Streetsblog New York City

The Weekly Carnage is a Friday round-up of motor vehicle violence across the five boroughs and beyond. For more on the origins and purpose of this column, please read About the Weekly Carnage.

Fatal Crashes (5 killed this week, 16 this year, 3 drivers charged*)

• Grant City: Colleen Mallon Dizeo, 48, Dies From Injuries After Truck Driver Runs Her Down; Police: Death Appears Accidental (Advance)
• Major Deegan Expressway: Daniela Abreu, 16; Jose Henriquez, 22; Eduardo Nunez, 30, Killed, Two Others Critically Injured in High-Speed Crash (News, Post)
• UES: 31-Year-Old Passenger Killed By Hit-and-Run Driver on FDR Drive (DNA)

Injuries, Arrests and Property Damage

• Sunset Park: Hit-and-Run Driver Critically Injures Pedestrian; Driver Later Turns Self In (News 1, 2)
• Jamaica: Pedestrian in Serious Condition After Driver Hits Him (DNA)
• Hudson Square: Cyclist Seriously Injured After Hitting Lane Divider Near Holland Tunnel (DNA)
• Forest Hills: Several Injured in Two-Car Crash on Jackie Robinson Parkway (Times Ledger)
• Williamsbridge: Pedestrian Struck Near Bronx River Parkway (DNA)
• Bulls Head: Driver Hospitalized With Life-Threatening Injuries After Crashing Into Pole (Advance)
• Greenpoint: Photos: Another Crash on McGuinness Blvd. (NY Shitty)
• SI: Police Arrest Four for DWI, One After She Crashed Into Fence, Parked Car (Advance)
• Lower Manhattan: Van Catchs Fire in Foley Square (DNA)

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Today’s Jim Dwyer column in the New York Times is a nice little encapsulation of everything that can go wrong when NYC’s press corps turns its attention to matters of transportation.

The slug for the story on the metro section homepage reads: “New York often resorts to revenue-raising expedients like a lucrative new campaign to keep drivers on Broadway below Houston Street from venturing into the bus lane.”

Dwyer’s piece then uses the enforcement of the Broadway bus lane in lower Manhattan as a kind of poster child for what he sees as an excessive reliance on fines and fees in the city budget. He writes: “Whatever the virtues of bus lanes, and there are many, this one is a trap — a lucrative one.”

Dwyer’s source for claiming that the Broadway bus lane is a “trap”? Well, he doesn’t quote any transit planners with the MTA or NYC DOT, which implemented bus improvements on Broadway in 2007. He doesn’t quote any bus drivers familiar with the route. He doesn’t turn to any of the 41,000 or so passengers who ride the New York City Transit buses that ply Broadway every weekday. Instead he cites a cop who “concedes that traffic would be backed up to 14th Street if some drivers did not make their way into that Broadway bus lane.”

The other expert who turns up at the tail end of Dwyer’s piece is an anonymous state official who, “as it happens,” was pulled over for driving in the bus lane and “managed to wiggle out of the ticket.” A member of the placarded class who got busted but didn’t have to pay. Exactly the type of credible source Times readers should trust to render judgment on transportation policy. The official says of the Broadway lane: “It goes against the intent of bus lanes because it causes congestion.”

And here I thought the intent of bus lanes was to help bus passengers reach their destinations quicker. But who needs transit planners, bus drivers, and bus riders to weigh in on a bus lane when cops and anonymous state officials who drive in the bus lane are so generous with their expertise?

Go back a few years in the Times’ archive, and there’s a great explanation for why Broadway needs bus lane enforcement. From a Willie Neuman story in 2007:

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It took a lawsuit from the family of Mathieu Lefevre to pry information from NYPD regarding the hit-and-run crash that took his life. Now they have reason to believe the police are still withholding vital evidence.

Last week, Streetsblog reported that NYPD had released a detailed description of how the crash unfolded, supposedly based on security video from a business located at 157 Morgan Avenue. But the footage NYPD gave the Lefevre family does not convey the same details as the descriptions of video in the police investigative file.

