Elderly & Disabled

If you ever need a laugh but don't feel like shelling out for the two-drink minimum, you could do worse than head over to a Brooklyn CB 15 meeting. At an info session last night about plans for Brooklyn's inaugural rapid bus line, the first question out of the audience was, "How many parking spots are we going to lose in Community Board 15?" The evening spiraled into absurdity from there.

Electeds and other officials gathered with representatives from AARP today to pledge support for street improvements and to call on Albany to pass complete streets legislation.

Select Bus Service’s new low-floor buses will make it easier for seniors to get on and off the bus. Image: Second Avenue Sagas. Last night the MTA and DOT continued their tour of East Side community boards, presenting plans for better bus service and safer streets to the Manhattan CB 11 transportation committee. Attendance was low, … Continued

As we've recently seen in Astoria, DOT doesn't always bring innovative traffic calming tools to streets that need them. What happens when they do? At a community board meeting in Rego Park last week, the agency rolled out a broad selection of ideas including neckdowns, road diets, and pedestrian refuges. The Queens CB 6 transportation committee seemed ready to listen -- except when discussion briefly turned to the possibility of eliminating parking spaces.

Hours after the Tri-State Transportation Campaign released a report yesterday identifying New York's deadliest roads, 13 AARP volunteers surveyed part of Third Avenue in an effort to make walking in New York safer.

Greenpoint maven Miss Heather, who blogs at New York Shitty, has noticed an increase in the number of seniors wheeling their electric scooters through neighborhood bike lanes. The reason, she suspects, is that "some of our sidewalks do not necessarily make the best terrain for such vehicles (or pedestrians, for that matter)." 

On Friday, two pedestrians and a man in a wheelchair, all aged 60 or above, were hit by motor vehicles in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Two died. One was in critical condition as of Friday night.

A recent poll conducted by AARP finds that Americans over the age of 50 are cutting down on car trips due to rising gas prices, but are finding public infrastructure, or lack thereof, to be an obstacle.

A Curbed tipster sent along this photo of the "controversial" new bike lane going in along E. 90th Street.