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Pedestrian space | Bike safety | Placard parking | Illegal trucks | Bus priority | Slow progress
Coming soon: Open Streets & Open Restaurants!

You know what’s wrong with this picture.*

We all know what’s made the streets of New York City unlivable. It’s not the e-bikes or the scooters, it’s not the “jaywalkers” (also known as “New Yorkers walking normally”), it’s not even the garbage or the rats. It’s the cars and trucks.

There are a lot more private motor vehicles on our streets, they’re a lot bigger than they used to be, they’re driven by people who ignore and break safety laws constantly, and the police think of themselves as too fancy to stand outside and write summonses for behavior that, after all, is just like their own.

Let’s look at some of the most fundamental problems that make us unsafe in our own neighborhoods.

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It’s illegal to block crosswalks with your car, or to park on the sidewalk, no matter what. If you can’t clear an intersection, don’t enter it. When you block crosswalks, you force actual human beings to walk in traffic. Parking on sidewalk makes you a bad person. And that goes double if you’re a police officer or firefighter, unless you’re stopping a robbery or rescuing a kitten from a tree right now.

You think the NYPD enforces these basic safety laws? You must be new here.

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Bike lanes are safety infrastructure, but often you wouldn’t know it from how drivers treat them. Once you’ve parked in the bike lane, sitting in your car doesn’t make you any less dangerous! Hello! (Ding ding!) Get your metal box out of my safety infrastructure.

The mayor and the police are (at best) sending mixed signals, and they’re costing people their lives.

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Even the legitimate parking placards issued by the DOT don’t ever allow parking in no-standing zones, in bus lanes, near fire hydrants, or (God forbid) on sidewalks. But people park in these places every day, often with fraudulent placards or a piece of cop swag. Enforcement is vanishingly rare, despite occasional claims to the contrary by the police.

The City Council claims to be concerned about placard parking. What happened to all those bills?

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Every truck longer than 55 feet nose to tail is illegal everywhere in New York City at all times, with a very short list of exceptions. This means that every 53-foot trailer on the streets of Maspeth, or every 48-foot trailer with a 10-foot tractor delivering to a Trader Joe’s in Manhattan, is illegal illegal illegal. There is no gray area. They’re all illegal!

Ever tried to get anyone to deal with this? “Sorry, not my table,” says every single city agency.

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New York City Transit runs the largest bus system in North America, carrying almost five times as many passengers as either of the runners-up (Los Angeles and Chicago). But you wouldn’t know it from the way bus priority infrastructure is treated by drivers, some elected officials and community “leaders,” and the public.

In almost every NYC neighborhood, better bus priority infrastructure would be a win for a clear majority of street users.

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Every year we should be building 25 miles of bike infrastructure, five miles of shared streets, five acres of new pedestrian plaza space, a thousand bulbouts. We should be placing 50 miles of concrete barriers and flexible walls, and three thousand plastic armadillos. Instead, we’re …not. And thousands of New Yorkers a year pay the price.

This is everybody’s responsibility. Let’s do things differently.

*That photo up there? That’s hundreds of NYPD and FDNY personnel and their friends careening through the streets of New York City at high speed for hours this past September in “honor” of 9/11 first responders, with no barriers, no street closures, no protection for anyone on this busy corner (2 Av & E 57 St) except this frantic traffic officer who showed up 2 minutes before they did. Why all these people weren’t fired, we’ll never understand.