A person on a bike was struck and critically wounded by the driver of a massive dump truck at one of the busiest intersections in Brooklyn this afternoon.
Cops said that the truck driver, 52, struck a 29-year-old female cargo-bike cyclist and her 54-year-old passenger at 3:06 p.m. at the intersection of Tillary and Adams streets — the spot where thousands of cyclists daily enter and leave the Brooklyn Bridge bike path. The victim, the passenger, suffered head trauma and was taken to Methodist Hospital in critical condition, police said.
The truck driver was headed westbound on Tillary Street and the cyclist was heading eastbound just west of the Adams Street intersection and was preparing to turn left — perhaps onto the bike lane just before it enters the bridge bike lane — or onto the Adams Street squib, witness Radley Osorio.
Osorio, the driver of another truck that had been waiting to make a left onto Adams from westbound Tillary, saw the whole thing. He said that the cyclist was heading down the hill eastbound on Tillary and noticed that Osorio had stopped his truck at a yellow left turn signal because southbound Adams was jammed.
"She saw me stop, so she cut across the intersection," he said. "But she never saw the truck next to me. He had the green light, but she didn't see him and he didn't see her." He said the cyclist had a green light, too, but she is supposed to yield to the vehicle going straight.
"There's no way the truck driver saw her," he said, adding that he believes the cyclist had a passenger, but the NYPD could not immediately confirm that.
The bike appears to have been shorn in two from the collision with the much heavier truck.
The plate on the dump truck indicates that it has been caught on camera three times for speeding and twice for running red lights since 2020, according to city stats.
It is one of the scariest intersections in Downtown Brooklyn for cyclists.
So far this year, there have been 28 reported crashes at that one intersection, causing injuries to three cyclists, two pedestrians and 12 motorists, according to city stats.
A slightly larger zone, encompassing just three blocks of Tillary Street between Flatbush Avenue and Cadman Plaza West, has been the site of 87 reported crashes this year in the first 10 months of this year, injuring seven cyclists, three pedestrians and 32 motorists.
The entrance to the bridge bike path is always narrowed by the presence of an NYPD squad car, which officials have said provides counter-terrorism deterrence, but ends up putting cyclists and pedestrians in the same narrow half-lane.
This year has been an epically bad one for cyclists, with 27 fatalities and 4,515 injured. That's roughly 14 cyclists injured every day.
This story was updated at 6:15 p.m.
