Proposed changes to West 70th Street and West End Avenue.

Last week, the city’s Department of Transportation unveiled the long-awaited results of a comprehensive traffic study of the Upper West Side. Manhattan Borough Commissioner Margaret Forgione presented the DOT’s data and plans to the community at a forum hosted by City Council Member Gale Brewer and Community Board 7, who initially pushed for the study.

The DOT first began collecting data on the Upper West Side in 2006. The study aimed to primarily address pedestrian safety, double parking, congestion, enforcement and truck traffic. Within the study area (from West 55th to 86th streets, between Central Park West and the Henry Hudson Parkway), the DOT conducted pedestrian counts at 26 locations and manual turning movement counts at 42 locations, looked at automatic traffic recording information for 18 spots, clocked travel speeds along 12 corridors, analyzed accident data for a four-year period and conducted a parking survey. The end result is a slew of recommendations, some simple and some more complex, to improve both traffic flow and safety on the Upper West Side.

Many of the DOT’s recommendations focus on ways to slow traffic at intersections and allow pedestrians more time to cross the street at some notoriously dangerous spots in the neighborhood. At the intersection by P.S. 199, where the DOT earlier had installed two speed humps at the adamant request of parents concerned about their children crossing the street to get to school, the new proposal suggests doing even more to calm traffic at West 70th Street and West End Avenue. The plan would create three neckdowns on corners of the intersection, as well as putting striped channeling to visually narrow the road and slow vehicles before they approach.

“What we’d want to do is pick the items that have been the most concern to the community board, and also the items that are fairly easy to implement, and prioritize those at the transportation committee, so that we can try to have some quick successes,” Forgione said after the meeting.

The DOT will be collecting feedback on their report, and residents can write to DOT as well as to Community Board 7 to share their thoughts and weigh in on what the first priorities should be as far as making changes based on the study. Some things, like those that require only a day’s work and some paint, can be done right away.

Other proposals, like ones that involve changing traffic lanes, moving bus stops, installing curb extensions and creating pedestrian medians, will take more time and are not necessarily going to happen automatically. Some residents at the meeting expressed dismay over the suggestions that eliminate or limit parking spaces, for example, and others weren’t convinced that changing traffic patterns would have the desired effects.

“The more complex the solution, sometimes you need to be a little more deliberative about making a move, but there are some things in this study that I think you heard tonight that everybody agrees are both a priority and readily doable,” said Mark Diller, chair of Community Board 7. He said that he hopes to usher through some of the easiest and least controversial measures swiftly, but knows that other measures will require more time and feedback.

Council Member Brewer said that she’s happy that the community can move forward with an abundance of data to back up their concerns.

“To the credit of DOT, they now have some facts—who’s crossing, where the traffic issues are—and that was the first step,” Brewer said. “This has been a really collaborative process; this is like the sixth or seventh meeting I’ve been to on this process, so this is not done in isolation.”

The full presentation is available online at www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/about/westside.shtml.

The commissioners for the Department of Transportation and the NYPD announced new safety initiatives at the Broadway-West 71st Street-Amsterdam Avenue intersection Oct. 21.

There will be an increase in police enforcement to crack down on speeding cars, drivers that fail to yield to pedestrians and bicyclists that disobey traffic laws. The city will also launch an ad campaign to educate drivers about the city’s little-known 30 miles per hour speed limit. A Department of Transportation study showed that two-thirds of city drivers are unaware of the city’s standard speed limit.

The announcement comes on the heels of a Department of Transportation plan to make the hectic intersection safer by altering the streetscape.

Borough President Scott Stringer and Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal had been pushing the Department of Transportation to make the three-way intersection safer for pedestrians.

In a joint statement, Stringer and Rosenthal praised the Department of Transportation’s plan and safety initiative.
“It is gratifying that DOT has responded to the call by implementing many of the specific safety measures we proposed,” Stringer and Rosenthal said in the statement. “We are gratified that this community outcry has been heeded. Our constituents are served by this proposed safety redesign and we look forward to ensuring that these changes are realized.”

The stepped up enforcement will be funded from a $150,000 grant of federal money from the Governor’s Traffic Safety Committee.

“As we make our safe streets even safer for everyone who uses them, every New Yorker needs to follow all the rules of the road whether in a car, on foot or on a bike,” said Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan in a statement.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, in a statement, said street safety can always be improved.

“Through a combination of education, enforcement and common courtesy, we think we can do even better in protecting pedestrians who are put at risk by motorists and bicyclists alike,” Kelly said.

The Department of Transportation has released a plan to make the dangerous West 71st Street-Broadway-Amsterdam Avenue intersection safer.

The proposal calls for adding pedestrian areas next to curbs that will shorten walking distance, add more spots to cross and slow cars making turns.

The safety measures were introduced after Borough President Scott Stringer and Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal pressed the department in August to alter the three-way intersection. Stringer and Rosenthal said the intersection has been considered dangerous for years and that safety improvements need to be made soon.

