal to install sharrows on Lafayette Avenue between Fulton Street and Classon Avenue. The vote comes after DOT abandoned a bike lane concept in 2010, spurring neighborhood residents to gather 1,400 signatures seeking a solution to improve safety on the busy one-way street.

The DOT plan includes two major components. First, it would slow the timing sequence of Lafayette Avenue’s traffic signals from 25 mph to 20 mph. By doing this, DOT hopes to reduce speeding by drivers who are trying to catch lights before they turn red. Presently, 39 percent of drivers on Lafayette Avenue are exceeding the 30 mph speed limit. Signal retimings for 20 mph have already been put in place on Eighth Avenue in Park Slope and Court Street south of Atlantic Avenue. “You don’t notice it as a motorist,” explained DOT’s Preston Johnson, “but the experience for pedestrians and cyclists is much improved.”

Second, DOT will install sharrows on the left lane of Lafayette Avenue, leading cyclists to ride outside the path of B38 buses in the right lane. As on First and Second Avenues in Manhattan, the sharrows will be accompanied by signage informing motorists that passing cyclists within the lane is prohibited.

At last night’s meeting, DOT explained that Lafayette Avenue handles 769 cars per hour during the evening rush. Removing a general travel lane for a bike lane, the agency said, would affect traffic flow too much for it to consider the option.

The neighborhood group pushing for improvements, Make Lafayette Avenue Safer, welcomed the sharrows as an improvement that will clearly indicate where cyclists belong on the street. But the group also called on DOT to be more innovative with its plan to protect bike riders.

At last night’s meeting, Make Lafayette Avenue Safer’s Hilda Cohen presented sharrow enhancements in Boston, Salt Lake City, and Long Beach, California, such as painted pavement or dashed lines bracketing the bike stencil, that she said would be effective on Lafayette Avenue. Cohen also noted after the meeting that most of the route on Lafayette Avenue is uphill, making it difficult for slow-moving cyclists to assert their place in the middle of a lane.

“I will be happy for Lafayette Avenue sharrows,” said Ali Loxton, a member of Make Lafayette Avenue Safer who rides a cargo bike with her children. “And I will be aware of the cars coming behind me.” The group isn’t giving up on the goal of a bike lane on Lafayette.

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Fort Greene’s newest public plaza opened today and Brownstoner was on the scene to capture the moment. The plaza, which reclaimed space for pedestrians on a short, lightly-trafficked block of South Elliott Place between Fulton Street and Lafayette Avenue, connects the sidewalk to an existing public triangle.

Even though construction only finished today (because the plaza materials are epoxy, gravel, granite blocks and planters, it only took about a week to install, Brownstoner reported), it’s already getting use. One of those now-iconic folding tables had a crowd of people gathered around it.

At the request of the community board, DOT will be evaluating the impact of the street reclamation on traffic flows and pedestrian life over the summer.

In a meeting Wednesday evening, Brooklyn Community Board 2 endorsed plans to try out a new pedestrian plaza at Fort Greene’s Fowler Square. A short, lightly-trafficked block of South Elliott Place, between Fulton Street and Lafayette Avenue, will be reclaimed for pedestrians, allowing the existing square to be connected with the adjoining block. The vote was 28 to 4, according to District Manager Rob Perris.

The plaza had garnered support from the community board before, but a small group opposed it on the grounds that the street closure would inconvenience drivers too much by forcing them to go a block or two out of their way. One opponent, who also invested a lot of energy trying to undermine nearby Putnam Plaza, posted flyers calling the Fowler Squre plaza a land grab by the “greedy 1%.”

The community board, apparently, disagreed. Pedestrian space and pedestrian safety are resources everyone in the neighborhood benefits from.

The Fowler Square plaza will be built with temporary materials for now, and DOT plans to monitor its success after it is installed in May. The department will be measuring traffic in the area and pedestrian usage of the new space.

Time-lapse photography of the before and after conditions will provide animated evidence of how people move through the space with and without automobiles, said board member Mike Epstein.

