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.

Under a new traffic pattern, drivers will be allowed to turn onto the Williamsburg Bridge from Clinton Street. Click to enlarge.

DOT also plans to allow drivers to turn onto the bridge from Clinton Street, which will be turned into a one-way northbound street between Grand and Delancey. The goal, said Benson, is to reduce the number of blocks drivers travel through the neighborhood when they go from the FDR Drive to the Williamsburg Bridge. Additionally, the presence of turning cars at Clinton Street might make eastbound Delancey drivers honor that red light more than they do currently. Bike access on Clinton would be maintained with a two-way bike lane.

Three new left turn restrictions would reduce turning conflicts where Delancey intersects with Chrystie, Allen, and Essex. Half of all pedestrians hit on Delancey Street are struck while they have the walk signal, according to Benson.

The improvements will be in place by June, when construction work ends on the bridge and a permanent traffic pattern is back in place.

Generally, the improvements earned commendations from local residents.

“This is more than I actually expected and I’m very pleased about it,” said CB 3 transportation committee chair David Crane. The improvements also won support from the Delancey Street Safety Working Group, made up of State Senator Daniel Squadron, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Council Member Margaret Chin, Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Assemblymember Brian Kavanagh, and Council Member Rosie Mendez.

Many, however, wanted to see additional safety improvements that DOT was unwilling to make. “We continue to feel that the lights to cross Delancey need to be lengthened,” said April Lewis, a member of the community organization Manhattan Together.

Benson, however, said that while DOT is studying retiming the signals, no major changes are in the works, lest Williamsburg Bridge traffic be negatively affected. “There might be a second here, a second there,” he said. “Making a radical shift in that could have some pretty significant impacts on traffic flow.”

“You are talking about, basically, appeasements,” responded one man standing at the back of the room. “The philosophy would be cars over people.”

Similarly, many community members complained that the traffic enforcement agents stationed at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge wave through traffic without the slightest regard for pedestrians or walk lights. When the agents are stationed there, said Crane, “there effectively is zero pedestrian crossing time.”

Also off the table was any reduction in space for traffic on or off the bridge. DOT won’t change the core width of Delancey Street while all that bridge traffic is pouring over it. For now, one can only wonder what the agency might have been willing to do had congestion pricing passed Sheldon Silver’s Assembly in 2008, or if the Fare Hike Four hadn’t killed bridge tolls in the State Senate in 2009.

The Delancey Street Safety Working Group will continue to meet, however, so more safety improvements could be added at a later date. “It is rare to get a government agency to move so aggressively and so quickly, and also to do it hand in hand with the community,” said Squadron, who added that more needs to be done. After the meeting, he mentioned bicycle safety and the quality of the median as two potential areas for improvement. “This is not the end of this,” he said.

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:

“I am confident that by working together city agencies, concerned elected officials, experts and community members will institute effective and creative ways to increase safety on the Delancey corridor,” said Council member Chin. “The number of fatalities this year alone demand action. It time to make Delancey safe for everyone who uses it.”

“By bringing the community together, we can develop solutions that improve traffic, pedestrian and cyclist safety in the Lower East Side,” said Congresswoman Velazquez.

“It is essential that we do everything possible to make sure we have the most effective safety measures in place to address the problems we have seen on Delancey Street,” said Speaker Silver. “I am encouraged that we now have key stakeholders at the table and I am hopeful that, with the full participation of the community, we can develop some solutions that will increase protections for pedestrians, cyclists and all other users of this important thoroughfare.”

“Last month’s tragic death of cyclist Jeffrey Axelrod was the latest painful reminder of the dangerous conditions that plague Delancey Street on the Lower East Side,” said Borough President Stringer. “For years I have called on the City to improve safety at this location, and this working group is a much needed a step in the right direction. I am committed to working with the NYC Department of Transportation, my colleagues in government, Community Board 3 and safety advocates to identify mitigations that will make Delancey Street safer for all users: pedestrians, cyclists and drivers.”

“While the last four years have been the safest in City history, we’re always working to make our streets even safer,” said NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. “We recently installed countdown signals along Delancey Street to help pedestrians cross and a safety redesign is now under way at the pedestrian and bike entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge. We continue to look for ways to build on the many enhancements we’ve made throughout the corridor and to working with elected leaders and other stakeholders to cut the number of traffic fatalities citywide in half by 2030.”

“Community Board 3 is very excited about working with the Delancey Street Working Group to make Delancey safer for everyone,” said David Crane, chair of the Community Board 3 Transportation Committee. “The Community Board has been grappling with this issue for years and has included it as a major problem in the current District Needs Statement. Senator Squadron has brought together agencies, advocates, and elected officials who are all very open to collaborating for the best resolution.”

