Friday’s Headlines: Riding the Green Wave Edition
The Department of Transportation has found the trick to getting cyclists to obey traffic signals — timing those signals to the actual speed of cyclists.
By timing the signals on Third Avenue in Manhattan for vehicles traveling 15 miles per hour, DOT managed to reduce the number of cyclists hitting red lights and cut the number of cyclist-pedestrian conflicts in the process, according to a new report.
Pedestrian-cyclist crashes on Third Avenue dropped from four in 2024 to zero in 2025, while the percentage of “bike lane users who did not slow on when approaching a red light” dropped from 8 percent to 4.5 percent, DOT said. The agency observed similar results on Hoyt Street and Bond Street in Manhattan, where it implemented “Green Wave” timing in 2020.
This summer, DOT will bring the Green Wave to three more Manhattan corridors — First, Second and Eighth avenues — while preparing a list of other possible locations for the treatment, which a pair of bike advocate-engineers cooked up back in 2018.
At the time, the two advocates, Christine Berthet and Joe Realmuto, pushed back on a DOT report that proposed to reduce driver-cyclist conflicts by giving them each separate green light phases. Berthet and Realmuto posited that timing traffic signals for the optimal number of successive green lights for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers would result in higher signal compliance on one-way streets with protected bike lanes.
DOT began experimenting with the concept in 2019 — and now has a mound of evidence it works. Daytime driver speeds, meanwhile, did not change — and dropped during night hours when crashes are more likely.
The Daily News and amNY also covered the agency’s announcement.
In other news:
- Gov. Hochul declared a budget deal as Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie denied one had been reached. (Gothamist, amNY)
- It looks like the Stop Super Speeders bill is no longer a budget impediment. We posted the news early on Thursday, and The Post followed. The Times celebrated by showing off the technology that will rein in the reckless.
- Zohran Mamdani is New York City’s first “bike mayor,” according to Gothamist.
- The city’s student travel training program helps young New Yorkers with disabilities get around without school buses. (NY1)
- NJ Transit lowered its World Cup gameday tickets from $150 to $105. (The Athletic)
- Will the city erect a permanent gate around Washington Square Park? (ABC 7 NY)
- Patch found 5:30 p.m. to be the most dangerous time on city streets (but under-counted injuries by a factor of nearly four and undercounted deaths by half).
- An Upstate cop is using routine traffic stops to help ICE make arrests. (NYS Focus)
- Meanwhile in the Big Apple, Mayor Mamdani is at odds with U.S. Rep. Nydia Velázquez and her allies over NYPD’s apparent coordination with ICE. (Politico)
- Robert Koch, 26, was charged in the May 3 wrong-way vehicular killing of 65-year-old Ada Rivero on the West Side Highway. (West Side Rag)
- Queens electeds want the MTA to rebuild and reopen the long-shuttered Elmhurst LIRR stop. (QNS)
- An LIRR strike is still in the cards — and would start May 16. (ABC 7 NY)
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