Vickie Paladino, welcome to the war on cars.
The longtime critic of street safety measures demanded action after a mob of thrill-seeking car drivers torched a car and attacked multiple people in the Malba section of Queens over the weekend — but her proposal for the city to install speed bumps in the area would do little to stop similar incidents in the future.
The 40-plus drivers performed doughnuts and other stunts at a five-way intersection on early Sunday morning in Paladino's City Council district. Someone ignited fireworks in a resident’s car, and a group of spectators assaulted two residents who approached with a baseball bat to complain about the ruckus, according to ABC7 and the New York Post.
In response, Paladino (R-Whitestone) posted several fulminating tweets and videos in which she criticized the Police Department for its slow response, blamed the existence of the Whitestone Bridge for providing car access to Malba, and decried "poor action from state leadership, including bail reform." She also warned that the residents of Malba may use deadly force, and encouraged her constituents to obtain a firearm license.
Paladino’s response follows her pattern of treating every news event as ammunition for her (and her son’s) various personal and political grievances, often looping in state and national politicians to feed the flames. But when it comes to the decidedly local matter of street safety, her stance is more confusing than clear.
In most ways, Paladino is a standard-issue NIMBY who resists change to the built environment. She is particularly opposed to any form of cycling infrastructure, including bike lanes and greenways, as well as automated enforcement like speed cameras and congestion-pricing gantries. Two years ago, she spelled out her thinking in a remarkable essay for Streetsblog.
But Paladino also claims to embrace certain goals of the street safety movement. For years, she has advocated for the installation of speed bumps and other physical interventions because they "[work] every time, no vehicle is immune, and fake plates don't render them useless." And in an interview with ABC7 on Sunday, she called out the city’s Department of Transportation for not installing speed bumps around Malba — implying that their presence would have dissuaded the motorists who staged the takeover.
But speed bumps alone would not have prevented the Malba mob from spinning doughnuts and causing mayhem. They are never installed in the middle of an intersection, which is where Sunday's "takeover" — and so many similar incidents around city — took place. And they frequently fail to truly stop speeding: Some drivers simply blast over them, while others try to compensate for being slowed down by driving faster elsewhere.
So what would have prevented it? An aerial view of the Malba intersection — where Point Crescent, 141st Street, South Drive, Center Drive, and the unnamed "Boulevard" converge — offers a clue:
Look at that thing! Mapping tools indicate this crossroads contains at least 8,000 square feet of flat, featureless pavement — the perfect venue for doing doughnuts. This particular intersection is popular enough among the car-meetup crowd that you can see doughnut-shaped skid marks when you zoom in on Google Maps:
New Yorkers are increasingly aware that enormous expanses of pavement attract drivers who want to perform dangerous stunts with their cars. Earlier this year, a resident of Ozone Park told the Post that these drivers congregate "wherever there is a big open spot."
These so-called "takeovers" are increasingly commonplace in New York City. In early November, motorists shut down the intersection of Avenue J and Bay Parkway. In late March, another group took over Rockaway Boulevard and 97th Avenue in Ozone Park, where some attendees shattered the windows of NYPD patrol cars when they arrived on-scene. Last year, a driver doing doughnuts killed two of his passengers after his car spun out of control in Hunts Point, The Bronx. One of those passengers was a 15-year-old girl.
To eliminate the "big open spot" in Malba, the DOT would need to install a traffic island — much like the triangular island directly north of the intersection, on Boulevard and North Drive — or perhaps a small roundabout.
Maybe Paladino did request an island or roundabout at this intersection, but neither her office nor the DOT responded to requests for clarification by press-time.
Don't hold your breath, though. Paladino’s endorsement of certain street interventions is very difficult to square with her public criticism of nearly anything that would remove parking spaces or traffic lanes. In January, she called Citi Bike a "ridiculous scam of a program [that] exists only to eat up curb space that could maybe possibly be used for parking." In early May, she described the comprehensive redesign of 31st Avenue in Astoria as a "nightmare" concocted by Transportation Alternatives to "ruin a main thoroughfare." Three days later, she actually praised several elements of the redesign, including chicanes and lane shifts, as "better than speed cameras."
Paladino’s confused stance toward street safety hasn’t made her district any safer. So far this year, District 19 has seen 1,530 crashes, or approximately 5 crashes per day, according to Crashmapper.
In any case: Welcome, sort of, to the war on cars, Council Member Paladino.
