Midtown

[Update: According to Cy Vance's office, prosecutors are investigating this crash. We'll have another post shortly.]

A man standing with his wife and kids on a Midtown sidewalk was hit by a cab driver yesterday in a precinct where speeding is practically unenforced by NYPD.

Clarence has been unearthing old footage from the Streetfilms vault this summer in preparation for Transportation Alternatives' 40th anniversary bash. This week's installment takes us back to the end of 1997, when the Giuliani administration and NYPD erected pedestrian barricades in Midtown, preventing people from crossing major avenues to make way for turning traffic. TA's protest got covered on all seven local newscasts, but Giuliani went ahead and made the barricades permanent. They remain to this day.

Across the street from Grand Central, a new pedestrian plaza is being installed this afternoon. Jonny Hamilton, who works nearby, snapped this short video of DOT workers laying down the new surface at Pershing Square between 42nd and 41st Streets, on the east side of the Park Avenue viaduct.

At the end of its second meeting on a DOT proposal to improve bike safety on the Manhattan approaches to the Queensboro Bridge, the transportation committee of Manhattan Community Board 6 reached a conclusion. The committee needed more time to make up its mind.

Last night, two community boards in Sunset Park and Manhattan's West Side voted to support bike lanes, bike parking and permanent pedestrian plazas. As a result, Sunset Park will be receiving shared lane markings on Fifth Avenue, the permanent reconstruction of a plaza at Ninth Avenue and 14th Street will move ahead, and bike lanes and on-street corrals are on track for the West Side of Manhattan.

Can we get a James Vacca City Council hearing on this?

In separate crashes in Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx, city motorists killed five pedestrians between Christmas and New Year's Day. Four of the crashes, which took the lives of a child and three young mothers, were hit-and-runs.

The protected bike and pedestrian space on Broadway between 42nd and 35th Streets will be redesigned in 2013 to give more space to pedestrians, removing a motor vehicle lane. The alterations will also change the bike lane from a protected route often used by pedestrians as a de facto sidewalk extension to a buffered lane between curbside parking and moving cars.