Traffic Justice

The police department confirmed this morning that no criminal charges have been filed against the bus driver who struck and killed a woman riding a bike on Delancey Street Tuesday afternoon. (The police have not released the identity of the victim, since the family hasn't been notified yet.)

Just a few hours into the new year, New York recorded its first pedestrian fatality of 2010. At around 6:45 p.m. on Friday, January 1, an unidentified 50-year-old man was struck and killed in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. The driver, a livery cab operator behind the wheel of a minivan, was charged with DWI and manslaughter.

Spurred by the recent hit-and-run deaths of three pedestrians, Transportation Alternatives led a protest on Sunday calling for new measures to keep unlicensed drivers from getting behind the wheel. On the steps of City Hall, advocates were joined by David Sheppard, fiance of Sonya Powell, and City Council Member Larry Seabrook.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, three people were killed in New York City by drivers with suspended licenses. These deaths are entirely preventable. If not for a legal system that cavalierly lets reckless drivers get back behind the wheel, Sonya Powell and Lillian and Peter Sabados might still be alive.

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:

We heard the question more than once. When it was reported that Allmir Lekperic, the unlicensed driver who killed Peter and Lillian Sabados as they walked to Thanksgiving Mass on Staten Island last Wednesday evening, had racked up some 29 license suspensions since 2006, Streetsblog readers wondered: How is this guy not behind bars, much less behind the wheel?

We've got a quick update on the legal aftermath of the Ninth Avenue road rage case, in which the Manhattan DA's office charged both cyclist Ray Bengen and SUV driver Gus Gonzalez.

Charles Alexander Diez, the former North Carolina firefighter who shot cyclist Alan Simons in the head, has been sentenced to four months in jail.

After two incidents in two months of off-duty NYPD officers running down and killing pedestrians, then refusing to submit to Breathalyzer tests, police Commissioner Ray Kelly this week convened a panel aimed at expediting the collection of blood evidence from motorists arrested on suspicion of driving drunk.