“It’s about time everyone came together to finally put an end to the dangers on Delancey,” said Paul Steely White, Executive Director of Transportation Alternatives. “Delancey Street is one of the most hazardous streets in the city–this is an important first step in making Delancey safe for foot and bicycle traffic. We understand this is a complex corridor that needs to be carefully studied but there are quick solutions that could be implemented to start saving lives now while a more permanent fix is planned. We’re eager to discuss making these solutions a reality in this working group.”

“The LES BID is excited to participate in this important dialogue with our great partners in government regarding the Delancey Street corridor,” said Tim Laughlin, Director of Policy, Planning and Operations for the Lower East Side Business Improvement District. “We look forward to working with our elected officials to implement financially feasible safety improvements that will complement and enhance projects the BID is currently leading the way on, such as our plan to extend the Delancey pedestrian medians at both Essex and Orchard Streets.”

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.

A rendering of what the intersection of Allen and Broome will look like after construction. Image: Parks Department

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.

The youth ambassador program is “a way to understand the neighborhood where they live more politically,” said Le, “how decisions like road construction or capital investment really impact the fabric of the place they call home.”

No one I spoke with wanted to say too much about what might be included in the plan before the community had spoken, but they were willing to point to a few issues that would likely be addressed. As in most parts of the city, said Le, traffic safety and secure bike parking are top concerns in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Bike lanes and bike-sharing could be tools to address those problems. Le also noted issues unique to the area, such as an extremely dense population, a large bike delivery industry, and major NYCHA developments. A large population of immigrants and people who speak limited English must be taken into account, Le added.

Azzarello also pointed to the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges as particular planning challenges for the area. The three free bridges deposit huge volumes of traffic onto the streets of the Lower East Side and Chinatown.

So far, coalition members are pleased with the reaction they’ve been getting. Azzarello said she was impressed by “just how interested people are and how willing people are to be engaged.”

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.

The driver of this wrecked SUV had been traveling on the other side of on Houston Street before flipping over the median, according to the tipster who sent this photo.

He saw the SUV driver crawl out from the wreck looking basically uninjured, after which the police took him into custody. The NYPD couldn't provide us with any further information.

That the driver escaped serious injury illustrates why legislators and law enforcement should take steps to protect people outside of cars through better enforcement and tools like Hayley and Diego's Law and Elle's Law. With seat belts, air bags, and ever-safer metal frames, today's cars protect drivers from their own recklessness better than ever. If this SUV had followed a different trajectory after the motorist lost control, however, any pedestrian or cyclist in the way would have been crushed.

Evidence continues to mount that NYCDOT's street reclamation projects are making New York a safer city for walking and biking. The latest statistics come from Allen and Pike Streets, where DOT installed four pedestrian plazas and the city's first center-median protected bikeway late last summer. The project followed a long campaign by local community groups to make the pedestrian malls on Allen and Pike more welcoming public spaces.

In an update presented to Manhattan Community Board 3 last week [PDF], DOT announced that pedestrian injuries have dropped 54 percent at the intersection of Allen and Delancey, and overall injuries declined 57 percent. At the four intersections where new plazas linked together mall segments and replaced cross routes for traffic, pedestrian injuries fell 60 percent, and overall injuries declined 40 percent. The numbers were crunched by comparing several months of post-implementation injury data to the average number of injuries during the same months over the prior six years.

In addition to demonstrating the safety benefits of the new street design, the reduction in injuries should help make the case for permanent improvements on Allen and Pike. Like many recent DOT projects, the bikeway and the new plazas were laid down using inexpensive materials and techniques, allowing for a rapid build-out. Later this year the Parks Department will start constructing a more polished version along part of the Allen-Pike corridor.

Work on the three blocks from Henry to South Street and on the single block from Delancey to Hester is expected to begin in the fall. On those segments, the project will reconstruct the pedestrian malls and give the bikeway a more finished, permanent feel. (Elsewhere, the existing improvements will remain in place.) The Parks Department is still seeking funding to build out the rest of the corridor.

Police talk to a man and woman at Essex and Rivington, where a cyclist was injured Monday night. Photo: DNAinfo

A pedestrian and a cyclist have been hurt in separate Manhattan crashes since last night.

DNAinfo reports that a cyclist was hit Monday at the corner of Essex and Rivington Streets:

Shortly after the crash, police on the scene were seen questioning a man and a woman while an ambulance drove away. A black SUV sat with a shattered windshield just north of Rivington next to a bike on the ground.

Police reportedly had nothing to say about the crash to DNAinfo. NYPD told Streetsblog this morning that the department had no information on the incident.

As DNAinfo points out, the city recently added bike lanes to Rivington as part of its effort to divert bike traffic from crash-plagued Delancey Street. Three weeks ago Community Board 3 member Harry Wieder was fatally struck on Essex less than two blocks away from the scene of last night's collision.

