Streetsblog New York City

On Delancey Street, DOT will extend sidewalks at every intersection with a star, with the largest expansion at the north side of Delancey and Clinton. On the south side of Delancey, a service road will be converted to pedestrian space. Image: NYC DOT

The crosswalks will be getting shorter on Delancey Street — one of the city’s deadliest corridors — thanks to a new safety plan from the Department of Transportation [PDF]. At 14 of 19 crossings between Clinton Street and the Bowery, neckdowns will extend the sidewalk into the street, making the distance across the extremely wide street a bit more manageable. While DOT found ways to add pedestrian space where it could, however, the department rejected options, some of which were very popular, that would interfere with the heavy traffic headed to and from the Williamsburg Bridge.

The changes to Delancey focus on the dangerous blocks approaching the Williamsburg Bridge. Cyclist Jeffrey Axelrod and pedestrians Patricia Cuevas and Dashane Santana were killed by drivers along these blocks in the last year alone. Over a five year period, 129 people were injured in traffic crashes at both Delancey and Essex and Delancey and Clinton.

The most extensive changes will come at Delancey and Clinton, the intersection right by the bridge entrance. Right now, the distance across Delancey is an incredible 165 feet, including a 30 foot median. “It begins to look more like a highway than a normal street,” said DOT bicycle and pedestrian director Josh Benson. “It gives a perception to motorists that they’ve entered a new environment, that it’s not a neighborhood street anymore.”

On the north side of Delancey, the sidewalk will be extended into the street a full 49 feet using paint and planters. The first lane coming off the bridge is a right-turn only lane, and there’s no reason for the space directly in front of it to remain open to traffic. “What we can do is capture that space, formalize it, and make it safe for people to walk to that place in the crosswalk,” said Benson.

Across the street, the service road for Delancey will be filled in and turned into pedestrian space: 14,160 square feet between Norfolk and Clinton.

On the other end of the corridor, at Bowery, another large neckdown will be installed at the southern end of the intersection. As Kenmare becomes Delancey at that intersection, each half of the street abruptly widens from two lanes to four. That means there’s a lot of extra road space, some of which is being reclaimed for pedestrians. The road will now widen to four lanes more gradually.

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Extra-wide Delancey Street is one of the most dangerous roads in New York, but will have shorter crossings under a new DOT plan. Image: Google Street View.

The Department of Transportation’s plan to improve safety on Delancey Street will make it easier to cross the deadly artery, a press release from State Senator Dan Squadron’s office confirms.

The plan will widen sidewalks, shorten crossing distances and extend the length of pedestrian signals, among the shortest in the city. The improvements are expected to be implemented in a manner of months. At Clinton Street, the distance to cross Delancey will fall from 125 feet to 75 feet, according to a report in DNAinfo. DOT will also change turning patterns onto Delancey.

The plan will be officially presented at a public meeting tonight and we’ll have a full report on the proposal tomorrow.

Delancey has long been one of the city’s deadliest streets for both pedestrians and the many cyclists using the Williamsburg Bridge. Last May, 51-year-old pedestrian Patricia Cuevas was killed by the driver of a private garbage truck at Delancey and Essex. Then, in August, cyclist Jeffrey Axelrod was killed by a cement truck driver as Axelrod turned onto Delancey from Chrystie Street.

The push to improve safety along Delancey gained urgency after 12-year-old Dashane Santana was killed crossing the street at Clinton Street last month. DOT’s changes have support from a safety working group made up of all the area’s elected representatives from City Council to the United States Congress. The working group will continue to meet and push for additional safety improvements, Squadron’s office said.

In the wake of the death of Dashane Santana, the 12-year-old girl killed by a minivan driver while she was crossing Delancey Street earlier this month, Lower East Side leaders are demanding safety improvements for the many pedestrians who cross this approach to the Williamsburg Bridge. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Borough President Scott Stringer, State Senator Dan Squadron and City Council Member Margaret Chin have each called on DOT to take action to prevent one more life from being taken by Delancey Street traffic.

A report from DNAinfo this morning lays out just how hostile the design of Delancey is to pedestrians. To cross Delancey at Clinton Street, where Santana was killed, pedestrians must traverse ten lanes of moving traffic in just 22 seconds.

That’s far less crossing time than pedestrians have at some of the city’s most notoriously dangerous intersections, which DNAinfo went out and measured. Reports DNAinfo’s Julie Shapiro:

For example, pedestrians crossing the eight-lane Queens Boulevard at Union Turnpike have a full 30 seconds to make it to the other side.

People traversing the six-lane Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard at 145th Street have 40 seconds, nearly double the crossing time on Delancey Street.

Other busy intersections with longer crossing times than Delancey Street include West Street at Albany Street, where pedestrians have 31 seconds to cross eight lanes; Houston Street at Essex Street, where pedestrians have 30 seconds to cross eight lanes; 12th Avenue at 23rd Street, where pedestrians have 34 seconds to cross six lanes; Ocean Parkway at Church Avenue in Brooklyn, where pedestrians have 45 seconds to cross 10 lanes; and Atlantic and Flatbush avenues in Brooklyn, where pedestrians have 60 seconds to cross four lanes.

