Starting in July, Broadway from Columbus Circle northward will soon get a new speed limit, and signals will be re-timed to dissuade speeding, as Mayor de Blasio works on reducing car crashes and pedestrian injuries. Cars will be expected to drive at 25 mph or less on the road, down from the city’s standard 30 mph limit.
“Through a combination of a lower speed limit, signal timing changes to discourage speeding, distinctive signs and increased enforcement by the NYPD, the announcement continues the expansion of efforts by DOT and its partners to prevent traffic fatalities and improve safety on New York City streets,” the DOT said in a release.
Since 2008 there have been 24 fatalities, including 22 pedestrians, on Broadway from Columbus Circle to West 220th Street.
Photo by Nomadic Lass.
Y’know, the thing that our DOT really doesn’t understand is that all of these different applications of design, variable speed limits and various individual changes demanded by micro-constituencies really make the city more confusing and more unsafe for pedestrians.
They’re so self-satisfied about the press conferences they get to hold and the experiments they can talk about at conferences that they lose an understanding of how New Yorkers want to move consistently and confidently around our city.
It’s time for a pragmatist to take control – do those even exist anymore?
It is my observation that the issue with speed on Manhattan avenues is not vehicles traveling at 30 mph v 25 mph It is vehicles traveling at 45-50 mph trying to beat the light turning red ahead of them. While the intentions are good – not sure this measure is going to be effective. They should set up radar enforcement. They would’t be able to write tickets fast enough. Eventually motorists would get the message. Separately, I have noticed that despite the publicity, pedestrians are still jaywalking in droves at Brodway and 96th.
Reducing the speed limit will do absolutely nothing – it’s already 30mph and no one observes that – it seems like it’s 45mph minimum on any given day. People J-walk all the time. They need to wait half a second and cross w the lights. Common sense is the factor missing w some people and a little patience.
The lights on Broadway are already limited. It’s not possible to go more than 8-9 blocks on a single light change as it is. Speaking as a motorist, cyclist and pedestrian, these seem like silly changes. Cars will just go north on Amsterdam Ave instead and speed there, but any longtime driver knows that it’s only when you go around 25 MPH that you will make all the timed lights without having to stop.
The only way to really slow down vehicles is to put up major speed bumps. and to change the light system at W. 96th Street (really all the major intersections) and install cameras for tickets with heavy fines, as they have on the West Side Highway in lower Manhattan.
Without addressing the pedestrian problem this will help / solve nothing.
If diBlasio was serious he’d have NYPD write tickets for jaywalkers at 96th and Broadway. One of the things that makes cars so dangerous is that after they get held up by pedestrians crossing illegaly they gun it to make the light they should have made easily if Pedestrians followed the crosswalk signals.
Quite simply the DOT does not care about Pedestrian safety if there are not also actions being taken to solve the Pedestrian jaywalking problem. Instead this is more PR nonsense.
You’re both right. What has changed, on both sides, is the attitude of entitlement, that I’m entitled to go wherever I want, whenever I want, and nobody had better get in my way.
That’s why more and more pedestrians (often connected to their electronic devices, which doesn’t help) blithely step into the street when and where the urge strikes them. Look at the cars or try to avoid them? Why?? I’m entitled!
And that’s why more and more motor vehicles (cars and, in my own experience, these luxury land-yachts called SUVs) just rev it up to get to that next light — especially, as pointed out, if some human has dared to delay them by crossing the street. “I have to get someplace and that light is going to delay me by 30 seconds if I don’t get through it THIS VERY INSTANT! Out of my way, peons!”
Jaywalking was one thing when the pedestrians were aware of, and respectful of, the on-coming cars. Driving through an intersection was one thing when the world would not end if you didn’t happen to make it through this one red light.
But now? I have to be where I want to be, and I want to be there NOW! That’s what’s led to so many more accidents.
And decreeing that the speeding cars should have been going 25 instead of 30, when they were racing at 45 or 50, isn’t going to change that.
God forbid! I’ve been here for 35 years ‘jay walking’ was never an issue until now when cars going fast round corners believing they have the right of way and dont slow down and could give a damn about pedestrians. Cameras and huge fines… That’s the answer!
I think it’s the light change signal coordination that needs to be fixed at 96th St. and Bway not so much the speed limit. The light signals are all screwed up. When you think the light will change because it did in the other direction… it doesn’t. There is no coordination between lights.
Enforcement of the speed limit is the key, for sure. Whether 30 or 25 is the speed limit is dangerously meaningless unless it’s enforced.
Feels like we’re in Bizarro World right now, that a good week for NYPD will be one without an officer making headlines for driving drunk and shooting at random people from behind the wheel. Fingers crossed Commiss Bratton and the force get things back on track.
More BS from the DOT! As everyone has already pointed out, the speed “limit” change will do nothing, mainly because the current 30 MPH has meant nothing to anyone who has observed the flow of traffic on Broadway going north from 59th Street. I’m a driver and a pedestrian and if the DOT is serious about reducing speed, it needs to inhibit the Mario Andrettis of Manhattan by putting in speed bumps every two or three blocks. But I don’t think even that would stop the bicyclists from going less than 30 or more MPH.