Just before 10:00 a.m. today, a pedestrian was hit at 83rd St. and Third Ave. According to NYPD, the victim was a woman who suffered a "badly injured leg." Police said she was taken to University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell. Streetsblog has contacted the hospital for an update on her condition.

Harry Wieder. Photo: DNAInfo

From news site DNAInfo:

The victim, Harry Wieder, 57, was crossing Essex Street between E.
Houston and Stanton streets around 9:45 p.m. when he was hit by a taxi
heading north on the block, police said.

Wieder, a longtime advocate for disability, transportation and LGBT
issues, had been leaving a Community Board 3 meeting at PS 20 when the
incident occurred, colleagues said.

Wieder was a member of the transportation committee of CB 3. A dwarf who had difficulty walking, he was known as an advocate for people with disabilities.

An email sent out by board chair Dominic Pisciotta last night reports that Wieder was surrounded by CB 3 members at the scene. According to DNAInfo, police "suspect no criminality" but the investigation is open.

The Essex/Delancey area is one of the most dangerous in the city. Earlier this month a man was killed while crossing Delancey at Essex. According to CrashStat, 86 pedestrians and 24 cyclists were injured at the intersection from 1995 to 2005.

New bike lanes leading to and from the Williamsburg Bridge encountered almost no opposition from Manhattan Community Board 3.

There was only one "no" vote against the proposals last night, said Transportation Alternatives' Caroline Samponaro. "There were three strong two-minute speeches in favor," she added, "and no one spoke opposed." 

The plans will paint new curbside bike lanes on Stanton, Rivington, and Suffolk Streets, defining routes on low-traffic side streets to help cyclists avoid Delancey Street as they get on and off the Williamsburg Bridge. The board also voted in favor of a planted median on the wide and barren Bowery. Implementation of both projects is scheduled for May.

What's next for the Lower East Side? Samponaro said that a top TA priority is to ensure that plans for First and Second Avenues -- "the single biggest investment in biking in New York City, ever" -- are implemented effectively. So is helping cyclists deal with dangerous, traffic-ridden Delancey Street, which these improvements don't address. That will happen "in part by letting folks know about alternative routes and also by supporting those who are trying to create a safe connection" along Delancey itself, she said.

The safety data and the workshop are part of a new campaign organized by TA called the East Side Streets Coalition, which aims to dramatically improve safety from East Harlem to Chinatown. The goal is to reduce traffic collisions that injure and kill pedestrians and cyclists by 50 percent over the next ten years.

Upper East Side workshop participants discussed street safety using a new map of the most frequent sites of traffic collisions that injure pedestrians and cyclists. Click here for the full version of the map, showing the whole East Side. Image: Transportation Alternatives. 

The campaign started by mapping out precisely where pedestrians and cyclists are most at risk of getting hurt by cars. Using advanced mapping techniques and new data from the state Department of Transportation, TA has identified and visualized the intersections where the most crashes occur along the entire East Side. These intersections will be the principal targets of the campaign. (The campaign will explicitly refrain from focusing on First and Second Avenues, which are already slated to receive major pedestrian and cyclist safety features.)

The coalition is beginning outreach to develop a vision for a redesigned East Side. The first workshop, for Upper East Side residents, was held last night, with about thirty participants meeting in the cafeteria of the Wagner Middle School to share their concerns about local streets and develop solutions.

Using tools like the city's Street Design Manual and detailed maps of some of the most dangerous intersections in the district, they plotted out their safety ideas. Some of the most popular fixes, like leading pedestrian intervals or sidewalk extensions, would make sense throughout the city. Others were specific to the neighborhood or even the intersection.

One especially interesting proposal was to give 86th Street, where two deep red ovals are visible on the safety map, the same treatment that DOT is proposing for 34th Street: a physically separated bus lane and a full block closed to cars. As Upper East Side resident Steve Vaccaro noted while presenting this idea, 86th Street is choked with cars even though it doesn't actually connect anything; the street doesn't directly connect to either the FDR Drive or a Central Park transverse.

The solutions didn't fall on deaf ears. City Council Member Dan Garodnick gave opening remarks, telling the group that he "will be very eager to look at the plans and then advocate for them." Representatives from Assembly Member Jonathan Bing and Council Member Jessica Lappin's office also participated in the group exercises and presented ideas.

The workshop was a success in another respect as well. Two local organizations, the E. 86th Street Association and Upper Green Side, became the first members of the East Side Streets Coalition, in addition to a local committee composed of TA members. According to Day, more organizations have already committed to joining the coalition but haven't officially signed on yet. Five more visioning workshops are scheduled for the rest of the East Side between now and mid-May. 

