Upper West Side

A woman is dead her daughter injured after they were struck by an unlicensed driver on the Upper West Side on Thursday.

On Tuesday evening, a van driver headed east on 72nd Street jumped the curb at Columbus Avenue and crashed into a light pole. Last night, a driver jumped another car at the same intersection, ending up with a front wheel perched on its mangled hood. Reader Liz Patek sent in the shot above.

Another day, another motorist barreling onto a New York City sidewalk. Reader Liz Patek sends this shot of the crash aftermath at Columbus and 72nd Street yesterday evening, where a van driver, apparently heading east, jumped the curb and crashed into a light pole. The tally on CrashStat reveals that 20 pedestrians and eight cyclists were injured in traffic crashes at this intersection between 1995 and 2005.

Last night's unanimous votes in support of a summer-long car-free Central Park by Manhattan Community Board 7's parks and transportation committees moved the ball forward for advocates of car-free parks. With no movement at the mayoral level on the issue, any successful push will have to come from the bottom up. Similar statements of community support will be needed from more than one neighborhood.

Upper West Side residents want to make Central Park once again a welcoming place for recreational cyclists, based on the near-unanimous position of Community Board 7's parks and transportation committees at a joint meeting last night. But with the NYPD intransigently committed to its ticketing blitz and DOT unwilling to pay for changes to the traffic signals in the park, it's not clear how to move forward. Some bright news is on the horizon for cyclists hoping to use Central Park for transportation, however: Two east-west routes through the northern end of the park should open this summer.

Since Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has promised to take his approach to street redesigns, first put into place by the Columbus Avenue working group, borough-wide, Streetsblog decided to check in with him to see just what this process would look like.

The Upper West Side is offering the city a lesson in what a mature and constructive response to bike lane growing pains looks like.

The parks committee of Manhattan Community Board 7 restated its support for shared bike/pedestrian paths through Riverside Park and Central Park last night. In Central Park, the shared paths would create new east-west routes through the park, while in Riverside, the community board is fighting against the Parks Department's surprise imposition of dismount signs on what was once a part of the greenway system.

We talk a lot about windshield perspective on Streetsblog, so with his latest salvo against safer cycling and walking, CBS 2's Tony Aiello has done most of the work for us.