The Adams administration must abandon its rushed move to return motor vehicle traffic to a narrow two-lane road cutting through Silver Lake Park on Staten Island's north shore, residents and advocates are demanding.
The road has been a car-free space for walking and biking since the earliest days of the pandemic, but after an attempted rape of a 53-year-old woman jogging there earlier this month, the Rock's political class has been working overtime to get the city to reinstate motor vehicle traffic — on the grounds that it will make the park safer.
"We [want] to reopen this roadway [to cars] so that we no longer have this park being desolate during the day and during the nighttime, and that there's more activity and traffic here," Staten Island's car-first District Attorney McMahon said at a recent press conference also attended by Borough President Vito Fossella, the Staten Island Advance reported. The area's Council Member Kamillah Hanks has also signed on in support of the move.
The April 3 attack was terrible, but the electeds' pro-car push is misguided and won't make the park any safer and could instead endanger residents with renewed traffic violence, locals said.
"What happened to that poor woman is awful, but re-opening the road to cars is not the solution! There are other ways to address safety in the park," said Andrea Morse, who said she "felt it harder" because she is a "fellow female runner" on Staten Island. "Having the road closed to cars has made it safer and more enjoyable for children to bike, skate, or simply be children, and others to run, walk, bike, or wind down."
Advocates with Transportation Alternatives have launched an online petition to keep motorists out of the park, and they along with other locals plan to hold an emergency rally on Saturday.
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio closed the roadway to cars at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic as part of a larger effort to keep cars away from roads in or near parks so that people would have more space free from the assault of 3,000-pound motor vehicles, their pollution and their impact on safety.
But the politicians on the borough's north shore have been lobbying the Parks and Transportation departments in recent weeks to let drivers back onto the strip that cuts through the park.
McMahon, Fossella and Hanks provided no proof that drivers would add safety to the park, and statistics indicate that they would make the area less safe. (Nor would they respond to Streetsblog's questions.)
For one thing, the vast majority of reported rapes do not happen in parks. Since 2015, there have been 510 rapes reported on Staten Island, with nine occurring in the borough's parks, including one in Silver Lake Park, according to a Streetsblog review of NYPD statistics.
Residents of the borough are much more under threat from traffic violence, with 4,727 reported crashes in 2024 alone, injuring 2,413 people and killing 14, more than one death a month, according to Crash Mapper. Meanwhile, there were 33 crashes on Silver Lake Park Road between 2012-2015, when it was regularly open.
One runner, Mike Cassidy, recently penned an open letter to the Advance citing similar grim statistics, and made it clear that cars were not going to make the park safer.
"It's very simple. Our parks are safe; our cars are not," said Cassidy, a record-setting marathon runner and an economist and assistant professor for health sciences. "Allowing cars in Silver Lake is not about public safety; it's about driver convenience."
Even senior Parks officials told the three Staten Island pols that they maintained the road solely for pedestrian and bike traffic due to its popularity. But the Parks bureaucrats nevertheless agreed to reverse course at their behest.
"We believe keeping our parks vehicle-free is a benefit to all those who use them in providing safe open spaces. However, at your request, we are working with the Department of Transpiration … to reopen silver Lake Road for vehicular traffic on a full-time basis," Parks Borough Commissioner Lynda Ricciardone wrote on April 11, in response to McMahon, Fossella, and Hanks [PDF].
That's a remarkably quick turnaround to re-establish car dominance for a city agency that routinely takes years, or even upwards of a decade, to improve bike infrastructure.
The move opens up the safe haven to traffic coming from some of the most dangerous thoroughfares on the island.
The path connects Forest Avenue and Victory Boulevard, the fourth and seventh most dangerous roads for traffic violence in the borough, respectively, according to a DOT report of so-called Vision Zero priority corridors.
The car-dominated borough is sorely lacking in safe cycling infrastructure, with almost all of its protected paths either inside parks or around the edges.
DOT recently unveiled Staten Island's first parking-protected bike lane, covering just two blocks of Seaview Avenue.
The roughly three-quarter-mile path cuts through the park 200-acre-plus park that the city calls Staten Island's response to Central Park. If so, it's questionable why the Parks Department would allow cars back inside; the city famously banned cars in Central Park permanently in 2018, as officials did in Prospect Park the same year — moves that have been a huge boon for Manhattanites and Brooklynites, making the park safer and more appealing for recreation.
The city should improve the park's maintenance rather than cave to politicians trying to get "temporary headline attention from a crime," wrote another West Brighton resident, Ed Yetman, in another letter to the Advance.
The park's lighting is inadequate and the space routinely floods after moderate rain, according to local advocates. What's more, the park's wildlife has been thriving without threat of cars mowing them down, from a pair of nesting bald eagles, to foxes, skunks, and turkeys, said one environmentalist.
"Reintroducing cars to Silver Lake Park puts these populations at risk from collision," said Janice Ellison, a naturalist and former first vice president of the Greenbelt Conservancy.
Advocates and resident will rally in opposition of cars on Silver Lake Park Road, at the Forest Avenue entrance on Saturday, April 19, at noon.
