The Bronx Ink

Earlier this month, the Department of Transportation took Riverdale Avenue and put it “on a diet.” The project known as a “road diet” transformed the avenue from a two-lane traveling road to one. A bike lane and a turning bay were added to the road that stretches from West 254th to West 263rd Street.  

The project was the result of efforts that started back in March of this year between DOT and local elected officials, DOT wrote in an email.  

From 2015 to 2019 there were three traffic fatalities along the stretch and 66 total injuries, according to DOT. They added that two of these fatalities were senior-aged pedestrians which demonstrated the need for a safer street.

However, residents are concerned about the new project which was completed on Sept. 5. because of increased traffic, double parking during school hours and congestion due to sharing the lane with city buses. 

The Traffic and Transportation Committee of Community Board 8 held a meeting on Sept. 15 where residents showed up to voice those concerns. 

Riverdale resident, Eric Miooan, was one of several who spoke out against the road diet. 

Taking out a lane is “like cutting off somebody’s leg and saying you’ll get used to it,” Miooan said. 

Community Board 8 rejected DOT’s proposal due to not receiving enough traffic studies to change the road, according to Community Board 8 meeting minutes.  The board also said that the plan didn’t take into account merging traffic and parking. 

Across the nation, road diets have been known to help reduce speed and accommodate other modes of traffic like bicycling, according to the federal highway administration. 

DOT proposed that the 60-foot-wide road be divided into smaller sections. The road is still the same width but a lane for bikes has been added and a turning bay, leaving a smaller amount of room for cars. 

At the Sept. 15 meeting, Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz (D) spoke of how shocked he was that DOT delivered the new road so quickly.   

“It’s an absolute insult that the DOT could have moved this quickly,” Dinowitz said.

He said that it normally takes the department months to complete projects like this but they finished the road diet in eleven days. 

First Deputy Commissioner Margaret Forgione of DOT said they got the project done quickly because the department wanted it finished before children in the community went back to school.

On the other hand, Dinowitz said he’s been pushing for left turn signals on Riverdale Avenue for years now. 

“Put in the left turn signals, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out the battle in the flow of traffic and make the decision to put in left turn signals,” Dinowitz said.

There was a protest on Riverdale Avenue on Sep. 7 after the project was finished, where City Council Member of District 11, Eric Dinowitz (D) called on DOT to take a look into community concerns. 

“We’re calling on the DOT to take into account actual community concerns and to be a collaborative partner in projects or proposed projects, instead of completely ignoring the community,” Dinowitz said. 

DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez attended the traffic and transportation meeting on the 15th to listen to the community’s concerns and get feedback. 

One member Yesenia Jimenez explained how she almost got into a car accident earlier that week because people aren’t used to the new road. 

Laura Spalter, Chairperson of CB8, said she got a phone call from the board office earlier that week that two cars had gotten into a sidewalk accident, and were found up on the curb of the Skyview Shopping Center on Riverdale Avenue between 258th and 259th street because of the new conditions. 

“If somebody had been walking on the sidewalk they would be dead,” Spalter said.  

Spalter also spoke at the protest earlier this month saying that the Traffic and Transportation Committee voted against the plan repeatedly.  

DOT said that they would come back in a year and reassess—if they see no changes or an increase in accidents at that time, then they’ll “go from there.” 

DOT has done similar projects in the Bronx that have shown to reduce total injuries between 22 percent and 47 percent, and citywide road diets have reduced deaths and serious injuries by 30 percent on average, according to research from DOT. 

“So we do expect to see that here and we will be monitoring it,” Forgione said. 

Shawn Garcia, Bronx and Uptown Organizer for Transportation Alternatives, is in support of road diets across the city and responded to a tweet from the commissioner on Sept. 15 just hours before the meeting.  

“Appreciate the commissioner @ydanis pushing forward this work, especially despite the small anti-road diet forces in Riverdale. The racial and class equity issues here are so apparent.” 

In an interview with The Bronx Ink, Garcia said that Community Board 8 isn’t representative of Riverdale as a whole. 

“We don’t want to wait for the next person to die or a child to get hit by a car,” Garcia said. 

On a Wednesday afternoon, a woman wearing glasses and holding a cane struggled up the steps of the elevated Morris Heights Mt. Eden Ave. 4 train platform. Just ahead was her 9-year-old daughter, who heaved a huge empty metal shopping cart slowly up each step. Sweat rolled down her face.

