It's enough to make you see red.
Drivers zooming on and off the Williamsburg Bridge in Lower Manhattan are running red lights and creating a harrowing situation for pedestrians and cyclists trying to use the busy intersection — but cops are not only turning a blind eye, but directing that organ towards cyclists instead.
At the Manhattan foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, cyclists have learned to wait at least five seconds after they receive a green light because, without fail, the driver of a 3,000-plus-pound machine will be blowing through the red light at the intersection of Delancey and Clinton streets.
And it’s not just cyclists who are endanger by red-light running by impatient drivers. Residents of an area senior center long asked Council Member Chis Marte (D-Chinatown) for a red light camera to deter reckless driving — and in August, the Department of Transportation said it has finally "surveyed the area ... and [will] install a red light camera in the vicinity.”
But Marte told Streetsblog that as much as he appreciates the red-light camera, the fact that it is needed at all reveals the failure of the NYPD to arrest the problem, not to mention our broader culture's failure to address car domination.
"Whether you are crossing the street as a pedestrian or navigating the congestion as a cyclist, the conditions on Delancey Street near the Williamsburg Bridge have never been more dangerous," Marte said. "This corridor continues to have heavy car and truck traffic and countless instances of run red lights and reckless driving. Parking a police car along the side of the road isn’t enough to enforce traffic laws.”
In the field
Streetsblog went to the scene to see just how bad the problem is, watching repeatedly as cars sped up to run the red.
In just 10 minutes of morning observation, Streetsblog observed seven red light cycles and saw 12 drivers drive through the red light. That same evening, when we returned at around 6 p.m., 13 drivers of cars and trucks disregarded the red light in 10 minutes.
[Methodology: It is hard to know whether the driver entered the intersection just before the light turned red, or just after, but many drivers were speeding up — not slowing down, as required — on the yellow. As such, these close calls counted as running the red.]
Red light running is both “dangerous” and “inexcusable,” according to a DOT report evaluating the city’s red-light cameras, which are only allowed to exist at 600 intersections, which is 1.5 percent of all city intersections.
From 2020 through 2023, 101 New Yorkers were killed by drivers running red lights, according to the DOT report. And in 2023, a whopping 29 fatalities were caused by drivers ignoring red lights, more than double the average from the last decade.
Most drivers who put New Yorkers’ lives at risk with their anti-social behavior will face no consequences for their actions — indeed in 2024, the NYPD averaged fewer than two speeding tickets per precinct per day, according to the agency's own stats.
And the red-light-ticket-writing-rate at the Seventh Precinct — where the notorious intersection is located — is even worse: Just 1.5 red light tickets were written per day in that entire precinct.
Meanwhile, at the same intersection, the NYPD has set up a checkpoint to issue criminal summonses to cyclists as part of Mayor Adams and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch's criminal crackdown on biking that started in April.
“This is the city we live in: Pointless enforcement of bikes, no enforcement of cars, and weak design of the bike network. Who is going to fix it?” asked Jon Orcutt, a former DOT official and director of advocacy at Bike New York.
Tisch said she launched her crackdown to fix the alleged "consequence-free environment" in which cyclists operate, but it is hard to ignore the irony: As cyclists indeed suffer consequences for their actions, car drivers race through a red light with no consequences at all.
Hence the reason a red light camera is better than cops in the first place.
Bad design
The Manhattan side entrance to the Williamsburg bridge is constantly held up as an example of bad street design.
If you are heading to Brooklyn from the Delancey Street two-way protected bike path, your lane splits with the west-bound traffic and takes a right, into the crosswalk. There is then a 90-degree turn where you need to maneuver your bike up a small elevation gain and in between two narrowly placed bollards. Because of this, many cyclists decide to just continue straight onto the “off ramp” in order to avoid the sharp turn which forces you to lose all momentum before a steep climb. All the while, pedestrians are standing in the crosswalk with no clarity on where cyclists will be coming from.
“The Brooklyn-bound approach … is the worst thing ever, nobody in their right mind sitting down to design bike infrastructure would do something like that. Most of that was designed by NYPD counterterrorism after 911,” said Orcutt.
The narrow bottleneck is despised by cyclists and pedestrians alike, all of whom are forced to share a sliver of the space dedicated to vehicle traffic.
“It’s really especially galling, because it has to be one of the intersections that has the most riders in all of NYC and yet it has been designed in a way that's impossible to navigate and dangerous at points,” said Alexa Sledge, communications director at Transportation Alternatives.
On a single day in July, 11,608 cyclists were counted riding over the Williamsburg Bridge, according to the DOT.
Advocates have pushed for a redesign of the area for years, and got part of their wish when the city put a center-running two way protected bike lane from the base of the bridge to Allen Street in 2019. But all that did was encourage more cycling — it did not fix the bottleneck, which is now more clogged than ever.
In February 2023, the city snagged over $18 million in federal funding through the “Safe Streets And Roads For All” grant program to redesign the Delancey Street median, bike lane and the bridge’s entrance and exit point, but there won't be a ribbon-cutting until 2029 (at the earliest), DOT told Streetsblog last year. And with the Trump White House taking back federal money from New York for other street safety projects, New Yorker’s shouldn't hold their breath waiting for a new Delancey.
The checkpoints ticketing cyclists on Delancey as part of the criminal crackdown has been documented on Reddit and observed by Streetsblog, most recently on Oct. 3. The cops are able to take advantage of the poor design and issue tickets to every cyclist that approaches the intersection.
“Ticketing cyclists there, it's the fish in the barrel theory. It doesn’t deter e-bike speeding or get someone being reckless, it just gets people trying to get through one of the most awkward spots. It's just pathetic," said Orcutt.
