Streetsblog New York City

A killer charged with the DWI manslaughter death of a six-year-old child walked out of court Tuesday without spending a day in jail.

Zhaneya Butcher. Photo via Daily News

Prosecutors say Kent Lowrie, 53, was legally drunk when he hit and killed Zhaneya Butcher last summer as the little girl ran toward an ice cream truck on 104th Avenue in Jamaica, Queens. Lowrie pled guilty to manslaughter as part of a deal that resulted in five years’ probation, a $1,000 fine, a six-month license revocation and the mandated use of an ignition interlock device for one year, according to court records. The Daily News reports:

Instead of going to a grand jury, prosecutors opted to offer Lowrie a plea deal. They feared that when a margin of error for the blood-alcohol test was factored in, Lowrie would not have been considered intoxicated and would have faced lesser charges.

There was also no evidence that Lowrie was speeding.

Given that Lowrie faced up to seven years in prison, Zhaneya’s relatives were understandably shocked by the outcome of this case. Implicit in the decision to negotiate such a favorable deal for Lowrie is the fact that, under ordinary circumstances, the driver who strikes a child with deadly force on a neighborhood street is considered blameless by default.

The state legislature has given police and prosecutors new tools to offer a modicum of protection to vulnerable street users like Zhaneya Butcher and, ideally, to deter drivers from acts of deadly recklessness. But as long as those tools go unused, motorists will continue to maim and kill with relative impunity, and victims of traffic violence will be deemed culpable for their own deaths and injuries.

A woman who accompanied Lowrie on Tuesday was quoted as saying, “People should keep their kids in the house and not running between parked cars.” As repugnant a statement as that is, it’s more or less what the criminal justice system is saying, too.

Queens community leader Patricia Dolan was killed last night as she walked to a transportation meeting at her community board. Photo: Times-Ledger/Christina Santucci

Queens community leader Pat Dolan was killed by the driver of a Nissan sedan as she crossed the street last night. Dolan served on Queens Community Board 8, and she was walking to a transportation meeting when she was struck.

According to the NYPD, Dolan was crossing Hillside Avenue southbound at 198th Street when she was struck by the driver, who was traveling east. The NYPD said that “there was no criminality” on the part of the driver, who remained at the scene, but the police could provide no information about whether Dolan was in a crosswalk or had the right of way, or whether the driver was speeding.

Dolan was president of the Queens Civic Congress, and in the wake of her death tributes have been pouring in from across the city. “Pat dedicated her life to Queens,” said Borough President Helen Marshall. Said Comptroller John Liu, “Her leadership and infectious spirit will be sorely missed, and I stand together with my fellow residents of Queens to mourn her untimely death.” Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer announced that he was dedicating his transportation conference this Friday in Dolan’s memory.

Dolan had made improving transportation access for car-free Queens residents part of her life’s work, reported the Queens Times-Ledger. As director of Queens Connection, she organized transportation for senior centers and advocated for better public transit across the borough. “Dolan did not drive and took public transportation to every one of the countless meetings she attended all around the borough,” the paper wrote.

“Pat’s tireless commitment to a safer, more livable community earned her the respect of all who knew her,” said Transportation Alternatives executive director Paul Steely White. “During her tenure as its leader, the Queens Civic Congress addressed community transportation concerns, like speeding, reckless driving and dangerous conditions for walkers. Her absence will be felt in the many lives she touched in her own community and beyond.”

If you would like to discuss the case and traffic safety in the neighborhood with local police, the next meeting of the 103rd Precinct is December 13 at 7:00 p.m. and the next meeting of the 107th Precinct is this Tuesday, November 22, at 8:00 p.m.

In City Council Member Mark Weprin's district, 61 percent of those surveyed said they like the city's bike lane program. Image: City Council

Several surveys this year by top polling organizations have found citywide support for bike lanes. And in Park Slope and the Upper West Side, questionnaires put out by local elected officials have shown consistent neighborhood-level approval for new bike infrastructure. Now, another member of the City Council has found widespread enthusiasm for the city’s bike lane program among his constituents — and he doesn’t represent the heart of the NYC bike belt.

In fact, the district in question upends the assumption, held by certain members of the tabloid media, that “ordinary New Yorkers” aren’t interested in safer streets for cycling. It’s the turf of Council Member Mark Weprin, whose Queens district hugs the Nassau County line. A recent survey found that 61 percent of Weprin’s constituents support the city’s installation of bike lanes.

“I was somewhat surprised at the results,” said Weprin (not to be confused with his brother, Assembly Member David Weprin, who recently lost the race for Anthony Weiner’s seat in Congress and fought hard against congestion pricing when he sat in the City Council). “You tend to hear from the naysayers. When you go out to civic meetings, a lot of people complain about bike lanes, but obviously that’s not the majority.”

