In the wake of the tragic and gruesome crashes involving two little boys, Transportation Alternatives, New York City’s advocates for street safety, today released a map of the borough of Queens showing where and how often Queens pedestrians are killed or injured by motorists.

The maps can be accessed at www.crashstat.org. With a few simple clicks, residents can see the number of historical injuries and deaths at each intersection in their neighborhood, and the crash frequency trend at particular locations. The map is based on data from 1995 through 2001, the last year for which accurate data is available.

For the borough as a whole, there were 8,186 locations with reported crashes resulting in 291 pedestrians killed and 18,079 pedestrians injured between 1995 and 2001. During this period, Queens Boulevard was the most deadly street in both the borough and the city. According to the New York City Department of Transportation, from 1993 through 2002, Queens Boulevard had the most pedestrian fatalities in the city. Since 1999, the City DOT has made significant pedestrian safety improvements on the “Boulevard of Death"; pedestrian crashes peaked in 1995 at 154 and continued to decrease over the next five years to an all-time low of 96 pedestrian crashes in 2000.

To its credit, the DOT has also made safety improvements on Rockaway Freeway, Main Street at 68th Drive and 73rd Avenue and the intersection of 69th Street, Grand Avenue and the LIE. And, since 1998, the NYPD has significantly increased the number of summonses it issues for dangerous and illegal driving in Queens.

However, as recent tragedies painfully illustrate, Queens streets can still be much safer. Even with vigorous police enforcement, studies have shown that the only way to create truly safe streets is for the City DOT to redesign them using modern traffic calming devices. Traffic calming, which encompasses a wide variety of inexpensive engineering measures like speed tables and pedestrian refuge islands, has successfully created safer streets around New York City, the United States and the world. Says Kit Hodge, Transportation Alternatives’ Campaign Coordinator,

“People choose to live in Queens because of the quiet, tree-lined streets and close communities. The loud public outcry following the recent tragedies of Joseph Baik and Nicholas Ho show that residents are all too aware that dangerous driving is, in the words of Jimmy Ho, Nicholas’s father, ‘destroying our communities’. www.crashstat.org is a powerful new tool that concerned residents can use to fight for comprehensive traffic calming, which will create safer walking conditions around schools, senior centers and parks."

Local community groups can contact Transportation Alternatives at 212-629-8080 or info@transalt.org to request free copies of the study and a booklet on how to create safer streets using traffic calming in your neighborhood.

View the supplementary maps and data here.