Here is the description of a security video from 157 Morgan submitted by Detective Gerard Sheehan. It delves into specific detail about the crash:

Here are two videos captured from 157 Morgan that NYPD gave to the Lefevres and their attorney, Steve Vaccaro, showing footage at the intersection immediately before Leonardo Degianni, who fatally struck Lefevre and then left the scene, turned on to Meserole Street. In the first clip, the crane truck operated by Degianni enters the frame at about the 4:50 mark, and a cyclist is briefly visible at about the 5:02 mark. In the second clip, the truck enters the frame slightly after the 6:50 mark. In neither video is the moment Degianni struck Lefevre plainly visible.

(Streetsblog transferred these videos from AVI files NYPD provided to the Lefevres and Vaccaro. The original files supplied by NYPD displayed the videos upside down — you can see how they appeared at the end of this post.)

Adding to the discrepancies, a second police description of security video does not match Sheehan’s description or the videos in the investigative file. The description from Detective Sheehan says that Lefevre was initially struck by the “passenger right side” of Degianni’s truck, which threw him “into the roadway” before Degianni struck him again. A second description, from officer Armand Tasca, says Lefevre “rode directly into the side of the truck as it made the right turn” (note that both Sheehan and Tasca wrote that Degianni and Lefevre were traveling north on Morgan, when they were in fact traveling south — see crash diagram at the end of this post):

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“Cities for Cycling“ is a project of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) to document, promote and implement the world’s best bicycle transportation practices in American cities. As part of the Cities for Cycling program, bikeway design experts take their show on the road, using the streets of different U.S. cities as their classroom and the new NACTO bikeway design book as their guide.

“The NACTO Guide is a really important step for cities to say it is okay to be different than a rural area. We are not better… we are just different and we would like to apply these different principles,” says Chicago Commissioner of Transportation Gabe Klein.

Streetfilms brings you these highlights of the Chicago stop on the tour, where representatives from the transportation departments of NYC, Portland and San Francisco shared lessons from developing bike infrastructure in their hometowns.

Introducing the newest member of the Streetsblog family… Luna Blue Evans-Snyder was born the afternoon of January 13. She weighed in at 6 pounds, 12 ounces.

As you might imagine, Tanya’s byline is going to be a little scarce over the next several weeks. If you’d like to send her well-wishes and recommendations for a good balance bike, you can reach her at tanya.c.snyder@gmail.com.

The hit-and-run truck driver who killed cyclist Mathieu Lefevre last October struck the victim with his front driver’s side tire, according to a description in NYPD’s investigative file shared by Lefevre’s family. The description, based largely on video evidence police obtained in December, raises serious questions about the driver’s claim that he was not aware he had struck Lefevre when he left the scene of the fatal collision.

Police released the investigative file on Friday, three weeks after Lefevre’s family filed a suit under the Freedom of Information Law to obtain materials related to the investigation.

In a statement released today [PDF], Erika Lefevre, the victim’s mother, revealed that NYPD has now issued traffic summonses to the crane truck driver, Leonardo Degianni, for failure to exercise due care and failing to signal, but no criminal charges. The statement criticizes NYPD for not charging Degianni with fleeing the scene and criminal negligence, given evidence that Degianni’s front bumper and driver’s side front wheel struck Mathieu Lefevre. The Lefevres are appealing to Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes to review the case.

The Lefevre case has shed light on an aspect of policing that NYPD is loath to conduct transparently. Police and press accounts of traffic fatalities tend to be riddled with gaps, and witness accounts from crash scenes often depict police failing to pursue potential lines of inquiry. Thanks to the Lefevres’ determined pursuit of the truth, the public not only has a better sense of what caused Mathieu Lefevre’s death, but how NYPD conducts crash investigations.