NYCDOT unveiled a slate of pedestrian and bicycle improvements to the transportation committee of Manhattan Community Board 3 last night. Presenters asked for votes on two street safety projects: the construction of a planted center median on the Bowery between Canal and Division streets, and the addition of new curbside bike routes to improve connections to the Williamsburg Bridge.

Despite a few moments of crankiness from one member ("I can’t in good conscience vote for any more bicycle lanes"), the committee approved resolutions in favor of both measures.

The new bike routes on Suffolk, Stanton, and Rivington streets would complement improvements built last year, which extended the Williamsburg Bridge approach to Suffolk. Slated for implementation in May, the painted, curbside lanes are intended fill in key east-west connections north of where Delancey Street feeds into the bridge path.

The changes are important because Delancey remains extremely dangerous even as biking on the Williamsburg Bridge increases rapidly.

This January, 74-year-old Fuen Bai was killed by a school bus driver while riding in the no-man's-land between the bridge and Allen Street. Every year, traffic injures dozens of pedestrians and cyclists on the corridor, according to CrashStat. Meanwhile, DOT bike counts indicate that cycling on the bridge has quadrupled since 2004. Despite all the people biking over the bridge, the tantalizing proximity of the Allen Street bike path, and the dismal safety record of Delancey Street, the new plan does not address Delancey itself.

DOT's strategy is to divert Williamsburg Bridge bike traffic to calmer, safer side streets. "One of the issues is that people don’t know about the alternatives," Bicycle Program Coordinator Josh Benson told the audience last night. "When you get out there and try this route, it’s gonna make sense. It will change people’s behavior." DOT has no plans to add bike infrastructure to Delancey, he said.

Ian Dutton, a member of neighboring Community Board 2, noted at the meeting that a similar strategy on the other side of town has helped direct cyclists to side streets like Bleecker and Prince instead of the Houston Street traffic sewer. Still, he said, the proposal amounts to a tacit admission that Delancey Street is supposed to function like a highway.

Delancey Street "is obviously the most dangerous corridor in that part of the neighborhood," said Transportation Alternatives' Wiley Norvell. "We can’t continue to skirt it in its entirely. It’s time to give it the attention it deserves."

The CB 3 committee also approved a plan to build a raised, planted median on the Bowery between the Manhattan Bridge and Division Street. The project would reallocate some space from moving and parking lanes to create safer pedestrian crossings on some of the most hellish blocks in Manhattan, where crossing distances currently exceed 80 feet.

Seward Park Houses has welcomed a small car-sharing program instead of clamoring for additional parking. Image: The Lo-Down.

"Not enough parking" is a pretty familiar refrain from residents, community boards, and elected officials across the entire city. According to the New York Times, Seward Park's co-op board has avoided that route and settled on a solution that can actually reduce the amount of space dedicated to the automobile: car-sharing. 

The city and MTA are poised to unveil a proposal for BRT on these major north/south arteries. But the MTA, expressing concern that trucks parked illegally in bus lanes would stop traffic, vetoed the idea of physically segregated lanes. The plans do include tighter enforcement of bus-only lanes and off-board payment of fares, both of which make buses move faster. And, according to those who have seen the plans, transportation officials do envision hundreds of blocks of discreet bike lanes on First and Second avenues.

The plans are being unveiled at the Hunter College School of Social Work tonight (129 E. 79th St., 10th Floor), at a meeting that's currently in progress and scheduled to last until 8:30 p.m. We'll have more on this development tomorrow. For now, it looks like big improvements in street safety are on the table, but officials at the MTA and DOT are counting on bus lane enforcement cameras to keep riders from getting slowed by traffic. Which means the effectiveness of this project will, to a significant extent, be determined by Albany.

A witness says the woman was riding her bicycle on Delancey when she hit a pothole and fell behind the bus, which then backed over her.

"She was just trying to get away from the school bus and the school bus just kept driving, and it was getting closer and closer to her. And everybody's screaming at him, 'There's somebody behind you!' And she was trying to avoid the pothole, but once she hit the pothole, that's when she fell over," said one witness.

Police had not charged the driver at the time NY1 filed the report last night. NYPD has not yet returned Streetsblog's inquiries about the crash.

The driver works for the same school bus operator, Atlantic Express, as the driver who killed cyclist Jonathan Millstein on Eighth Avenue in Brooklyn in 2008.

Two other New Yorkers lost their lives on city streets yesterday. Rosemary Pratt, 46, was killed by a forklift operator at a subway overpass construction project on East 14th Street in Midwood, Brooklyn. And Mary Mason, 59, was killed by a fuel truck driver as she crossed Pacific Street at the intersection of Classon Avenue in Crown Heights.