By Gus Saltonstall
An Upper West Side street is among the first batch of proposed locations for a reduced speed limit under the recently passed Sammy’s Law in this year’s state budget.
The speed limit would drop from 25 MPH to 20 MPH on select streets.
The first Upper West Side street proposed by the Department of Transportation for reduced speed?
West 64th Street between West End Avenue and Amsterdam Avenue.
The UWS block was among 10 streets proposed in this initial Manhattan batch for reduced speed. The closest street that will also see the slower speed limit will be Morningside Avenue between West 126th and 127th streets.
Along with dropping speed limits to 20 MPH on certain blocks, the DOT will also create “Regional Slow Zones” in each borough, where multiple streets will see their speed limits dropped to 20 MPH.
The current default speed limit within the city is 25 MPH.
This does not include school zones that already have decreased speed limits.
The first Regional Slow Zone will be in Manhattan south of Canal Street, but the specifics won’t be announced until the end of this year or early next year.
“Speeding ruins lives, and reducing vehicle speeds by even a few miles per hour could be the difference between life or death in a traffic crash,” DOT Commission Ydanis Rodriguez said in a news releasae. “The new Regional Slow Zones and other speed limit reductions announced today will save lives and keep people safe.”
The DOT will begin notifying community boards of its proposals by the end of the summer. Boards will begin a 60-day public-comment period, before implementation of the slower speed limits can happen
Upper West Side local elected officials, Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal and State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, sponsored Sammy’s Law, which they first introduced almost four years ago.
The bill is named after 12-year-old Sammy Cohen Eckstein, who was hit and killed by a car near his Brooklyn home in 2012.
You can read more about the DOT’s push to reduce speed limits across the city — HERE.
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It’s already there. 87th at Broadway has big new yellow signs saying School 20 MPH.
Will that include e-bikes and scooters (sarcasm)
It’s a start but hardly sufficient. Missing piece here is enforcement which NYPD can’t seem to be bothered to do. Hopefully they start rolling out some speed cameras to enforce this.
Reducing the speed limit to 20 mph is ridiculous. It just generates road rage and more pollution from idling cars
Would love to read the study that supports this. Can you share?
What is going on is we first lowered it to 25, now 20, the next mayor 15, then 10. This is about banning cars except for certain people, not safety. Urbanists want a culture war and they are getting one
But I was looking for the data that supports the assertion that a lower speed limit “generates road rage and more pollution from idling cars…”.
They don’t study, they force it. Why not!!!!!
If a speed limit difference difference of 5 MPH is enough to generate road rage, that person has no business operating any kind of heavy machinery and should probably be in some kind of intensive therapy.
How is anyone going to remember random streets or be prepared to begin to slow down before reaching them?
The signs?
How is one supposed to see the speed limit signs if they’re texting while they’re driving?
I tend to agree. The speed limit should therefore be lowered universally, and applied to all vehicles, machines, and devices, and whatever classification would include bicycles, unicycles, moped, e-bikes, electric scooters, roller skates, roller blades, skateboards (electric too), etc. etc. and so on.
It should be every street and enforced by cameras on every block. We also need raised crosswalks to physically slow down vehicles of all types.
Good point, raise crosswalks would be even better, as someone pointed out below usually cameras don’t give a ticket until you’re going 10mph over but crosswalks would enforce the point that drivers need to maintain a safe speed in residential areas.
Completely agree, as well as speed bumps throughout central park to slow down the bikes that ride through stoplights with reckless impunity. There would be far fewer accidents in the park from bikes and scooters if it was littered with speed bumps.
A facile token gesture that won’t change a thing. Only consistent enforcement of moving violations will be impactful.
As a practical matter, the only way to enforce this is through speed cameras. The problem there is that they have a +10MPH margin, meaning that they only resultin a ticket if you’re doing >35MPH in most of the city. They’d have to change that for a 20MPH zone, maybe to 25 MPH to get ticketed. The lower the speed limit, the greater the impact of having that extra 10MPH allowed. HOWEVER, if they got rid of that, there would be an enormous uproar and the pushback would kill it entirely. Can you imagine if everyone got ticketed by camera for going 1 MPH over the limit? Legislation would kill that faster than you can get hit by an e-bike.
I needs to include cameras and scooter/e-bike limits! My step son was just severely hurt.
Oh, e-bikes, the throttle type, are electronically limited to 20MPH. They should be limited to 10 MPH.
However this does nothing about drivers of petrol powered motorcycles going 50MPH without plates–a common occurance.
And the NYPD will do no enforcement, whether by cop or by traffic camera.
I would like to see it at 15 mph, all streets in Manhattan…
I would love the default speed limit in NYC to go back to 30.
Make all the laws you want. Meaningless tomes unenforced.
Ambulance response times have increased two culprits cited are bike lanes and lower speed limits according to the FDNY Emergency response.
One can go to the analytics to review response times
https://www.nyc.gov/site/fdny/about/resources/data-and-analytics/end-to-end-response-times.page
Looking at traffic it would seem that lower speed streets that have bike lanes are problematic.
Either cars should be eliminated on those streets or bike lanes. FDNY emergency response typically has difficulty on those streets where both exist in conjunction with lower speeds limits if a dedicated emergency lane can not be established.
Prior to street dining sheds taking up a considerable amount of space that was once part of the bike lanes, emergency vehicles were able to drive thru bike lanes and avoid traffic. That was cited as a positive feature of the bike lanes when they were implemented. If anything should be removed for better traffic flow, it should be the dining sheds.
And pedestrians need to look both ways, only cross at the cross walks at the corners, and only cross when clear. And should be ticketed if they don’t.
Pointless to do it for random blocks. Better to make all of Manhattan 20 mph, except for West Side Highway and FDR.
Amsterdam Ave and Columbus Ave speed limits can not legally be lowered as per the current law of number of lanes.
NYC: we need to add a toll to allow people to drive faster
Also NYC: let’s lower the speed limits