NYPD Tow Pound is Still a Major Source of Greenway Danger

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.