Streetfilms Shorties: NYPD Traffic Agents Wave Drivers Into People

Last month we noted that Ray Kelly’s NYPD made a highly visible show of bike enforcement in Prospect Park in response to a pair of crashes where cyclists injured pedestrians. Normally, police don’t react so decisively to locations with high crash rates, but in Prospect Park, the 78th quickly handed out more tickets to cyclists at one spot than they do to speeding motorists in the whole precinct in an average month.

If only NYPD targeted the most dangerous intersections with similar vigor. Streetfilms’ Clarence Eckerson and Streetsblog publisher Mark Gorton went out to Canal and Lafayette, which saw 13 crashes in the month of August alone, to see how traffic is being policed. Here’s what they found.

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

NYPD Ticketing Cyclists in Prospect Park and Central Park

By Brad Aaron |
As dangerous drivers continue to injure and kill with impunity, NYPD is targeting cyclists in parks. Joanna Oltman Smith tweeted the above photo this afternoon. Police were ticketing cyclists on the loop of Prospect Park, Smith wrote, “mere feet” from the raging torrent of speeding traffic that is Flatbush Avenue. Motorists have killed at least […]

Suggested Locations for Additional NYPD Traffic Enforcement

By Ben Fried |
The Park Slope Patch and the Brooklyn Paper both reported this week that the 78th Precinct will soon be ticketing cyclists in Prospect Park, in response to two crashes in the past six months where cyclists injured pedestrians on a downhill slope of the park loop. Now that NYPD has shown a willingness to respond […]

Awaiting NYPD Checkpoints for NYC’s Most Dangerous Streets

By Ben Fried |
This was the scene on the Prospect Park loop Saturday afternoon. With two pedestrians having sustained serious injuries in collisions with cyclists on the southwest side of the park over the last six months, NYPD and the Parks Enforcement Patrol set up at the base of the hill where the crashes happened. (The Daily News, […]

NYPD Data Show Cracking Down on Cyclists Isn’t Preventing Cyclist Deaths

By Brad Aaron |
Eight months into Vision Zero, and after weeks of targeted enforcement during “Operation Safe Cycle,” department data show NYPD isn’t moving the needle much on cyclist injuries and deaths. Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg announced Wednesday that drivers have killed 17 city cyclists so far this year. That’s a 142 percent increase from the first nine […]