Anatomy of a (Legal) Hit-and-Run

Scene of an April 3 collision between a driver and delivery man. That’s food on the car’s hood.

Early this month Streetsblog regular ddartley tagged a series of shots for the Flickr feed showing the aftermath of a driver-cyclist collision on the edge of Stuyvesant Town. According to Dartley, the cyclist was a restaurant delivery man, on the job when he was hit.

An eyewitness said the driver was traveling “like a bat out of hell,”
and that the cyclist, who was seriously injured, got dragged under the
car’s front axle. The driver was, of course, allowed to drive away
afterward.

There is no way to tell from the photos how the collision transpired or who was at fault, but the fact that within minutes the driver was allowed to leave the scene in his own car (watch it here), while the cyclist was carried away by ambulance, speaks volumes about the way cyclist- and pedestrian-involved crashes are treated by city law enforcers. Seriously: How thorough an investigation could have taken place here?

Dartley has started a Livable Streets group aimed at calming traffic on the Stuyvesant Town service road where the crash occurred.