“Come on!” the daughter shouted to herself.

Both Marisol Rivera and her daughter stopped frequently for breaths.

This is the daily reality of getting to and from the station, which has no elevator, for Rivera.

This isn’t the only station where  disabled residents of the Bronx struggle. Of the 14 subway stops on the 4 train line running through the borough, only two are accessible by wheelchair, according to a Metro Transit Authority (MTA) subway map. 

Rivera, who suffered a bad fall on slippery stairs back in 2005, has since endured long-lasting pain in her lower back, hip and legs. She relies on a walking cane to support herself.

Her child assists with carrying items like a grocery cart up the dozens of steps. But she only has the strength to lift it, empty, upwards. On their way down, when the cart is full, Rivera has to lower it herself, she said.

A lack of elevators poses a problem for mothers with babies, too. Laurie Hernandez, 22, explained whenever her mother takes the train with her baby, she meets her at the station to help carry the stroller, sometimes multiple times a day. 

Leonara Delmoral, 57, is a transplant patient who relies on a walking cane. In the 20 years she has lived in her neighborhood, Mt. Eden Ave. and other stations in the Bronx have not been accessible.

“It’s not fair. It’s two flights going up to the third floor, and then when you get in, you gotta walk upstairs, too… If you’re in a wheelchair or walker, it’s very hard,” she said. 

As of last Friday, the MTA listed 35 stations as having at least one elevator or escalator out of service. Two stations had their only elevators out of service. 

Last year, the city approved rezoning plans that are expected to increase the population of University Heights, according to the area’s community board spokesperson Remi Bola. According to Bola, University Heights’s Community Board 5 has redoubled pressure on the MTA since then, as well as the Department of Transportation (DOT) and local elected officials to add elevators at Burnside Ave. on the 4 line. But the DOT, which is in charge of issuing permits related to construction affecting sidewalks state-wide, denied the request to install elevators at Burnside Ave.

“That proposal–they did not even let it see the light of the day,” Bola said. “We need infrastructure to be able to support [the rising population].”

Assemblyman Pichardo, of District 86, works with Rider’s Alliance, a nonprofit organization that lobbies for better transportation and riders’ rights, to increase community engagement and government awareness. 

“Transportation and wheelchair accessibility is a huge problem in the Bronx, especially on the 4 line,” he wrote in a statement. “It makes it nearly impossible for handicapped individuals to have proper access.”

While Pichardo is not aware of any current legislative proposals in the Assembly aimed at resolving the issue, he said he is open to them.

As alternative handicap transportation, the MTA offers its private cab service, Access-A-Ride. But it requires ordering a day in advance, providing specific times and locations and is slower than a train.

Delmoral said she never applied for Access-A-Ride because she’d seen first-hand, the extreme wait times while working at a private doctor’s office in Manhattan.

“In my experience with Access-A-Ride, you’ll be stuck there waiting the whole day,” she said. 

As soon as a patient was dropped off at her office by the service, Delmoral knew to call Access-A-Ride immediately to schedule the patient’s ride home. But even then, the patient would be seen by the doctor well before the service arrived to take them home, according to Delmoral.

Last spring, MTA President Andy Byford launched an initiative called Fast Forward, which featured proposals ranging from redesigning bus routes to improving station access. New York’s transit system is the largest in North America. However, only a quarter of its 472 stations are wheelchair accessible. The MTA released a proposal on Monday with plans to install new elevators or escalators at up to 66 stations within the next five years.

But for Rivera, Delmoral and others like them, the planned changes can’t come soon enough. In the meantime, they must resort to what little is available. 

“We do what we got to do,” Rivera said. 

MTA officials launched a series of informational sessions to outline a proposed Metro-North rail service to four neighborhoods in the East Bronx. The project, which is to be completed by 2019, aims to provide swifter access to and from the area to Midtown Manhattan, Westchester and communities outside of the city.

Construction of the new train stations are being proposed for Hunts Point, Parkchester, Morris Park and Co-op City, DNAinfo reports. Expansion of the Metro-North service would connect the existing Hudson line with one line along the west side of Manhattan. The existing New Haven line in Westchester would connect to another line along the Bronx.