The reports are in, and it seems like Fort Greene residents were able to have a productive workshop with NYC DOT and the Fulton Area Business Alliance (FAB) last night to discuss the new public plaza planned for Fowler Square. A reader informs us that aside from a few minutes of haranguing from a few individuals, attendees could sit down together and share ideas.

Previous public meetings for both the Fowler Square plaza and the recently opened plaza by Putnam Avenue in Clinton Hill have been ambushed by Schellie Hagan, an opponent of plazas and FAB who goes by the acronym FACT (Fulton Area Coming Together). As you can see from this Hagan flyer that our reader sent along, FACT is really all about bringing the Fulton area together by informing everyone of the facts.

After all, how could Fulton Street withstand another project to “split a neighborhood apart” like the “leisure class” plaza that opened at Putnam Avenue last year?

While a successful anti-plaza campaign would deprive residents of a community space open to all, that hasn’t stopped Hagan from trying to co-opt Occupy Wall Street and the 99 Percent movement, as you can see in her full flyer after the jump…

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NYC DOT, Council Member Tish James, Community Board 2, and the Fulton Area Business Alliance are hosting a community workshop tonight to gather ideas for a new plaza at Fowler Square — the triangle formed by Fulton Street, Lafayette Avenue, and South Elliot Place in Fort Greene. In addition to lending your expertise as the new public space takes shape, this is an important one to turn out for because a handful of project opponents have managed to commandeer past meetings.

The Fowler Square plaza would reclaim a short, lightly-trafficked block of South Elliott in front of the Smoke Joint. Community Board 2 overwhelmingly approved it, but opponents have disrupted workshops for this project before and they will probably try again. Their complaint seems to boil down to two things: 1) If they happen to be driving on the one block of South Elliott Place between Fort Greene Park and Lafayette, they’d have to drive one block out of their way to reach Fulton Street; and 2) New York is not Amsterdam.

So if you live in the neighborhood and you’re of the mind that New York is not Parsippany or I-95, tonight’s workshop is a good place to share your vision for a city where streets do more than just move cars. Here’s where to go:

Lafayette Ave Presbyterian Church – Jarvey Room
85 South Oxford Street (between Fulton Street and Lafayette Avenue)
6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Hilda Cohen, Ali Loxton and 1,600 petition-signers are asking for a painted bike lane and a road diet on Brooklyn’s Lafayette Avenue: They’re hoping to calm traffic and improve the area’s bike network by turning one traffic lane into a bike lane, and they helped persuade Brooklyn Community Board 2 to ask NYC DOT to revisit the idea.

Streetsblog reader jacob-uptown asks: What if you reallocated that space to build a parking-protected bike lane and pedestrian refuges?

By flipping the bike lane and the parking lane, he suggests, cycling and crossing the street would be that much safer. He Photoshopped the image to demonstrate what a protected bike lane might look like on Lafayette (current conditions are below).

Like what you see?

It only took Hilda Cohen and Ali Loxton ten weeks to collect 1,600 signatures supporting a traffic-calming redesign, including a bike lane, for Brooklyn’s Lafayette Avenue. Yesterday evening they took their petition to the transportation committee of Community Board 2 and made their case. The result: a 9-1 committee vote asking DOT to study Cohen and Loxton’s proposal.

There’s still a long way to go before an official redesign moves forward, but Cohen and Loxton’s impressive organizing has revived the idea of redesigning Lafayette, and it’s a great case study in how to mobilize for safer streets.

Cohen and Loxton both live in Fort Greene and bike, walk and drive on Lafayette with their kids. They told the CB 2 committee last night that the street feels like it’s geared more toward fast-moving cars than people, with two eastbound traffic lanes and two parking lanes. The galvanizing moment for them came last October, when two drivers crashed at high speeds at the corner of Lafayette and Vanderbilt Avenue, jumping the curb outside a packed church.

The next week, they started gathering signatures supporting “traffic calming and a bike lane” on Lafayette. Their regular sign-up spot was the farmers market by Fort Greene Park. Since the weekend of the New York City marathon in early November, 1,500 people have signed the petition in writing and another 100 have signed it online.

“You would just say ‘Lafayette’ and people would want to talk to us,” said Loxton. “In the cold, they would stop.”

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