Advocates are renewing calls to redesign Morgan Avenue after a box truck driver struck and killed a pedestrian this week in the third fatal crash in three years on the increasingly residential industrial strip in North Brooklyn.
On Wednesday morning, a 56-year-old truck driver hit the victim, who, cops say, was crossing west to east near Sharon Street “outside the marked crosswalk.” One caveat that was left out of the police report: there is no marked crosswalk at that mid-block intersection.
Street safety advocates have been pushing the Department of Transportation to install a protected bike lane as well as mid-block crossings in the exact place where the victim, whose identity was withheld by cops, was struck and killed. But even with support from local elected officials such as Council Member Jennifer Gutierrez, state Sen. Julia Salazar, and Assembly Member Emily Gallagher, nothing has been done.
There have been three fatal crashes on the avenue between Flushing and Meeker in just the past three years. In August 2022, delivery worker Daniel Vidal was struck and killed by a truck driver while riding his bike on Morgan. In March 2023, cyclist Eugene Schroeder was killed in a hit-and-run on the same street (his killer was later caught and pleaded guilty to a count of leaving the scene).
And the area surrounding Morgan Avenue has been booming. The population has grown 21 percent in the four census tracks surrounding Cooper Park since 2010, keeping with the pattern of residential expansion into industrial zones as the city takes on more residents.
And the city has been aware of the consequences for vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists in the absence of street safety redesigns for years.
In 2019, then-DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg told the City Council that population increases in formally industrial areas as a reason for the 25 cyclist fatalities so far that year — a bit of victim-blaming.
“In areas that were formally industrial – lot of trucks, lot of heavy construction activity – that are becoming residential where cycling is more popular, we’re unfortunately seeing a lot of collisions with cyclists and trucks,” she said at the time. Yet Morgan Avenue remained unsafe.
Vidal's death prompted Transportation Alternatives and local activists to start the Make Morgan Safe campaign, which asks for a protected bike lane on the avenue between Flushing and Meeker as well as new loading zones to ensure that trucks do not park on the bike lanes and on sidewalks. One of the original organizers said he was frustrated to hear that three years later, someone else suffered the same fate.
“I was sad and angry at the same time because I still feel that these are things that can be prevented. I was very frustrated that nothing has been done in more than three years since Daniel Vidal was killed,” said Juan Ignacio Serra, who was volunteer co-chair for Transportation Alternatives at the time.
Serra lives in Bushwick and frequently bikes on Morgan Avenue to get to other parts of North Brooklyn. For cyclists trying to get around, Morgan is a non-negotiable.
“It's the only north-south connection in North Brooklyn,” Serra told Streetsblog. “There’s no other direct route because of how the neighborhoods evolved. A lot of people work and go by bike because it's the most efficient way of moving and unfortunately they have to deal with these dangerous conditions everyday.”
But Morgan is also a bustling industrial area. The North Brooklyn Industrial Business zone is one of the top three busiest freight zones, according to a DOT presentation given in 2023. And the local businesses have not been open to collaborating with advocates to find solutions that work for everyone, Serra said.
After Vidal was killed in 2022, Serra went on a walk through of the area with DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodríguez, Gutiérrez, and other staff. Serra said he felt like the commissioner and the council member understood the issues with Morgan Avenue.
Soon after, in early 2023 the DOT hosted a “Street Improvements Workshop” to discuss Grand Avenue, Metropolitan Avenue, and Morgan Avenue.
After that meeting, in February 2024, advocates organized another vision meeting at local bar Our Wicked Lady. A letter was then sent to the administration in May of last year which outlined the specific aims: a protected bike lane and a one-way conversion on some parts of the avenue to accommodate new loading zones.
At the meeting, Gutiérrez showed strong support for the redesign initiative.
“Every single death that we have experienced since I took office just two years ago, and before that, is 100 percentable preventable. We as a city are not moving fast enough to achieve Vision Zero. We are not moving with urgency. We are not placing ourselves in the lives of pedestrians and cyclists and that is causing a huge, huge backlog on how quickly we are moving,” she said at the community meeting, according to the letter sent to the DOT obtained by Streetsblog, which was signed by Gutiérrez, Salazar, and Gallagher.
But since that letter, Morgan has stayed relatively the same. With just a couple of concrete barriers being installed near Johnson Street, the site of one of the fatalities.
"A lot of promises were made and there's been no follow through and it's just incredibly discouraging and sad and it inevitably leads to these kinds of tragedies," said Kelterborn.
Advocates will renew their long-ignored calls for a redesign at a community speak-out on Friday evening at the crash site at 7 p.m. The DOT did not respond to Streetsblog's requests by deadline.
