AARP New York State Director Lois Aronstein attends the Complete Streets Week event in Parkchester. (AARP)
The corner of Wood Avenue and White Plains Road in the Parkchester section of the Bronx had more than its fair share of stop signs Friday morning. And for a good cause.
The intersection, which has a stop light, is one of the 50 most dangerous in New York City, according to the Department of Transportation (DOT). This prompted a group of about 40 seniors – wearing stop-sign red shirts – to set up camp at the intersection’s four corners to conduct a safety survey. They tracked everything from the timing of stoplights to the upkeep of the area’s asphalt.
The AARP’s grassroots “Create the Good” movement is coordinating the monitoring campaign. Its pedestrian safety surveys received the backing of several local Bronx politicians, including James Vacca, the New York City Council member for District 13.
“It is no longer an exception for people to live into their 80s,” said Vacca, the current chair of the council’s Transportation Committee. “It is the rule. And these folks still want to go out and do things like go out to the supermarket. We’ve got to make sure the streets are safe for them.”
By many standards, the streets are not safe. New York state has more pedestrian fatalities per year than all but two other states. The high incidence can be attributed to heavy traffic in New York City.
In 2008 alone, the area defined by the DOT as “downstate New York” – New York City, Long Island and Westchester, Rockland and Dutchess counties – suffered 232 pedestrian fatalities. Several incidents have highlighted particularly dangerous intersections, such as Broadway and 230th Street in the Bronx.
The intersection, which saw 19 crashes from 1995 to 2005, according to crashstat.org, claimed one more victim on March 22. Four year-old Josh Delarosa was blind-sided when heading to nursery school during Monday rush hour. He was rushed into critical care at the Columbia Presbyterian Children’s Hospital, whose spokesman confirmed to the Bronx Ink that he has since left. Calls to his daycare center – Growing Happy on 238th Street and Broadway – and his family went unanswered.
But Delarosa’s story is in keeping with that of the tri-state area. After a slight decline in overall pedestrian deaths from 2006 to 2008 in Connecticut, New Jersey and “downstate New York – from 443 to 407 – the earliest data from 2009 showed an uptick, according to the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.
The fear of a pedestrian death is acutely felt among seniors. Two in five Americans over the age of 50 say their neighborhood sidewalks aren’t safe, a recent AARP study found.
“The light changes before you even get across the street,” 78-year-old Harriet Miller, who uses a walker, said about the corner of Wood and Metropolitan, also located in Parkchester. “What are you supposed to do with that?”
AARP organized the Friday event as part of National Volunteer Week. The initiative is called “Complete Streets Week: Making New York Walkable for All Generations.”
Hundreds of intersections are going to be surveyed by the end of the week. On Friday, the AARP team was conducting similar public events at notorious intersections in Harlem and Rockland County.
Jessica Lappin, the New York City Council Member for the Fifth District in Manhattan, made the trek up to Wood Avenue and White Plains Road to express her solidarity with the “Complete Streets Week” event. Her motivation – the death of an 82-year-old woman a week and a half ago at an intersection in her district, which includes the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island.
“An unsafe corner for seniors is an unsafe corner for me,” Lappin said.