NYPD Tow Pound is Still a Major Source of Greenway Danger

12:17 PM EST on January 17, 2008

As Transportation Alternatives recently noted in an essay for Streetsblog,
more than a year after the death of Eric Ng, the alphabet soup of government agencies
responsible for the Hudson River Greenway, have done almost nothing to fix glaring safety problems along New York City's most important bike route.

Photographer and bike commuter Lars Klove encountered one of the worst of these problems Tuesday evening when a Lexus sedan accelerated past him just yards away from where Carl Nacht, a 56-year-old doctor was killed by an NYPD tow truck in 2006.

Klove sends along the following note describing the incident and photos showing how little is being done to warn motorists not to hang a right on to the Greenway as they exit the Tow Pound.

Yesterday evening, around 5 pm, I was riding northbound on the Hudson River Greenway when I encountered a white Lexus driving southbound. I started waving and yelling at the guy to stop and the driver accelerated and continued southbound. The car then pulled into the lot at 34th Street and exited onto the Westside Highway.
The car had made a right turn out of the NYPD Tow Yard on a red light.
This morning I stopped by the yard to see what kind of signs there were to identify the Greenway to motorists coming out of the Tow Yard. There are none. There is only a cold little orange cone, where the pedestrian lane has a large iron mooring hitch.

Aaron Naparstek

AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparsteks journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.

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