“With this plan, they are addressing the problems that exist in that area,” Rosenthal said. “It’s going to mean a lot to residents in this neighborhood.”

In the Department of Transportation report, the intersection ranked in the 94th percentile for pedestrian crashes in Manhattan and 88th percentile for bicycle injuries in the borough between 2004 and 2008.

In addition to adding pedestrian areas, the department’s proposal calls for changing the street design. A southbound Broadway lane and a northbound Amsterdam Avenue lane would be removed if the plan was implemented. Broadway would also get a left-turn bay near West 70th Street.

The Upper West Side community board’s transportation committee saw the presentation and its members will submit comments before voting on an advisory opinion, said committee co-chair Andrew Albert.

Clarification is needed, Albert said, especially for parts of the proposal that may affect bus clearance and traffic congestion on Broadway.

The added pedestrian areas and removal of a traffic lane are expected to cause brief delays on Broadway—an increase in 18 seconds for southbound drivers and an increase of 8 seconds for northbound drivers.

“That could have ramifications so you have to look at everything,” Albert said. “But the Department of Transportation promised they would.”

A finalized safety design is planned for the end of fall this year. In spring 2011, the department plans to install “operational” enhancements using temporary material such as paint. A permanent installation of these safety measures, which includes use of concrete, is planned for late 2011.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” said Batya Lewton, vice-president of Coalition for a Livable West Side, a community group. “But a little more has to be done and it has to be done before 2011.”

Though Lewton and other transportation advocates have been clamoring for swift changes, a Department of Transportation spokesperson said the year-long implementation is due to the intersection being on top of a major subway line with multiple utilities. That location affects when certain aspects of implementation can proceed, such as relocating signal poles.

The city announced the installation of 1,500 countdown signals at intersections, including four Upper West Side corridors, after a report found pedestrian injuries happen more on multi-lane streets.

“The report and actions detailed today, including the installation of pedestrian countdown signals across the city, will make our streets even safer,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a statement, “especially for the pedestrians who, year in and year out, account for the majority of New York’s traffic fatalities.”

Broadway was the largest corridor on the Upper West Side selected to have countdown signals, from Columbus Circle to West 169th Street. Other Upper West Side corridors include 11th and 12th avenues from West 14th Street to West 72nd Street and Riverside Drive from West 103rd Street to West 173rd Street.

The first 250 countdown signals will be installed this month with the rest phased in over the next year.

The city wants the inclusion of pedestrian countdown signals to be the standard for new installations on wide streets.

An earlier pilot program that featured these signals at 24 intersections in five corridors showed that they reduced the number of pedestrians in the crosswalk when the light was about to turn green. On narrower streets, the report notes the countdown signals had no effect.

“Pedestrian countdown signals can help cut out any guesswork in crossing busy intersections to keep pedestrians from being caught in the middle of a dangerous situation,” said Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan in a statement.

The report reviewed more than 7,000 crash records to find out who is at risk for a pedestrian accident.

Manhattan has a high concentration of serious accidents. Four times as many pedestrians are killed or seriously injured per mile of street than in the four outer boroughs. Nearly half of those pedestrians killed in Manhattan lived outside the borough.

Most of the accidents, 79 percent, involve private vehicles and 80 percent involve male drivers.

Seniors are especially at risk when crossing wide streets. The report found that seniors comprise 38 percent fatalities, though they make up 12 percent of the population.

East Side Council Member Jessica Lappin, who chairs the Aging Committee, said the city is the third most dangerous for senior pedestrians.

“My hope is that these changes will make it safer for seniors, children and everyone in between,” Lappin said. “Making sure they know how much time they have to cross, and in certain instances increase time to cross, should make a big difference.”

The study also found that drivers involved in these accidents are often speeding, failing to pay attention to the road and not yielding to pedestrians.

The Department of Transportation is going to try a pilot program that creates a zone where the speed limit will be cut to 20 miles per hour from the standard 30 miles per hour. One reduced speed limit zone is planned for 2011.

The department will also identify 60 miles of street to reconfigure in a pedestrian-friendly way, such as refuge islands and sidewalk extensions.

Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal, who recently criticized the Department of Transportation as being too slow to put in safety changes to the West 71st Street-Broadway-Amsterdam Avenue intersection, said she and other pedestrian groups have pushed for these changes before.

“I think the time for study is over,” Rosenthal said. Though she wants to see where the safety pilot programs will be tested, she was pleased that countdown signals will be installed in the neighborhood.

“It’s about time it comes to the very crowded pedestrian thoroughfares we have here on the West Side,” she said.

Michael Auerbach, president of the environmental and transportation advocacy group Upper Green Side, called the report a confirmation of what New Yorkers already know about dangerous, heavily-trafficked streets.

“The countdown timers have been long awaited. They have them in other cities. They’re proven and they save lives,” Auerbach said. “[The Upper West Side] is a place where people live, go to school, go shopping. They’re on the street in these neighborhoods and they need these safety improvements.”