The city will begin making a handful of promising safety improvements to the western (and wealthy) segment of Brooklyn's deadly Atlantic Avenue this month, but Department of Transportation officials have left out some key recommendations from locals.
DOT plans to add another mid-block crossing, some concrete pedestrian islands near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway interchange, and alter traffic light timings and markings at busy intersections of the corridor.
The upgrades "will improve safety for everyone who uses this major street, helping to ease congestion and spur economic growth," Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi said in a statement.
A larger redesign of Atlantic Avenue, such as a road diet, is not part of the project, which aims for short-term fixes for now and omits several simple redesigns suggested by Community Board 2 earlier this year.
DOT says it will add a new mid-block crossing between Court and Clinton streets, but it is still studying whether it's "feasible" to add the safety measure on the next western block between Clinton and Henry streets, which is where a driver struck and killed Katie Harris last year, a crash that created the latest imperative for change.
The corner of Court Street will get painted curb extensions, rubber speed bumps and flex posts later this month, and DOT has already started setting some of the plastic additions along with some new lane markings. However, the agency did not mention any daylighting efforts.
At the chaotic intersection near Brooklyn Bridge Park and the BQE entrance at Columbia Street, DOT plans to add two concrete pedestrian islands and signalize a slip lane and a turm from Furman Street, but the agency only "aims to begin implementation this year" on those changes.
Advocates once again called on the city to think bigger, and deliver a bold redesign.
“Atlantic Avenue is one of the most dangerous streets in New York City, and it needed a comprehensive redesign yesterday,” said Kathy Park Price, a Brooklyn organizer for Transportation Alternatives. “So many of these improvements — from mid-block crossings to signal adjustments to daylighting — are critical safety upgrades. ... Atlantic needs and deserves a bold redesign for the entire corridor."
The changes are a good start, but more is needed, said the head of a local business group which has pushed for a safer avenue.
"Given the urgency of need for safety improvements on Atlantic Avenue that the choices of these initial interventions are smart and needed and can be efficiently executed," said Atlantic Avenue BID Executive Director Kelly Carroll. "I do think that more changes need to be made to make this street as optimally safe as possible."
CB2 reps did a detailed walkthrough of Atlantic Avenue between the waterfront and Barclays Center — a deadly 1.3-mile stretch where there have been 4,414 reported crashes over the past decade injuring 1,172 people, or about one person every three days.
Afterwards, CB2's Transportation Committee recommended several key quick fixes — such as installing more mid-block crossings and hardening the existing ones with concrete curb extensions to keep drivers from blocking the new crosswalks — but DOT declined to include those changes.
"The mid-block crossings, to have these now on the western half of Atlantic is simply wonderful," Carroll said. "They have worked at slowing vehicles down."
The panel also voted to ban parking for better visibility — also known as daylighting — at the five most crash-prone intersections: Hicks Street, Clinton Street, Court Street, Nevins Street, and Third Avenue. Those intersections should also get hard barriers to keep cars from blocking the corners, the board said, such bike racks, planters, boulders.
The civic organization recommended a protected left-turn bay and pedestrian island at Atlantic and Nevins Street, which DOT denied.
DOT spokesman Will Livingston said the agency decided to advance the changes "we feel provide the most benefit at this time." Livingston also claimed that the five intersections in the request are already daylit, but he included corners that don't have infrastructure to physically keep out cars — even though CB 2 specifically asked for hard obstacles to illegal parking like bike racks or planters.
City officials have generally been hesitant to make more substantial changes on that stretch of Atlantic, because that could interfere with DOT's study of whether to re-widen the highway's triple cantilever section from two lanes in each direction to three as part of its $5.5-billion reconstruction, Councilman Lincoln Restler has claimed.
DOT will study whether to close the terrible on-ramp to the BQE at Atlantic as part of that study, officials revealed last month.
"Easy-lift things like the curb bump-outs and daylighting should be revisited," Carroll said.
It's not the first time safety improvements haven't been as complete as they could be on Atlantic Avenue. The far eastern stretch of the dangerous roadway, in Queens, has not gotten all the safety improvements once promised by the city.
And improvements to a central stretch of the roadway, through Bedford-Stuyvesant, are slow-moving and lack concrete next steps.
