Traffic Calming

Yesterday the City Council held a hearing on street safety for older New Yorkers. The hearing came while the deaths of Lillian and Peter Sabados, an elderly Staten Island couple run down by Allmir Lekperic on Thanksgiving eve, are still fresh in people's minds. But when it comes to keeping drivers like Lekperic from harming others, The Staten Island Advance reports, some of the borough's council reps seem to think they've exhausted their options:

Clarence Eckerson sends these shots of DOT street safety improvements taken on a recent ride near the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront. Above is the newly traffic-calmed intersection of Joralemon and Hicks -- part of the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Project -- which now sports two sidewalk extensions. (According to the Post, a third corner was slated for a curb extension, but DOT changed plans after residents said they were worried about how fire trucks would negotiate the turn.) Says Clarence: "I am sure the speed reductions will be dramatic, the equivalent of a chicane."

There's a very nice set of livable streets improvements underway at Park Circle, where Brooklynites heading to and from Prospect Park mix it up with traffic heading to and from the Prospect Expressway, Ocean Parkway, and the Fort Hamilton Parkway. Construction was still in progress when I took these pictures a few days ago, but it's already making a big difference for pedestrians and cyclists. (And, I assume, the equestrians coming from Kensington Stables, although I didn't see horseback riders during my visit.)

Clarence recently dug up a few unused nuggets from last year's junket to Melbourne, Australia. Watch and see how curbside space in residential neighborhoods has been repurposed for plantings that double as traffic calming treatments. Whatever red tape they had to hack through to plant trees in the roadbed, not just on the sidewalk, they've hacked through it in Melbourne. Have to say, though, the trees planted in the bike lane (or the bike lane painted around the trees) had me scratching my head.

A bit more background on the generous neckdown at Smith and Bergen spotlighted earlier today: This pedestrian amenity never would have been built without the long-term organizing for the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Project. Street protests and advocacy campaigns stretching back more than a dozen years are bearing fruit now.

Since the spring, DOT construction crews have been building out traffic calming improvements all over the neighborhoods near downtown Brooklyn. When the years-in-the-making Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Project wraps up, pedestrians will have safer crossings at dozens of intersections. The sidewalk extension at the northwest corner of Smith and Bergen, shown here, is especially impressive. Several hundred square feet of street space now belong to pedestrians instead of cars.

Thanks to BicyclesOnly for posting this shot from yesterday morning's commute to the Streetsblog Flickr pool. By my count, we've got six people riding bikes here on a one-and-a-half block stretch of the Eighth Avenue protected path, with two or three others farther back, in the shade. As far as I can tell, everyone is riding in the right direction. If I was an Eighth Avenue merchant, I'd start agitating for more bike parking in front of my store.

These days, it's not often that we get to report about New York City community boards pushing DOT for more progressive street designs. So sit back and enjoy this post. If you read Streetsblog regularly, it'll blow your mind.

DOT tonight will present its recommendations for improvements to Manhattan's 181st Street.