A taxicab careened into a grocery store’s flower stand at 83rd street and Amsterdam Avenue on Monday night around 10 p.m., hitting and injuring a worker there. West Side Rag correspondent Meredith Kurz was at the scene, and sent the description below and the photos. Witnesses said a truck hit the cab, which had no passengers in it, forcing the cab onto the sidewalk.
“Our wonderful flower vendor was limping badly – he had hurt his knee – and it took all of his bodega buddies to convince him to go into the ambulance – I don’t know if he’s just being macho or if he’s worried about doing paperwork. Luckily that was the only injury. Glass was strewn like stars all over Amsterdam.”
Witness Lenny Bautista tells us the truck was heading North and the cab was heading West when the truck slammed into the cab and spun it around toward the curb.
Why did you put ‘witnesses’ between quotation marks?
Sorry for the confusion. Meredith says she had overheard the conversations, so had not verified that the people had seen the crash. We took that part out and added the info from Lenny Bautista, who saw the crash. WSR
because this paper is like a JHS publication. No one here knows how to write an article like an adult.
Maybe you should ask for a refund.
Yeah, I thought that was weirdly pejorative. They were nice enough to talk to her. . . .
Nice to get the report, tho.
Emphasis is that of the person they were quoting I think.
This is really close to the 20 precinct house, at 82nd between Columbus and Amsterdam. Rampant speeding is endemic. Residents (me!) have been begging the 20 to do meaningful speeding enforcement.
I’ll beg again. NYPD, you’re paid to enforce the laws. The speed limit was dropped to 25 mph to prevent injuries like this one and save lives. It’s the law. Please do your freaking job.
Because NYPD tends to tell residents that it only looks like cars are speeding, one way to tell is to use an app like video physics or even the regular video camera on any phone. Count the frames for a car’s front wheels to pass from the south crosswalk line to the north crosswalk line in any intersection. If you know the distance in feet, and your phone records at 30 frames-per-second, you can count the frames and get the speed in mph.
Example: distance is 50 feet; a driver at 25 mph covers this distance in exactly 1.36 seconds. A driver who covers this in one second is speeding at 34 mph. A driver speeding at 40 mph will cover this in 0.85 seconds. Take any driver’s time in seconds, divide by distance in feet, multiply by 3600 seconds per hour, divide by 5280 feet per mile, and voila: the vehicle speed in mph.
Tell the NYPD, Margaret! This does nothing!
Oh – I tell them more often than I want to. They know. I get that we can’t have a car at every corner all the time, but we definitely need better than this.
Just noticed I flipped the fraction. Start with a vehicle’s speed through an intersection in feet per second. Multiply by 3600 seconds per hour, divide by 5280 feet per mile, and that’s the vehicle speed in miles per hour. 35-40 mph by trucks, taxis, and SUVs past the precinct’s street at W 82nd is much more common than it should be.
This poor flower vendor at the bodega, I hope he is okay. Please let us know if we can help.
Only luck kept someone from getting killed, and this poor guy’s injuries are going to cause him a lot of pain and suffering. Can the city please expedite changes to Amsterdam? Narrow the lanes with cones and bollards now. Swarm the place with cops to give tickets to drivers.