MTA officials’ proposal to build six new train stations intends to shorten the commute of roughly 5,000 Bronx residents who currently use the Metro-North line to travel to their jobs outside the city and to foster economic growth in the Bronx.

 

 

Groups of cyclists aren’t a common sight in the South Bronx, especially on a blistering, late-summer day.

But on Aug. 26, community advocates from the Bronx River Alliance, Transportation Alternatives, Bronx Health Reach and other local organizations gathered on the corner of Whitlock Avenue and Westchester Avenue with helmets on their heads and their bicycles by their sides.

Their mission was to document the conditions on the roads linking Hunts Point Riverside Park, Concrete Plant Park and the soon-to-be-opened Starlight Park. For years, these groups have been asking the city’s Departments of Transportation and City Planning to improve the greenways within the parks. Now, city officials finally seem to be paying attention — and in an ongoing series of meetings, they’ve been asking the community firsthand what they want for the greenways.

Concrete Plant Park has been open to the public since 2009, and Hunts Point Riverside Park since 2007, but the community groups say both parks need upgrading.

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.

By Ryan Tracy and Dan Lieberman

Word that four year-old Joshua Delarosa was still alive came as good news Tuesday to folks familiar with the intersection at 230th Street and Broadway, but news of another accident in the area was no surprise.

Yolanda Ellerbe, 43, stood near the site of the accident that left Delarosa in critical condition at New York Presbyterian Hospital Columbia Monday as a pair of crossing guards in reflective vests tried, often in vein, to hold off drivers cutting through the crosswalks. Ellerbe called the intersection “terrible.”

Between 1995 and 2005, 19 crashes occurred at the location, according to crashstat.org, a website run by pedestrian advocacy group Transportation Alternatives. There were two pedestrian injuries at the same intersection last year, according to the city Department of Transportation.  Another injury occurred there in 2007, but none were reported in 2008 and 2009.

In 2005, a man in a wheelchair was killed after an SUV hit him at the intersection and dragged him 50 yards.  Another pedestrian was killed at the same intersection in 1999, according to crashstat.org.

“There’s too many schools around here, they need to do something about the (traffic) lights,” said Ellerbe, who worked with Delarosa’s family at a Head Start Program in the Marble Hill public housing buildings next to the intersection.  Delarosa’s mother, Romula Fernandez, was walking him to day care on Monday morning when a swerving livery cab knocked over a nearby traffic sign.  The sign fell and hit the child.

Other observers echoed Ellerbe’s concerns about safety.

“This street, the cars, they running fast,” said Jose Avelar, who can see the intersection from his nearby barber shop.  “There’s something every week.”

After the crash, a nearby crossing guard lifted a traffic sign off Delarosa’s body.  The driver of the cab, who turned to avoid a city Department of Environmental Protection truck “could have run over (Delarosa).  He could have crushed him,” said the crossing guard, who asked to remain anonymous because she was not supposed to speak with the media.

The crossing guard, who has been working with the New York Police Department for 11 years, said she was nearly hit by the sign.  Her navy raincoat still had yellow stains on the sleeve from the spot where a street sign had fallen against it.  She quickly grabbed the heavy sign and surprised even herself with her strength.

“I’m still amazed I did that,” she recalled.

As rain fell, cars, buses and trucks rolled through from five directions.  Schoolchildren, mothers with strollers, people in wheelchairs and dozens of pedestrians walked from side to side, hiding behind steel pillars as vehicles rushed by and a subway train rumbled overhead.

Delarosa’s mother was also injured in the accident, but was discharged from the St. Barnabus Medical Center emergency room Tuesday, said a hospital spokesman.

Ellerbe said she had spoken to Delarosa’ mother Tuesday afternoon and she had reported Delarosa was “doing a little better.”  Ellerbe’s colleagues at Little Angels Head Start expect Delarosa to attend pre-school there this fall.

Last year, the mother had regularly dropped off his older sister at the center, and it was clear young Joshua wanted to go to school too.  “He would come in in the morning and go right in the classroom and sit in the chair immediately,”  Ellerbe remembered.

Despite statistics showing accidents in the Bronx have decreased since 2001, “There are still too many accidents caused by driver inattention, speeding, and failing to yield to pedestrians and too many motorists speed away from crash scenes,” said DOT spokesman Seth Solomonow.