DOT Begins Slow Process of Lowering Speed Limits on a Small Number of Streets

By the end of 2025, 250 roadway segments, mostly one or two blocks, will get reduced speeds, the agency said.

4:12 PM EDT on June 27, 2024

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The city Department of Transportation said on Thursday that will use its newly granted power to reduce speed limits by lowering the legal driving rate from 25 to 20 miles per hour on 49 roadway segments in September.

By the end of 2025, another 201 locations will get reduced speeds, the agency said.

The first tranche of slower blocks comprise 8.64 miles, or roughly 0.13 percent of the 6,300 miles of roadway in New York City. If speed reductions roll out across similarly sized groups of roadways through 2025, the roadways would comprise 0.5 percent of city streets.

Sammy Cohen Eckstein — for whom "Sammy's Law" is named.

There is potential for much more, however: In the same announcement, the DOT said it will create a "Regional Slow Zone" in each borough — a zone where "speed limits will be set at 20 miles per hour throughout a set geographic area."

"The first location to be considered will be lower Manhattan south of Canal Street," the agency said, adding that its goal is for implementation by "the end of this year or early next year." A slow zone south of Canal Street could add roughly 20 miles of roadways into the effort to reduce speeding.

So if that all happens, by 2025, roughly 0.8 percent of city streets will have the lower speed limits under the state's "Sammy's Law" that passed this year in Albany.

In this case, don't blame DOT for the slow pace of slowing down drivers; the state law did indeed allow New York City to lower its speed limit on virtually all streets — but "Sammy's Law" gives the DOT the authority to reduce speed limits but only "on individual streets," as the DOT press release makes clear.

Only City Council legislation could create a new citywide 20-mile-per-hour speed limit. But the Council's Transportation Committee Chair, Selvena Brooks-Powers, said through a spokesperson that no member of the Council has yet proposed such a bill.

“Regional slow zones” are just rebranded “neighborhood slow zones” that have existed for over a decade. We didn’t fight for Sammy’s Law for DOT to spend years adjusting speed limits block by block. Lower the default speed limit to 20! https://t.co/48QOmGkEoj
— BrandonWC (@BrandonWC) June 27, 2024

Lower posted speed limits have been shown (repeatedly) to reduce speeding and, as a result, fatalities and serious injuries.

Thursday's announcement

To start, there will be 49 road segments in four boroughs (sorry, Staten Island) where drivers' speed will be capped at 20 miles per hour. Only three of those segments — Walton Avenue between E. 179th and E. 171st streets in The Bronx, Prospect Park West between Grand Army Plaza and 15th Street in Brooklyn, and Audubon Avenue between W. 165th Street and Fort George Avenue — are lengthy.

Activists in Park Slope pointed out that the Prospect Park West stretch was certainly appropriate, given that Sammy Cohen Eckstein, for whom the speed limit law was named, was killed by a driver on that roadway in 2013.

"Sammy’s death ... certainly may have been prevented if the speed limit had been lower in 2013," said Eric McClure, executive director of StreetsPAC. "This feels like an appropriate monument to Sammy, but every city street adjacent to a popular park, or anywhere else’s there’s substantial foot traffic, should get similar treatment, and sooner rather than later.

"We’d certainly like to see the city taking a more aggressive approach to lowering speed limits now that Sammy’s Law is finally an actual law," McClure added.

Without the three longer segments, the average reduced speed zone will be just 617 feet. Brooklyn safety advocate and "War on Cars" podcast co-host Doug Gordon pointed out that making short roadway segments safer is only a tiny step towards the larger goal of a city where no one is killed on the roadways.

"Pedestrians and cyclists don't magically appear on streets with lower speed limits; they come from all over," he said. "Therefore, we need DOT to lower the speed limit not just on a patchwork assortment of streets here and there, but across vast swaths of entire neighborhoods. ... Twenty is plenty wherever you'll find people, and in New York that's everywhere."

The DOT said in a statement that the segments were chosen with "a focus on priority locations such as schools" — and, indeed, many of the 49 locations are one- or two-block stretches next to schools.

"The agency will implement this safety measure utilizing safety data and focusing on equity, implementing speed limit reductions in Priority Investment Areas — defined as areas of the city with larger proportions of non-white and low-income residents, higher population and job density, and without a strong history of previous DOT investments."

On the regional slow zone, the DOT was less forthcoming, saying only that the agency will have more to say — and specify the exact geography — when the public notification process begins. The other four zones have yet to be determined.

Regardless of the lack of details, the area's Council member was ecstatic.

"It's great," said Council Member Christopher Marte. "My district has so much speeding off the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, and if drivers know they are going into a 'regional slow zone' south of Canal, maybe they'll think twice about speeding. So I welcome this, and hope we can expand it, even."

It is unclear how the "Regional Slow Zones" program will differ from the DOT's former "Neighborhood Slow Zones" program, which ceased taking applications from communities shortly after the onset of the global Covid pandemic in 2020.

That program created 26 such zones across all five boroughs between 2011 and 2015, but had not been expanded after that.

Slower open streets

The DOT also said on Thursday that will reduce the speed limit to 10 miles per hour on all existing shared and open streets "that have had substantial design upgrades," the agency said.

That list comprises:

Brooklyn

Willoughby Ave. from Washington Park to Washington Ave .
Berry St. from Broadway to N. 12th St .
Underhill Ave. from Pacific St. to Eastern Parkway 
Sharon St. from Olive St. to Morgan Ave .

Manhattan

Broadway between:

18th and 23rd streets
24th and 25th streets
27th and 33rd streets
38th and 39th streets
48th and 50th streets

Queens

34th Avenue between:

69th and 77th streets
78th and 93rd streets
94th St. to Junction Blvd

Supporters of the bike boulevard on Underhill Avenue in Brooklyn cheered the DOT for formalizing the speed limit on the roadway:

Today @NYC_DOT informed us that the speed limit on the Underhill Bike Boulevard will be reduced to 10 mph.

Underhill has seen >80% reduction in crashes thanks to the bike blvd treatment. Now the new speed limit will also lower the risk of serious injury from a crash to below 10% pic.twitter.com/cVsZxOlQSK
— Underhill Avenue Bike Blvd & Underhill Plaza (@UnderhillOSCC) June 27, 2024