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Last July, the DOT announced plans to calm one of the most dangerous intersections in Queens, at the foot of the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge. Greenpoint Avenue is only two lanes wide on either side of the bridge, but as the road crosses Newtown Creek, it widens to four lanes and the bike lane on the Brooklyn side disappears, allowing traffic to speed up. When that fast-moving bridge traffic hits the confusing intersection of Greenpoint Avenue, Van Dam Street and Review Avenue on the Queens side, it’s a recipe for disaster.

To calm the bridge traffic, DOT proposed keeping Greenpoint Avenue at a consistent two-lanes wide as it crosses the bridge. The extra space would have been used to extend the bike lane over the bridge with an extra-wide nine foot buffer.

Last month, however, opposition from residents and local businesses led DOT to back away from its traffic-calming plan. They promised to reconsider the bike lanes, according to a report in the Brooklyn Paper, and to hold a series of meetings with community members to discuss the issue further.

One of those meetings will be held tomorrow morning and Transportation Alternatives is urging people who would use a Greenpoint Avenue Bridge bike lane to turn out. Click here for the details. For those who can’t make it on a weekday morning, you can either e-mail the community board or sign this group letter written by T.A.’s Queens volunteer committee.

Here's a look at NYCDOT's plan for the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge [PDF], which would give cyclists traveling between Greenpoint, Brooklyn and Sunnyside, Queens a safer and more comfortable ride by installing bike lanes with extra-wide buffers. The project recently got some press in the Brooklyn Paper for attracting the opposition of local trucking interests.

Also known as the J.J. Byrne Memorial Bridge, this span over Newtown Creek is currently a danger zone for cyclists. Heading toward Queens, the Greenpoint Avenue bike lane ends abruptly at the bridge, throwing cyclists into mixed traffic where the road widens from two lanes to four. The confusing intersection on the Queens side of the bridge, where Greenpoint Avenue meets Van Dam Street and Review Avenue, is one of the locations most prone to crashes that cause severe injuries in the entire borough.

As part of a badly needed resurfacing of the bridge, DOT has proposed putting the bridge on a road diet using new markings. Two of the bridge's travel lanes and its striped median would be narrowed. The other two lanes would be turned into bike lanes with no physical protection but plenty of room: six feet of travel width with a nine foot buffer. On the Queens side, the intersection would be simplified and include new pedestrian crossings.  

The redesign, unsurprisingly, has already drawn some controversy. According to the Brooklyn Paper, truckers have objected to bike lanes on Greenpoint Avenue, both those proposed for the bridge and those already built on the Brooklyn side. Of course, Greenpoint Avenue is already only two lanes wide on either side of the bridge. Moreover, in addition to improving safety on this bridge, the new bike lanes may help relieve some pressure on the narrow bike/ped path of the Pulaski Bridge, which is terribly overcrowded.

DOT's website has the redesign slated for November implementation. We haven't received any replies from the department in response to requests for more information about the status of the plan. 

Gothamist reports that Neil Chamberlain, a 28-year-old Williamsburg resident, was taken off life support today after a driver struck him and fled the scene in Greenpoint early Sunday morning.

The still-unidentified driver was traveling east on Calyer Street and struck Chamberlain as he was walking between McGuinness Boulevard and Newel Street. Detectives are currently looking for video that may have recorded the fatal collision, said the NYPD. 

Local activists say that the McGuinness corridor is one of the most dangerous in Brooklyn. "We've been close to begging people to do some sort of traffic calming," said Ryan Kuonen, an organizer with Neighbors Allied for Good Growth, a North Brooklyn community organization. "It's a racetrack." 

At the most dangerous intersection along McGuinness, where it intersects with Nassau Avenue, there were 34 crashes and two fatalities between 1995 and 2005, according to CrashStat. The violence has not abated since. Last December, a truck driver killed 33-year-old Solange Raulston at that intersection. The area's growing population means more and more pedestrians and cyclists are being exposed to dangerous conditions along the corridor. 

The federal stimulus-funded reconstruction of Nassau offers a golden opportunity to make the area safer, said Kuonen. Since the city will be ripping up the street anyway, adding traffic calming measures -- especially necessary at the intersection with McGuinness -- would be easy and cheap. Following Raulston's death, NAG and Transportation Alternatives jointly called for safety improvements at Nassau and McGuinness. 

A low-cost fix to traffic signal timing could improve safety along the rest of McGuinness. "The lights are timed for speed," Kuonen said, not safety. She also called for some basic speeding enforcement. "The 94th precinct doesn't really police that stretch," she said. "If people were being pulled over for speeding, it would stop." 

There's been some discussion recently on the issue of cyclists and pedestrians unhappily sharing the Brooklyn Bridge's crowded promenade. Similar ped-bike conflict is heating up on the Pulaski Bridge, linking Long Island City and Greenpoint.