The survey went out by e-mail to a list of thousands of Weprin’s constituents, asking: “Do you support the network of bicycle lanes that the New York City Department of Transportation has installed on city streets?” About 400 people responded. While the methodology wasn’t scientific, Weprin guessed that if anything, it probably oversampled the high-intensity opinions of the bike lane opponents. “People seem to like them,” said Weprin, “including myself.” In the latest Q-poll, which uses random sampling and other scientific statistical techniques, 53 percent of Queens residents said they supported the expansion of the bike lane network.

Weprin's pro-bike lane district sits at the easternmost edge of Queens. Image: NYCityMap.

“It always helps to know that your constituents are behind you when you support an issue,” Weprin said when asked how the survey would affect his actions moving forward. While he cautioned that there might be problems with the location of any given bike lane, Weprin said it’s important “to realize that we have too many cars in this city and it would be more environmental and healthier to have more people ride bikes.”

He also praised the city’s upcoming bike-share program, again reserving the right to critique the particulars of its implementation, should issues arise. “In theory, it’s a great idea to have bike-sharing and have people have an alternative to taking taxi cabs and even subways and buses, because those too are overcrowded on occasion,” said Weprin.

Though the 2 train runs up White Plains Road, the Department of City Planning has proposed downzoning all the areas bounded by yellow on either side of the street. Image: NYC DCP

The Department of City Planning’s commitment to rezoning the city along more transit-oriented lines is a critical component of its sustainability agenda. Allowing more people to live and work next to transit means more people will ride transit and fewer will drive.

Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, upzonings have indeed been concentrated near transit. But what the administration gives with one hand, it takes with the other. Over the last decade, the Department of City Planning has also downzoned large swaths of transit-accessible land, preventing further development in these locations. Indeed, under one representative five-year period of Bloomberg and Burden’s city planning, three-quarters of the lots rezoned for greater density were located within a half-mile of rail transit, but so were two-thirds of the lots where development was further restricted, according to research by NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

The pattern still holds. In fact, some of DCP’s most recent rezonings are restricting development on blocks literally around the corner from a subway stop.

Take the Williamsbridge/Baychester rezoning in the Bronx, which the City Planning Commission certified last month. There, an elevated train, the 2, runs up White Plains Avenue. Along White Plains itself, DCP proposes to either maintain the existing rules or allow slightly more growth. But turn the corner off the main street even a fraction of a block, and the department is seeking to sharply curtail the opportunity for growth.

At the 219th Street station, for example, the allowable floor area ratio (or FAR), a measure of density, would drop from 2.43 to 1.25 as soon as you move east off of White Plains. Parking minimums would rise, requiring 85 parking spots for every 100 homes (up from a 70 percent ratio). To the immediate northwest of the station, the proposed zoning would be even stricter, with a FAR of 1.1 and a parking space required for each new residential unit.

The story is the same one stop further north at 225th Street. Walk one short block south of the station, turn left and the allowable FAR drops to 0.9, again with a parking space required for each unit.

Two sides of the Baychester Avenue stop on the 5 line are slated for the same extremely restrictive zoning, but in that case there won’t even be any upzoning along a main street to compensate for it.

Those neighborhoods are in the northeast Bronx, near the end of the subway system. Even so, transit is heavily used in the area; in that City Council district, less than half of residents drive to work.

Moreover, DCP is tightening its zoning precisely because developers want to build in these areas. Explaining the need for the new restrictions, the department writes on its website that “the residential neighborhoods in the rezoning area have been experiencing development pressure” and that the new rules are needed to “preserve the scale and context of these areas.”

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The block of the bike path directly to the east of the Queensboro entrance has been paved. Photo: Clarence Eckerson

Clarence sends along a few more shots from the beginning of construction season. These come from Queens Plaza, where the two-way bike approach to the Queensboro Bridge is extending eastward.

The bike approach, part of a package of public space improvements to Queens Plaza, will eventually connect Vernon Boulevard and Northern Boulevard. The segment between the bridge entrance and Northern Boulevard is well on its way to completion.

Looking east toward Northern Boulevard, one block of the path has yet to be paved. Photo: Clarence Eckerson

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A rendering of the foot of the Roosevelt Island Bridge with new pedestrian refuge islands added. Image: NYCDOT

At the foot of the Roosevelt Island Bridge, DOT is showing off how a few simple improvements can turn a dangerous intersection into a safer one. It’s not a flashy redesign — just a pair of pedestrian refuges and improved crosswalks — but it’s a good example of the street safety improvements that are becoming increasingly common.

Right now, pedestrians crossing 36th Avenue where it becomes the entrance to the bridge must walk 107 feet from sidewalk to sidewalk: six lanes of traffic with no safe place for pedestrians to pause. Satellite photos of the site show that if a crosswalk had ever been painted there, it’s long since worn away.

By building two new pedestrian refuges across 36th, DOT’s redesign makes it so that the longest distance a pedestrian would have to walk in one stretch is only 49 feet. It also allows for the crosswalk across Vernon, which already has a traffic calming bike lane, to shift from a more dangerous diagonal route to one that leads straight across the street. One of the refuges is long enough to include a new area for trees and plantings.

Queens Community Board 1 did not vote on the proposal after DOT presented it to them on March 29, according to the district manager.