DNAinfo’s report also includes the above video, which includes an interview with one of Santana’s schoolmates.

The area’s elected officials are primarily calling for pedestrian crossing times to be extended, a move that would surely make it easier to cross. Shrinking Delancey down from ten lanes should also be on the table; no matter how long the light is, that’s a wide street to ever cross safely.

DOT will present its plan for improving Delancey Street next Wednesday.

Kids are more likely to be injured while walking or biking in East Harlem and the Lower East Side than the wealthier areas between them. Click to enlarge. Image: T.A.

Children growing up in Manhattan’s low-income communities are at significantly higher risk of being seriously injured or killed in traffic than their neighbors in wealthier districts, a new study from Transportation Alternatives finds [PDF]. Intersections near public housing appear to be particularly dangerous for children trying to cross the street.

In East Harlem and on the Lower East Side, the number of children younger than 18 who are killed or seriously injured while walking or riding their bikes is significantly higher than on the Upper East Side or in Gramercy and East Midtown, even though there are more total crashes with pedestrians in those wealthier neighborhoods.

The most dangerous intersection for kids on the East Side is Lexington and 125th, where 34 children were injured and one killed between 1995 and 2009.

The disparity can’t be explained by differences in population. In fact, the Upper East Side has the greatest share of residents under the age of 18 of the four areas studied. Rather, children are more at risk of getting hit by a car than adults in the low-income neighborhoods, while they are at lower risk in the high-income areas.

Transportation Alternatives hasn’t pinned down a cause, but they theorize that the design of public housing projects could be the culprit. Nine of the ten most dangerous East Side intersections for children were near public housing. The creation of large superblocks at many public housing developments could be encouraging children to cross mid-block, for example.

Twelve-year-old Dashane Santana, a resident of the East Village’s Jacob Riis Houses, was hit and killed last Friday while crossing Delancey at Clinton Street, across from NYCHA’s Seward Park Extension at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge.

Leaders from East Harlem and the Lower East Side have decried the unsafe conditions their children face. “My district contains the greatest concentration of public housing in the city and is located in an area of Manhattan where traffic can be quite heavy. That means the children of my district are at risk,” said City Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito. “We need immediate action to address dangerous driving habits and must improve traffic patterns in high risk areas. Bike lanes in East Harlem are certainly one part of the solution, but more can be done.”

“This map shows us an injustice, pure and simple,” said Damaris Reyes, the executive director of the neighborhood organization Good Old Lower East Side. “Our kids living in public housing on the Lower East Side, including my own children, deserve safe streets just as much as any other child in the city. The NYPD needs to get its priorities straight and crack down on dangerous driving.”

Extra-wide Delancey Street is one of the most dangerous roads in New York. One pedestrian and one cyclist have already been killed on Delancey this year. Image: Google Street View.

Delancey Street is one of the most dangerous roads in the city. Between 2008 and 2010 alone, 134 pedestrians and cyclists were hit by drivers on Delancey, according to Transportation Alternatives, and two were killed on the street this year.

Last week, Streetsblog reported on a new design for the base of the Williamsburg Bridge which routed cyclists off Delancey and onto calmer side streets. The implication, it seemed, was that the Department of Transportation wasn’t planning to make Delancey safer for cyclists and pedestrians, just less trafficked by them.

Elected officials on the Lower East Side, however, aren’t standing for the deadly status quo. On Monday, State Senator Daniel Squadron convened the first meeting of a new working group meant to improve safety in the area.

“For too long, Delancey has been the scene of far too many tragedies,” said Squadron in a statement. “Our working group is a much-needed step toward ending the cycle of danger. I’m confident that, together, we can find the short-term and long-term solutions to ensure a safe Delancey Street for all types of users.”

Joining Squadron were City Council Member Margaret Chin and representatives from the offices of Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Borough President Scott Stringer, Community Board 3, the Lower East Side Business Improvement District, and Transportation Alternatives. Staff from the Department of Transportation and the NYPD, which would have to implement any safety plan, were also in attendance.

The group will meet monthly to create a set of short-term and long-term changes to improve safety for all users of Delancey. “All solutions are still on the table,” said Squadron spokesperson Amy Spitalnick. In an e-mail, she listed a few possible solutions already being considered: “turning restrictions, stop lines, lengthening medians and crossing times, and a real solution for bikes (understanding that they’ll end up on Delancey no matter what).”

We’ll be reporting on the working group’s recommendations as they develop, but for now, it’s encouraging to see this broad and powerful coalition of elected officials and community leaders commit to a safe Delancey Street. Their statements, collected in a press release, are below:

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Two Manhattan pedestrians were killed in a span of just over 24 hours this week.

According to NYPD, on Monday at approximately 10:20 p.m., Steven Reese was crossing E. 125th Street near Lexington Avenue when he was hit by the driver of an eastbound 2004 Chevrolet Suburban. Reese, 58, was pronounced dead on arrival at Harlem Hospital. The driver remained at the scene. No criminality is suspected.

