Streetsblog New York City

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 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.

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.

A tipster sends this photo of Houston Street near the corner of Mott, early yesterday morning at around 5:00 a.m. Our source says he was awakened when an SUV speeding east on Houston plowed into an electronic construction sign, hit the median and flipped over end to end, coming to a stop on its side in the middle of the opposite side of the street.

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.

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.

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.

Two weeks after NYCDOT revealed a package of pedestrian and cyclist improvements for the Lower East Side, the full membership of Community Board 3 voted overwhelmingly to approve the plans. 

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.

"You can't control what you can't measure," the saying goes. So to get a better grip on street safety on Manhattan's East Side, Transportation Alternatives started by collecting better data about local traffic collisions and injuries. Last night, a group of Upper East Siders used that information to begin imagining what a safer neighborhood might look like.

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.

"Other areas of Manhattan have seen significant street improvements in the last few years," said TA campaign coordinator Julia Day. "A lot of the East Side's major corridors haven't benefited from these improvements." As a result, she said, the East Side has some of the most dangerous streets in the city. The densely-populated Community Board 8 district on the Upper East Side, for example, suffers from the third most crashes of any community district in the city.

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.

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