Trucks

Federal safety officials missed their own deadline Friday for making new rules about dangerous trucks.

Speaking at the Municipal Art Society's annual summit this afternoon, outgoing Port Authority chief Chris Ward said he wouldn't be sending any parting shots at the New York region's leaders, but he didn't hold back from proposing some big and bold ideas. With only a few weeks left at the Port Authority, Ward issued a call for the construction of a cross-harbor freight tunnel and a rail freight distribution system for the city, as well as the abandonment of container shipping at the Red Hook terminal in Brooklyn.

Streetsblog has been gathering responses to yesterday's release of PlaNYC 2.0. This is the second installment. Read the first part here.

The fight for scarce street space is always fierce in New York City, and as DOT's efforts to install bike and bus lanes across the city have revealed, the most contested zone of all is probably the curbside. On commercial streets, drivers can't get enough of the underpriced on-street parking while businesses want curbside access to load and unload deliveries. The result is rampant double-parking, cruising, and ultimately congestion -- slowing down buses and creating more dangerous conditions for pedestrians and cyclists. In some cases, local displeasure about curbside dysfunction manifests itself as opposition to seemingly unrelated livable streets improvements, like the Fifth Avenue bike lane in Park Slope.

The one-way tolls on the Verrazano Bridge have been a major cause of truck traffic in New York City since they were instituted in 1986. Though numerous efforts to restore two-way tolls have failed over the last two and a half decades, technological progress may finally bring victory within reach. Congressman Jerry Nadler thinks that the MTA's moves toward cashless tolling could make two-way tolls politically feasible, and he's trying to pass the federal legislation necessary to allow them.

A proposed amendment to the City Charter could help free certain neighborhoods from the grip of truck traffic and other unhealthy side effects of public facilities.

The driver of a private garbage truck ignored a bicyclist riding alongside and crushed him as the truck rounded the corner of Varick Avenue and Meserole Street in Bushwick last Wednesday evening, BushwickBK.com has reported, citing a preliminary NYPD investigation. According to police, the victim was Eling Rivera, 51, of East New York (a conflicting identification has surfaced in this Streetsblog comment thread).

A reader sends this photo of a huge rig using Kent Avenue's new protected bike path as its own, highly illegal shortcut. Our tipster says the trucker was bearing down on him at a rapid clip for several blocks before slowing down enough to hear an inquiry through the window: "What do you think you're doing?" The driver's response was unenlightening and filled with obscenities, we're told. This shot was taken after the confrontation.

We've got another dispatch from the ongoing bike lane drama that is Kent Avenue. At Wednesday night's information session hosted by Brooklyn CB1, the DOT team gave a short presentation [PDF] outlining their plan to address truck traffic changes caused by converting Kent to one-way flow. Then the public was invited to comment.