The Pulaski's eight-foot wide greenway is about half the width of the Brooklyn Bridge promenade and accommodates cyclists and pedestrians traveling in both directions. With bike commuter rates soaring in North Brooklyn, the pedestrian vs. cyclist shouting has begun. Local Brooklyn bloggers Restless and New York Shitty both recently published posts on the issue.

As on the Brooklyn Bridge, DOT recently striped in some new markings but that doesn't really seem to be solving the fundamental problem: Plenty of space dedicated to cars and trucks while the cleanest, most efficient and environmentally-friendly modes of transportation -- biking and walking -- are largely squeezed into the margins.

Pulaski Bridge motorists, meanwhile, seem to be oblivious to the whole thing, content to speed along their free-flowing, six-lane right-of-way. 

We've got another dispatch from the ongoing bike lane drama that is Kent Avenue. At Wednesday night's information session hosted by Brooklyn CB1, the DOT team gave a short presentation [PDF] outlining their plan to address truck traffic changes caused by converting Kent to one-way flow. Then the public was invited to comment.

According to sources who attended the meeting, most of the 60 or so people who showed up were worried that the new pattern will send more trucks down their streets, especially North 11th Street -- an existing truck route -- and Wythe Street, which runs parallel to Kent and is not a truck route. While some stretches of the discussion were civil, a few opponents were not above browbeating tactics, shouting down testimony from bike lane supporters, we're told.

A couple of things to keep in mind. The traffic changes are happening in three phases. So far only the first has been completed. Once the whole thing is finished and truckers have had some time to learn the new traffic patterns, the straightest shot heading south goes nowhere near Wythe or North 11th. DOT intends to promote this route, which takes trucks down McGuinness Boulevard instead, and work with the local police precincts to keep truckers off streets where they're not supposed to drive.

As for the notion that the project makes streets less safe (some opponents went so far as to say the new traffic patterns will endanger children), it's hard to take seriously. This is not just a one-way conversion: The crossing distances will be shorter and the roadway narrower on Kent Avenue, which motorists used to treat as a little stretch of autobahn in Brooklyn. Now that traffic will be calmer.

The bike lane was always intended to be a precursor to the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway. The new design now occupies the greenway footprint, so opposing the bike lane is tantamount to opposing the greenway. An area undergoing as much residential development as North Brooklyn sorely needs this new space for pedestrians and cyclists. Walking to the waterfront will feel much safer and more appealing, and biking to the Williamsburg Bridge won't just be limited to a few brave souls. CB1 embraced those improvements when it approved the greenway plan last April [PDF]; the same benefits should feel much more tangible once the Kent Avenue bike lane is completed next month.

The most telling answers at Transportation Alternatives' District 33 City Council candidates forum came after an audience member asked point blank for the debaters' stance on congestion pricing. "I can’t support a candidate who’ll support congestion pricing," said the questioner, Dave Reina. "I think it's punitive, and there are more creative solutions out there. Who’ll stand up against it?"

It was an opportunity for the candidates to show how well they understand the most critical transportation problems facing New York City by rebutting Reina with a well-reasoned argument. Traffic generated by the free price on Brooklyn's three East River bridges overruns the 33rd District, which includes parts of Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill and Park Slope. Congestion pricing, supported by outgoing rep David Yassky, should be as much a no-brainer here as it is in Lower Manhattan.

Only one candidate, Doug Biviano, a former campaign staffer for Kucinich 2008, came close to giving Reina what he asked for. "I'm not against congestion pricing," he said, "but I think we have to be careful about unintended consequences. Do we want to hit people with that toll? In this climate, I don’t think we want to. That would kill contractors."

Biviano was followed by Evan Thies, who played an active role in last year's campaign to pass congestion pricing as a consultant for Environment Defense and the Pratt Center. "I do absolutely support congestion pricing," he said to some applause. "Neighborhoods like this are disproportionately affected by the traffic that’s created by the lack of congestion pricing. Contractors in the outer boroughs supported congestion pricing, because instead of spending time in traffic, they’d be spending more time working for clients." Thies later named congestion pricing his top transportation priority and noted that the next City Council will need to take it up again in 2010 to fund the MTA Capital Plan.

Jo Anne Simon, an attorney who serves as Democratic district leader in the 52nd Assembly District, gave another strong statement in support of pricing. "The gratuitous traffic that comes over the bridges is just that, gratuitous," she said. "We’re a doormat. It’s costing us in infrastructure; it’s costing us in health. The challenge for us as policy makers is to convince people in the outer boroughs that congestion pricing benefits them too. It’s not just for Manhattan."

Ken Diamondstone and Ken Baer, the other two candidates at the forum, also endorsed congestion pricing. Baer took the more enthusiastic stance, noting that pricing revenues can help plug the MTA Capital Plan's $10 billion hole. Diamondstone said he "believes strongly" in the policy but thinks exceptions must be made for people with disabilities and, in a novel carve-out suggestion, musicians.

By this point in the debate, candidate Isaac Abraham was long gone.

