Eyes on the Street

"Have placard-bearing drivers begun their own reclaiming of reclaimed public space?"

Streetsblog San Francisco's Bryan Goebel attended the NY400 event yesterday, where Dutch Cabinet Minister Frans Timmermans presented Deputy Mayor Robert C. Lieber and NYC & Company CEO George Fertitta with 200 orange commuter bikes as part of a year-long commemoration of "four hundred years of friendship between the Netherlands and the City of New York." To mark the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival, the bikes arrived in Manhattan via a water taxi on the Hudson River.

Streetsblog San Francisco's Bryan Goebel, blogging from New York this week, came upon the scene of a driver-cyclist collision in Midtown Manhattan at around 1:30 this afternoon.

As spotted on Eighth Avenue near 14th Street on Tuesday.

This stencil appeared on the corner of Manhattan's Duane and Greenwich Streets late last month. Our source tells us the message -- "DOT what will it be, traffic light or dead like me" -- stems from years of fruitless neighborhood efforts, as documented in this Streetfilm from 2006, to persuade the agency to install a signal at what residents say is a dangerous intersection. Community Board 1, Council Member Alan Gerson and Borough President Scott Stringer have joined the call, but to no avail.

A camera phone tipster sends this shot of wreckage on a residential street in Boerum Hill. This morning, a speeding SUV managed to build up enough force to plow through parked cars, take out the iron gate, and demolish a good chunk of the ground floor. FDNY, fearing a cave-in, has propped up the front of the building. Mercifully, no one was hurt. We're told that the driver lost control due to a seizure, though our source says that traffic engineering has also made this block more susceptible to crashes.