Trucks

New York City should be an ideal place to ship cargo by bike. It's dense, space is at a premium, traffic regularly ensnares delivery trucks, and customers demand near-instant delivery. Despite its advantages, pedal-powered freight delivery has remained a niche operation. A panel at a conference on last-mile freight delivery hosted by the University Transportation Research Center today explored why. The reasons are as simple as bollards blocking bridge entrances and as complex as New York's regulatory black hole for electric bicycles.

Yesterday I observed the driver of this tanker truck do a U-turn at Broadway and 204th Street in order to pull up to a gas station.

In February, 7-year-old Amar Diarrassouba was killed while crossing the street in East Harlem. Truck driver Robert Carroll ran him over while turning from East 117th Street to First Avenue. Because Carroll was driving a truck registered out-of-state, the vehicle wasn't covered by the state law requiring crossover mirrors for large trucks on New York City streets. Community Board 11 recently asked Representative Charles Rangel to introduce a bill that would mandate crossover mirrors nationwide, but federal action seems unlikely in the near future and the loophole allowing out-of-state trucks to skip the safety mirrors remains in place.

With more than two million rides and only a handful of reported crashes, bike-share in New York appears to be putting together an impressive safety record. In London and Paris, fatal bike-share crashes, while very rare, have mostly involved large vehicles like buses and trucks.

The death of Bronx high school student Renee Thompson, 16, on the Upper East Side Wednesday evening was the latest in a string of fatal crashes involving large trucks. Thompson was at least the seventh pedestrian killed by a semi-truck driver in New York City in the past year. While there are laws on the books intended to regulate the use of these vehicles, the state of truck enforcement in the city remains opaque, with NYPD's public information office (DCPI) generally providing no details about whether the vehicles involved in these crashes had the proper permits and safety equipment.

A senior was struck and killed by a truck driver at a crash-prone intersection in Brooklyn Monday.

Yesterday we had a feisty exchange of posts between Charles Komanoff and Nicole Gelinas about what the city should do to enhance safety for Citi Bike users (and everyone else).

In a recent study out of Seattle, researchers Erica Wygonik and Anne Goodchild found that having groceries delivered by truck can cut mileage by up to 85 or 95 percent compared to driving a car. "It's like a bus for groceries," Goodchild told NPR. "Overwhelmingly, it's more efficient to be sharing a vehicle, even if it's a little larger."

Early Saturday afternoon, about 25 people gathered at the corner of St. Annes Avenue and East 138th Street in the South Bronx, protesting heavy truck traffic and deadly driving in the Mott Haven neighborhood.