According to pedestrian safety specialists at the street safety group Transportation Alternatives, Juan Estrada and Victor Flores, the young Brooklyn boys killed on February 9 on their way home from school, might be alive today if the City engineered the intersection of 9th Street and 3rd Avenue differently.

Pictured in blue are neckdowns, which slow turning motorists and help prevent fatal crashes of the kind which occurred at 3rd Avenue and 9th Street. This rendering shows neckdowns at a different Brooklyn intersection and capped by protective posts called bollards.

Specifically, if the NYC Department of Transportation had installed neckdowns, an extension of the sidewalk at the corner, the truck driver who killed the boys would have had to make a wider and slower turn. This would have potentially given the boys more time to get out of the way, or for the driver to see them.

Additionally, if the NYC DOT changed the signal timing to give pedestrians a head start before motorists were given the green, called a Leading Pedestrian Interval (LPI), the boys may have gotten further into the intersection and been more visible to the driver. New York City has installed hundreds of LPIs throughout the city.

Currently, the NYC Department of Transportation is conducting a major study of truck use and its impact on city neighborhoods.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/motorist/truckintro.html

On August 21, 2003, Transportation Alternatives, the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance sent a letter to the NYC DOT asking it to:

Use the truck route study to refine traffic calming approaches to keeping trucks on legal and appropriate routes, and to add traffic calming to its regular toolbox. (View letter.)

The need for the NYC DOT to use street engineering and traffic calming techniques like neckdowns to protect pedestrians from turning drivers is given renewed urgency by the deaths of these two young boys. Pedestrians and cyclists are regularly killed by turning truck drivers. Unfortunately, the NYC DOT has not implemented neckdowns or other new street designs after these deaths.

Other high profile pedestrian deaths from turning truck drivers include the 1997 killing of a middle aged women and mother at the intersection of 7th Avenue and 59th Street in Manhattan. Read the article and proposed safety improvements at http://www.transalt.org/press/magazine/003Summer/08trucks.html

http://www.transalt.org/campaigns/nsn/workwith.html