Study: Scaffolding Pushes Pedestrians Into The Street

Pedestrians forced into the street while walking through Fulton Mall. Photo: Numina
Pedestrians forced into the street while walking through Fulton Mall. Photo: Numina

“I’m walkin’ in the street here!”

New York’s omnipresent construction scaffolding does more than give concert promoters a place to put up their posters — it makes pedestrians more than 50 percent more likely to veer into the street, data from a local mobility company shows.

The company, Numina, quietly published its findings earlier this year, but CEO Tara Pham presented the data at an industry summit in Manhattan on Thursday, telling transportation wonks how the company’s sensors on a scaffolding on Fulton Mall and Flatbush Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn showed that pedestrians were 53 percent more likely to mingle with buses, trucks and cars when the sidewalk was cut off by scaffolding.

Pham said her company did the analysis to quantify pedestrian behavior in cities.

“It’s usually pedestrians and bicyclists that have been left out of planing from a data perspective,” Pham told the audience of muckety mucks at a Crain’s breakfast.

In a city with 332 miles of scaffolding at last count, the way the walls restricts pedestrian movements or puts them in harm’s way has been a seemingly intractable problem. The amount of scaffolding in New York City has increased, from 280 total miles to over 330, since a 2017 New York Times story on city residents’ frustration with scaffolding and the de Blasio administration’s attempt to fight scaffold sprawl by keeping better location data. And it has even risen since Council Member Eric Ulrich wrote an editorial calling on the city to “tackle the scaffolding scourge” in April 2019.

In that editorial, Ulrich wrote that there were over 8,300 scaffolds totaling 1.45 million linear feet. As the latest numbers from the Department of Buildings show, those numbers have both increased, to 9,200 sheds totaling 1.75 million linear feet.

Pham said that the data had “huge implications” at Thursday’s breakfast. In the blog post explaining the findings, Numina’s Jennifer Ding suggested that the city work on things like “better signage to inform pedestrians early on of a road closure, temporary pedestrian refuges or mid-block crosswalks at busy intersections” to mitigate the effects of construction on pedestrian movement.

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

Jan Gehl: New York Could Have World’s Best Streets

|
When DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, together with consultant and Danish urban planner Jan Gehl,  introduced the new "World Class Streets" doc [PDF] to a crowd of over 300 last Thursday evening at the Center for Architecture, the event seemed equal parts town hall meeting and celebrity book launch. Building upon PlaNYC and DOT’s Sustainable Streets, […]

Coming Soon: Ped-Friendly “Urban Umbrellas” for NYC Sidewalks

|
Image: NYC Department of Buildings Walking through parts of New York can feel like walking through a tunnel. The city’s ubiquitous sidewalk sheds — typically blue scaffolding holding up green plywood to protect pedestrians from construction overhead — corral people into cramped, dark spaces wherever development or building repairs are underway. There are about 6,000 […]

CB 4 Wins Sidewalk Expansions, Bike Corrals For West Side Bike Lanes

|
One of the year’s most exciting street safety projects is on track to get better. Thanks to a recent set of recommendations from Community Board 4, the extension of the protected bike lanes on Eighth and Ninth Avenues will include additional sidewalk expansions and on-street bike parking. Though DOT didn’t adopt all of the board’s ideas — most […]

The Weekly Carnage

|
The Weekly Carnage is a Friday round-up of motor vehicle violence across the five boroughs and beyond. For more on the origins and purpose of this column, please read About the Weekly Carnage. Fatal Crashes (1 Killed This Week, 61 This Year; 2 Drivers Charged*) Harlem: Taja Johnson, 21, Struck, Possibly Dragged by Unlicensed Livery Cab Driver; […]

The Weekly Carnage

|
The Weekly Carnage is a Friday round-up of motor vehicle violence across the five boroughs and beyond. For more on the origins and purpose of this column, please read About the Weekly Carnage. Fatal Crashes (2 killed this week, 11 this year, 3 drivers charged*) Midwood: 58-Year-Old Pedestrian Hit by One Driver, Fatally Struck by […]