Traffic Calming

It's hard to imagine a street in more dire need of a safety upgrade than Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Lined with schools, senior centers, subway stations, churches and stores -- and situated in one of the city's top walk-to-work neighborhoods -- the street is a magnet for pedestrians of all ages. It's also a speedway for motorists. Now it looks like this part of Fourth Avenue will get a safety-minded makeover as soon as this fall.

Staten Island's Howard Avenue was once known as Serpentine Road. Though the moniker was mostly due to the serpentinite in the hill's bedrock, the road also winds and writhes up Grymes Hill, the second highest point on Staten Island. The neighborhood is home to two college campuses, Wagner and St. John's, the secondary schools Notre Dame Academy and P.S. 35, century-old homes and breathtaking views stretching beyond the north shore to encompass Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Bayonne.

I nearly spit out my coffee when I saw that Adriano Espaillat had signed on in support of the Inwood slow zone application.

Interest continues to grow in the Department of Transportation's slow speed zones, which place 20 mph speed limits on residential streets. One month after the application deadline for the program, community boards across the city continue to pass resolutions in support of slow zones.

A plan to put Classon Avenue on a safety-enhancing road diet won unanimous approval from Brooklyn's Community Board 8 last night. CB 8 was the fourth and final community board to vote on the proposal, according to the board. Each CB supported the plan.

The deadline to apply to NYC DOT for a neighborhood slow zone is tomorrow, and groups from many different corners of New York are making their case for bringing a 20 mph speed limit and traffic calming measures to their neighborhoods.

The Brooklyn Paper ran one of its trademark neighbor-vs.-neighbor stories today, turning a weekend public workshop about implementing a 20 mph zone in Park Slope into an occasion for more conflict-driven reporting:

It only took Hilda Cohen and Ali Loxton ten weeks to collect 1,600 signatures supporting a traffic-calming redesign, including a bike lane, for Brooklyn's Lafayette Avenue. Yesterday evening they took their petition to the transportation committee of Community Board 2 and made their case. The result: a 9-1 committee vote asking DOT to study Cohen and Loxton's proposal.

After years of neighborhood activism, the Department of Transportation plans to install much-needed safety improvements at the dangerous intersection of Ocean Avenue and Parkside Avenue, at the southeast corner of Prospect Park. By closing a park entrance to automobiles, DOT will simplify the intersection and shrink the space dedicated to traffic, preventing an estimated ten injuries per year [PDF].