Walk along Broadway from 59th to 96th, count the number of 30MPH sighs posted. Do the same on Amsterdam Ave. Advise me on the count please! If you see one it is so high who sees it? Even the buses ignore it.
Utter neurotics dominate the UWS in a very bad way. Now I can’t get downtown at a reasonable speed any more and the only big real craft fair is banned too? All for a perfectly expectable, mostly pedestrian caused rate of accidents on one of world’s most active city streets? After all, are there not many *more* accidents below the relatively placid and terribly boring UWS where traffic is considerably denser? Four people a year? Listen to all the ambulances going by every day. Most of those are not traffic accident related. And many of those will result in dozens of deaths one each year from hospital infections and hospital mistakes. This activism is just a preening do gooder obsession in comparison with real death rates from other causes, many of them preventable. And just *wait* until your liberal inspired billions of dollars funneled *away* from crucial antibiotics research into readily bankrupted premature green energy boondoggles results in a new dark ages of truly toxic hospitals for us all. The horror to come from this continuing policy will mark you people forever as your genocidal legacy as will burning our corn crop in cars instead of exporting it to poor countries. You don’t care about humanity, you care only about appearances and displays of public activism, it seems.
-=NikFromNYC=-, Ph.D. in synthetic chemistry (Columbia) and winner of the top graduate award that year in the organic division.
This reduction in speed limits is designed to be *part* of a larger plan to reduce speeding. So, yes, a 25 mph sign by itself won’t get us to where we want to be. BUT combined with automated enforcement and street redesigns aimed at making the “natural speed” of a street more in line with the 20-30mph goal, it will bring down fatalities and injuries in the medium to long term. This has worked everywhere it has been tried.
And, now, I don’t know anyone here who would say we shouldn’t bother trying to control gun violence in New York. And that’s absolutely the right sentiment. Yet, More people are dying on the streets from cars than guns. It’s not unreasonable or dilettante to be concerned about both. It’s not foolish to try to do something.
We certainly want to prevent loss of life but there’s a piece of me that worries that our NYPD will use this as a way of simply generating income. At the end of the day, driving 5 miles per hour less will not contribute to reduced loss of life with drivers who are careless or engaged on their cell phones.
This will be a disaster…a fume creator!!! Stop and Go is gas wasting…and while it will piss people off drivers, taxi customers and taxi drivers…becuse if the lights don’t flow..and people have to stop every three blocks…this will be a fuckin disaster!!!! Then, think about this..if you on broadway..I’m going to have to deal with the pissed off honkers!!! FUCK!!! Keep the lights flowing and the traffict flowing!! If a cab driver is an asshole and hits someone..it’s their fault. If someone is walking against the light…it’s their fault..let’s keep the fault’s where faults lie!
Speed is one issue, but a 5MPH reduction will do little, although enforcement would. Of greater concern, at least on Broadway between 65th and 72nd, is a sudden glut of drivers who seemingly never should have received a license, as they believe that when they have a North or Southbound green signal, it gives them the right to turn and progress through the opposite direction’s traffic, rather than waiting for the East/Westbound light to change to green for them. In the past 2 weeks alone I’ve had to either push or pull my child across the street, out of harm’s way, while we had the green light to cross and a car believed they should continue on from their left turn. Signage is needed to remind drivers to wait at the neutral zone until the light changes, and more police presence and tickets might help reinforce the true traffic laws.
The Columbus Avenue bike lanes and their corresponding traffic lane changes have also hurt pedestrian safety. On 65th Street, for example, the triple play of North and Southbound Bwy, W65th, and Columbus Avenues have caused ridiculous traffic snarls. Not one light change goes by where cars or trucks aren’t left in the crosswalk, and trucks then block the ability to view the crossing signal for pedestrians. Cars routinely go through any of these lights, and those making left turns off Columbus onto 65th regularly threaten pedestrians by creeping across the crosswalk, running the red light, or pushing themselves agressively between crossers. Again, signage, cameras, and enforcement at this intersection would probably go a long way toward preventing the fatalities that are only a matter of time before they happen.
Actually, there was something in the Times a few months ago that said that the law is that if the median is less than 30 feet wide, you don’t have to wait for the crosstown light to go green before making the turn. So, your point is invalid — the law does not require waiting in the neutral zone.
Agreed. Some intersections (esp Park Avenue) have a “stop line” in the median to show that you’re expected to wait for the crosstown light. Most intersections don’t. I learned to drive in Manhattan, and my teacher told me that completing a left turn was fine, as it would be in the rest of the country (absent further lights/signage)
However the left turn from columbus onto 65th is a disaster. There is a sea of pedestrians most hours, and a lot of cars want to make the turn to go through the transverse. Especially since left turns are illegal on southbound broadway onto 65th. I think the city should have a pedestrian/bike crossing signal like on 77th and 81st that gives the pedestrians a red signal allowing the cars to make the left turn. (Not that the pedestrians will respect the signal…)
No one uses Broadway as a through street as the lights are timed to stop you every 6 blocks, so…
Let’s make uptown Broadway a pedestrian mall. Downtown Broadway can then have timed lights like any other one way avenue.