For an overhead view of what the intersection looks like now and the plan for the future, head below the fold:

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Hunter's Point South will have good bike infrastructure, as shown here. But will it be transit-accessible or swamped by parking? Image: NYC Mayor's Office via Flickr.

This morning, the Bloomberg Administration announced the developer for the first phase of Hunter’s Point South, a Long Island City project the city is billing as the largest middle-class housing project since Co-Op City and Starrett City went up in the 1970s. A team led by the Related Companies will be developing the first 900 units at what will eventually be a 5,000-unit complex along the East River.

Whether Hunter’s Point South turns out to be the most recent in a line of auto-oriented projects along New York City’s deindustrialized waterfront, or a project in line with the city’s sustainability goals, will depend on whether developers choose to build all the parking they are entitled to, whether the MTA extends bus service into the complex, and whether the city’s attempts to foster ferry transit across the East River are successful.

The nearest subway station to Hunter’s Point South is the Vernon-Jackson Ave stop on the 7. The northeastern corner of the site is only two blocks away from the station. Those are long blocks, however, making the walk about three-tenths of a mile. That’s not right on top of the subway, but it is walkable. The far end of the 30 acre site, however, will be 0.6 or 0.7 miles from the subway, more than the half-mile rule of thumb for transit-oriented development.

Over the course of the project, the city has been in talks with the MTA to extend bus service, most likely the Q103, into Hunter’s Point South. There is no concrete promise to provide transit to the heart of the project, however, nor have funds to pay for more buses been publicly identified.

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DOT's new interactive map of Jackson Heights can display several layers of information, like the number of traffic crashes and pedestrian volumes at certain intersections.

Since 2009, the Department of Transportation has been engaged in a major study of Jackson Heights’ streets and sidewalks. At the request of community groups and with federal funding from Rep. Joe Crowley, DOT has been developing a plan to make the neighborhood safer, less congested, and more transit-accessible. After two years of research and community engagement, DOT will be presenting its first recommendations next Saturday, February 12.

In preparation for the release of those plans, DOT has also launched a first-of-its-kind data portal collecting all the information about the Jackson Heights Transportation Study. (The portal was developed by a division of OpenPlans, Streetsblog’s parent organization.) Everything from community board presentations to raw, block-by-block data about parking occupancy is in one place.

The portal includes a new interactive map of Jackson Heights. Presenting information like vehicle speeds, pedestrian volumes, traffic crashes and parking occupancy, the map helps visualize what happens on the neighborhood’s streets. You can see, for example, how rampant double-parking blocks buses along Broadway: On one block, there are an average of 32 percent more cars parked than there are spaces. According to DOT, even more features should be available after next Saturday.

What’s presented on the 12th could also be extremely exciting. At presentations to Community Boards 3 and 4 last June, DOT proposed classifying all neighborhood streets into four categories laid out in the department’s Street Design Manual.

• Through streets would be redesigned to move vehicular traffic more efficiently, without causing speeding.
• Transit streets would have bus lanes, curb extensions at bus stops and lights coordinated with the buses. 74th and 75th Streets are likely candidates.
• Slow streets would calm traffic with re-timed signals and traffic-calming treatments like neckdowns.
• Some streets could be pedestrianized, with furniture and greenery creating new public spaces.

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The intersection of Woodhaven Boulevard and Atlantic Avenue where a tow truck driver critically injured an 81-year-old woman crossing the street. Image: Google Street View

Separate crashes in the past 48 hours have critically injured two New York City pedestrians.

On Saturday afternoon around 2 p.m., an unidentified 81-year-old woman was crossing Woodhaven Boulevard in Queens when she was struck by a tow-truck driver turning left from westbound Atlantic Avenue. The woman sustained severe trauma to the head and was last listed in critical condition, according to police. Despite the fact that the circumstances of the crash indicate the victim was crossing Woodhaven with a walk signal and the truck driver failed to yield, NYPD gave Streetsblog the standard line that the crash involved “no criminality” and that it “looks like an accident.”

This morning at around 7 a.m., a minivan driver struck a pedestrian at the intersection of 172nd Street and Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. The victim was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital in critical condition. NYPD had no further details on the crash at this time.

Update: The Daily News reports that the victim of the Bronx crash was crossing Jerome when he was struck by a minivan driver heading north, then hit again by a southbound driver. The minivan driver said he didn’t see the victim “until he was right in front of me.” No charges were filed.

The new approach to the Queensboro, looking east, with access to the bridge path on the right. Photo: Clarence Eckerson

We’ve got another highlight from 2010 construction season to share with you. A two-way, protected approach to the Queens side of the Queensboro Bridge bike-ped path has been paved, striped and open for business since the end of October.

Clarence took these photos of the new approach, part of a package of bicycle and pedestrian improvements that NYC EDC is carrying out at Queens Plaza and vicinity. The project has been in the works for several years and, when finished, will encompass a major reallocation of real estate from cars and parking to public space, walking and biking. The bridge approach in these photos will be a link in a two-way path running from Northern Boulevard to Vernon Boulevard.

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