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The Kent Avenue bike path was not the most hotly debated item at last night's Brooklyn CB1 meeting. That distinction belongs to the rezoning plan for the area known as Broadway Triangle. But DOT's team still encountered some skepticism from North Brooklyn residents concerned about truck traffic. The revised plan [PDF], which calls for a two-way protected bike path on Kent with one-way auto traffic, would divert southbound trucks along a different route.

By all accounts, the new plan enjoys the support of former opponents, including the Satmar Hasidic community and businesses along Kent that would see loading zones return. While supporters may have had the numerical advantage last night, they were not the loudest.

"DOT could barely get through its presentation," reports TA's Wiley Norvell, with lots of heckling coming from residents of North 11th Street (which is already a truck route but would receive diverted traffic). The meeting had already been going on a few hours by the time public comment on Kent Avenue started, Norvell said, and not that many people testified. "A lot of people who were there to speak in favor felt a little browbeaten."

There was no vote on the agenda last night.

No one is dismissing the issue of truck traffic, which could be mitigated, in part, by stricter route enforcement. But the latest plan is the product of an already long and contentious public process. "DOT came up with a design that satisfied those concerns," said Norvell. "There's never a perfect scenario that leaves everyone grinning ear to ear, but there's always a safest scenario."

Another Greenpoint resident has come forward reporting to have seen a police car, in violation of NYPD policy, chasing the speeding white mini-van that took the life of Violetta Kryzak in April.

Earlier this week, a reader who chose to be identified as 'Alex B.' emailed Streetsblog, writing that she had witnessed the chase. In an email exchange that followed, Alex B. explained what she saw: "I was on Manhattan between Norman and Meserole [Editor's note: seven blocks south of where the fatal collision took place] when two cars sped past me -- clearly one chasing the other. I remember being sure that the second car was police, although it was unmarked -- possibly because it had its lights on."

Her account matches the story of three other eyewitnesses. Their testimony runs counter to the version of events given by the 94th Precinct's commanding officer, Deputy Inspector Dennis Fulton, who told attendees of a precinct community council meeting that the department "has no indication that [a police pursuit] happened."

The NYPD’s public information office has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

The NYPD continues to dispute eyewitness accounts of the events that preceded the vehicle-on-pedestrian collision that took the life of Violetta Kryzak, a 38-year-old mother and Greenpoint resident.

Despite the statements of three separate eyewitnesses stationed several blocks from one another who claim that at least one police vehicle was following the speeding white mini-van that struck and killed Kryzak, the 94th Precinct’s commanding officer maintains that a police pursuit did not occur.

At a precinct community council meeting last week, Deputy Inspector Dennis Fulton said that he can only go on what witnesses say, but that he has "no indication that [a police-pursuit] happened."

Streetsblog contacted the NYPD's Public Information Office for clarification about the contradiction between eyewitness accounts of the day’s events and Deputy Inspector Fulton’s understanding of what occurred. "Everybody’s going to say something," said a spokesperson.

The family of Violetta Kryzak has secured legal representation. A private investigator hired by the family’s lawyers is conducting interviews and searching for surveillance cameras that may have caught the alleged chase on tape.

The NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau also has an investigation underway, said Fulton.

The New York City Police Department denies that it was involved in a high-speed police chase preceding the vehicle-on-pedestrian collision that took the life of Violetta Kryzak, a 38-year-old Polish-American mother and Greenpoint resident, despite eyewitness accounts to the contrary first published by Streetsblog.

On Monday, at the 94th Precinct Community Council’s monthly meeting, Deputy Inspector Dennis Fulton, the precinct’s commanding officer, told approximately 40 assembled neighbors, “At this point it appears as though there was not a high-speed chase,” adding, “To make sure, it’s being investigated by our Internal Affairs Bureau. But it does not appear that anyone was following [the perpetrator].”

Fulton's statement contradicts numerous eyewitness accounts of the fatal crash. Three weeks ago, I reported on this tragedy for Streetsblog, and everyone I spoke with seemed sure that the police had pursued a white mini-van up Manhattan Avenue at a very high speed. The day of the crash I was told by Kamil Uminski, a 20-year-old man who witnessed the van strike Violetta Kryzak, “There were two cops chasing a white van up the avenue.”

Less than an hour after I heard Deputy Inspector Fulton deny that there was a high-speed chase, I emailed with a neighborhood mom named Sydney, who claims to have seen an unmarked police vehicle pursuing the white mini-van. I don't have Sydney's last name, only her email address, as a mutual friend put us in touch when I told her I was writing a follow-up story about this incident. Sydney replied to my inquiry: “I was slowly driving down Manhattan Avenue between Bedford Ave. and Norman Ave. headed west [Editor's note: eight blocks south of where the fatal collision took place] when the mini-van flew past my truck very close at an unbelievable speed nearly taking my rear view mirror with it. The van was occupying the opposite lane of Manhattan Avenue, which is a two-lane street and also headed west, in other words driving head-on into oncoming traffic. Seconds after the van passed my truck an undercover cop car in hot pursuit passed me traveling at the same speed and following the van as it weaved through traffic down the busy street.”

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