Evidence in the Lefevre file summarized by their attorney, Steve Vaccaro, directly contradicts at least one NYPD account of the crash, in which a police source said the victim ran a red light. The NYPD file indicates that Lefevre and Degianni were passing through the intersection of Meserole Street and Morgan Avenue simultaneously, with a green light, when Degianni turned across Lefevre’s path, without signaling, as the cyclist continued straight.

The new evidence is only coming to light after the victim’s family relentlessly pressed the NYPD to disclose information related to the crash.

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Transportation analyst and Streetsblog contributor Charles Komanoff is out with a piece in Reuters today that examines the traffic impacts of adding 2,000 new yellow taxis to Manhattan streets, and it’s not pretty.

As part of the grand bargain struck between Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Andrew Cuomo that will create a new class of hail-able livery cabs, NYC will auction off 2,000 new yellow taxi medallions. The city is expected to haul in a billion dollars from the auction, but Komanoff calculates that in the bargain, central Manhattan streets will be overrun with even more traffic:

No one mentioned traffic when the taxi deal was rolled out last month at City Hall and in Albany. After all, with 800,000 motor vehicles already entering the Manhattan Central Business District (CBD) each weekday, what difference could a mere 2,000 additional yellow cabs possibly make?

Plenty, it turns out. Yellow cabs spend three-fourths of each shift, around seven hours, plying CBD streets and avenues. (And of course some are active for two shifts a day.) Most private cars driven in Manhattan don’t do so for long. Even at the CBD’s notoriously labored traffic pace — now averaging 9.5 mph, up from 8 mph before the recession — the two to three miles per day logged by the average car below 60th Street occupy 15 to 20 minutes.

Adding one new medallion is thus equivalent to adding 40 private cars. Adding 2,000 of them — as the City now intends to do during the next three years — would be the traffic equivalent of adding 80,000 cars, a 10% increase in volume.

Some form of congestion pricing would be just about the only way to mitigate the impact of all this additional traffic, Komanoff writes. You can see the analysis underlying his conclusions in this PDF.

We have a late breaking addition to the Streetsblog calendar. Tonight the transportation committee of Brooklyn Community Board 14 will be discussing DOT’s plan to add more pedestrian space and realign the intersection of Parkside Avenue and Ocean Avenue at the southeast entrance to Prospect Park [PDF]. The redesign will be made possible by relocating a park loop entrance for cars from this intersection to Lincoln Road. An average of 20 people are injured in traffic at this location every year, and the project is expected to cut that number in half.

Neighborhood residents campaigned long and hard for safety improvements here, but Community Board 14 has a spotty record on livable streets. If you live in the area and want to see this project move forward, tonight’s meeting gets underway at 7:00 at 810 East 16th Street, by Avenue H.

The Post is reporting that a Williamsburg man was killed this morning as he crossed Borinquen Place near Keap Street. The victim, 57-year-old Lepoldo Hernandez, was walking to meet a friend to carpool to work when he was struck by two drivers in succession. The first driver was traveling eastbound, and the second driver struck Hernandez as he lay in the street.

While police, as usual, are already telling the press that they “suspect no criminality,” Gothamist’s John del Signore cites a report from a local resident at the scene who was told that the first car was “going like 50″:

There was a crowd of onlookers and I saw the sheet over the body in the street. I did not see any vehicles around that looked damaged or anyone speaking with police, but witnesses said both drivers stayed at the scene. Motorists speed like crazy down this street to get on the Williamsburg Bridge. I watch them run the light, pass in the bike lane, and speed like it’s a free for all.

This fatal crash occurred in the 90th Precinct, which will hold its monthly precinct community council meeting tonight. To voice your concerns about neighborhood traffic safety directly to Deputy Inspector Michael M. Kemper, the commanding officer, head out to tonight’s meeting. The 90th precinct meetings happen at 7:30 p.m. on the second Wednesday of each month, at 30 Montrose Avenue. A detective at the precinct confirmed that tonight’s meeting is set to happen as scheduled.