Brooklynites Fight to Get Big-Rigs Off Their Block As City Preps Truck Route Revamp

Fed-up Downtown Brooklyn residents want the city to remove a nearby local truck route that encourages big-rigs to use their street as an illegal cut-through, as officials prep for the city’s first citywide truck route redesign since the 1970s.

Members of the 400 & 500 State Street Block Association have documented one truck after another turning onto their street, which is not a designated truck route, from Third Avenue as a cut-through to Flatbush Avenue. One of those trucks even knocked down a sign that DOT installed last fall to warn away truck drivers, the group said.

“When trucks turn on State Street they get stuck and cause a lot of issues,” said block association leader Brendan Gibbons. “The backing up is really unsafe. There are people crossing the street as a 53-foot truck is trying to get out of a tight spot.” 

Gibbons and his neighbors want the DOT to remove two blocks of Third Avenue, between Atlantic Avenue and Schermerhorn Street, from the truck route map. That would force trucks to take Atlantic Avenue to access Flatbush Avenue. They plan to submit testimony at a Tuesday hearing about DOT’s planned truck route redesign — which controversially proposes a slight increase in overall truck route miles.

Previous attempts to involve DOT have fallen short: In May, DOT told the group that it had addressed the trucks on State Street with signage — seemingly unaware that a driver knocked over the signage months earlier. NYPD has not issued a single truck route violation all year in the area policed by the 84th Precinct.

Truck routes designate where trucks can travel when not making local deliveries. DOT’s rulemaking process for its new map began in April and culminates on Tuesday with a public hearing. The map adds around 43 miles of streets to the network in order to “help reduce the overall truck miles traveled on local streets by providing more direct connections to industrial zones and shifting more trips onto highways that previously weren’t part of the network,” in DOT’s words. 21 of the new miles are on or lead to highways.

DOT spokesperson Vin Barone called the redesign an “iterative process.” The rule making is “not a one-time network update,” he said in a statement. “We are reviewing feedback from our proposed redesign, including the recommendations from the association.”

On State Street, trucks pass a number of residences and P.S. K456, which serves pre-K, kindergarten and first grade. Trucks making the tight turn onto the street have driven onto the sidewalk and into one specific tree so many times that neighbors installed a rope to alert the driver to stop before doing more damage to the precious greenery.

Between January 2020 and December 2025, Third Avenue between Atlantic Avenue and Schermerhorn Street recorded four cyclist injuries, eight pedestrian injuries, 21 motorist injuries and one pedestrian fatality, according to city data compiled by Crashmapper.

The block association applied for an “Open Streets for Schools” permit so they could close the street to traffic to solve the truck problem, but DOT rejected the application because of an FDNY firehouse located on the same block.

The problem isn’t limited to State Street: On a recent tour of area, Streetsblog observed multiple trucks with 53-foot trailers turn from Atlantic Avenue onto Third Avenue. DOT’s rules ban 53-foot trailers everywhere in the city except for portions of I-95, I-695, I-295 and I-495, and requires special permits even for those streets. There is no legal reason for a truck with a 53-foot trailer to be on any local truck route in the five boroughs. Yet NYPD has given out zero tickets to “over-length” vehicles in the 84th Precinct.

Members of the 400 & 500 State Street Block Association consistently observe illegally oversized trucks on Third Avenue — a problem that plays out citywide thanks to NYPD’s lack of enforcement. There is even an X account, @illegal53 (which has migrated to Bluesky), dedicated to spotting giant trucks in the wild.

“We live in the middle of Brooklyn, we don’t expect no traffic and no trucks but geometrically it just makes no sense,” said Gibbons.

DOT has already rejected the association’s request that the agency scrap those blocks of Third Avenue from the map. The agency referred Streetsblog’s questions about 53-foot trailers to NYPD, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Ninety percent of goods in New York City reach their final destination by truck, while a growing number of “last-mile” warehouses feed the growing demand for same-day and next-day delivery from companies like Amazon. Since 2018, distributors have opened 21 new warehouses in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island.

New York City’s truck route network consists of through truck routes, for trucks that are passing through the city, and local truck routes, for trucks that need to deliver goods. City law only allows truck drivers to leave a designated route to complete a delivery, and only via the shortest possible path between their destination and the nearest route.

Bypassing a traffic jam is not a legitimate legal reason for a trucker to leave a designated route, but the block association’s observations show little adherence to that rule and minimal enforcement from the city. Compliance with truck routes has declined dramatically over the last decade: NYPD issued just 1,036 truck route violations in the first 11 months of 2024 — which represents a more than 85-percent decrease from the city’s 2011 peak.

Downtown isn’t the only section of up in arms over the city’s truck route redesign.

Earlier this month, Council Member Kayla Santosuosso (D-Bay Ridge) called on DOT to rethink allowing trucks on Third Avenue from 86th Street to 65th Street, which she described as an “already heavily congested commercial corridor” in a recent letter to city officials.

And Council Member Lincoln Restler (D-Downtown Brooklyn) sent a letter to the DOT on Friday in support of the State Street neighbors’ cause. “I write in support of their request to remove 3rd Avenue between Atlantic Avenue and Schermerhorn Street from the citywide truck route network, or at minimum to significantly restrict non-local through-truck traffic on that corridor,” he wrote.

The public comment page for the agency’s rule-making process is flooded with comments about Third Avenue, both in Downtown Brooklyn and in Bay Ridge, as residents attempt to have their voices heard by the agency.