An NYPD spokesperson told Streetsblog that the incident report does not indicate the speed of the SUV at the time of the crash. A person struck by a vehicle traveling at 30 mph — the city’s speed limit — has up to an 80 percent chance of surviving the collision. The likelihood of survival drops to 30 percent when the vehicle is moving at 40 mph.

It’s also worth noting that a DNAinfo account says Reese was hit by a van, again pointing to the dearth of reliable information regarding city traffic crashes.

At 10:48 p.m. on Tuesday, DNAinfo reports that an unidentified man was struck and killed by the driver of a livery cab as he ran across FDR Drive near E. 6th Street. The driver stayed at the scene and was not charged.

On Allen Street between Hester and Grand, the outline of the upgraded bikeway is visible. It bends toward the median at intersections, providing a space for pedestrians to pause between the bike lane and the traffic lanes as they cross the street. Photo: Noah Kazis

Crews are currently at work turning the new pedestrian plazas and protected bike lanes on Pike Street and Allen Street into more attractive, long-term fixtures of the Lower East Side. The new construction will add landscaping and higher-quality materials, helping the local community achieve the vision developed for Allen and Pike Streets in a multi-year grassroots process.

After the first phase of this project was completed in 2009, traffic injuries dropped by 40 percent at the intersections with pedestrian plazas, according to NYC DOT. At the corner of Allen and Delancey, injuries dropped 57 percent.

Work on upgrading the improvements with better materials began on the southernmost end of the corridor, on Pike between South and Madison Streets, in February. Right now, crews have dug up the median on the block of Allen between Hester and Grand Streets, with plans to work north to Delancey. Check below the fold for a rendering of what the new sections of Allen will look like once completed.

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In Chinatown and the Lower East Side, a new coalition is showing how grassroots, community-based bike planning can be done. Formed six months ago, the nine-member Local Spokes coalition is surveying local residents and workers, holding public meetings, and training youth ambassadors in preparation for the creation of a new bike plan for those two neighborhoods.

The nine coalition members range from organizations with deep community organizing roots in the two neighborhoods, like housing organization Good Old Lower East Side and civil rights group Asian Americans for Equality, to citywide cycling advocates like Transportation Alternatives. In six to twelve months, Local Spokes will compile all the information they’ve gathered, make a concrete plan for building the bike infrastructure the community wants, and present it to elected officials and the city.

One way that Local Spokes will be gathering input from the community is with a survey, available on their website in English, Spanish, and Chinese. It asks people who live or work in Chinatown and the Lower East Side to detail how they get around, what would make them cycle more, how they exercise and who they think has power in their community. According to AAFE’s Douglas Le, they hope to get 1,000 responses.

Those surveys will be augmented by a series of public meetings reaching out to community members, starting at the end of the summer. “Rarely is there this opportunity to have this conversation before it’s too late,” said Karyn Williams, the director of Velo City, an urban planning education group participating in the Local Spokes coalition.

At the same time, Local Spokes will be training a team of 12 youth ambassadors to serve as leaders in local cycling efforts. Over the course of the summer, the ambassadors will learn about issues like immigration and gentrification, mapmaking, and bike safety twice a week, said Recycle-A-Bicycle director Pasqualina Azzarello, a coalition member. On Saturdays, the ambassadors will take group bike rides tied to the week’s lesson. When the public meetings about the bike plan get underway, the ambassadors will attend them. By the end of the planning process they will be leading them.

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A boot and bloodstains mark the location of where a private sanitation truck ran over a pedestrian at Essex and Delancey. Photo: Adrian Fussell via The Lo-Down.

A private sanitation truck driver hit a pedestrian at the intersection of Essex and Delancey Streets yesterday afternoon, dragging her under the truck. She was transported to Bellevue Hospital in critical condition with severe trauma to her legs, according to the NYPD.

The NYPD press office reported that both the woman and the truck driver were headed eastbound on Delancey at the time of the crash and that the woman was run over by the truck’s rear wheels. The police do not suspect any criminality on the part of the driver, who remained at the scene.

The intersection of Essex and Delancey is one of the most dangerous in New York City. According to Transportation Alternatives, there were 119 crashes injuring pedestrians or cyclists between 1998 and 2008, more than any other intersection on Manhattan’s entire East Side. A pedestrian was killed in a traffic crash at the intersection last April.

This is only the most recent in a series of serious crashes involving private garbage trucks. A private sanitation truck driver killed a pedestrian this March at Broadway and Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, and as Charles Komanoff wrote last summer, these trucks have posed a consistent and long-standing threat to pedestrians and cyclists.

The corner of Delancey and Bowery, where a driver struck and killed a pedestrian yesterday afternoon. Image: Google Street View

A driver struck and killed a pedestrian at the corner of Delancey and Bowery at 1:45 p.m. yesterday, according to the NYPD. The victim, a 54-year-old Asian man, was declared dead at Bellevue Hospital.

The police did not have any additional information about the crash or any charges brought against the driver at this time.