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.

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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 […]

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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, […]