By Bill Parry
City Department of Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg returned to Northern Boulevard last Friday to unveil safety improvements at 48th Street, calling the complex, five-legged intersection “tricky.” The $1 million project brings an array of safety improvements, including a concrete pedestrian island, two crosswalks and curb extensions.
Trottenberg called Northern Boulevard “critical to Queens” and the birthplace of New York City’s Vision Zero initiative. In 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio introduced his plan at PS 152, at 61st Street in Woodside, where 8-year-old Noshat Nahian had been killed crossing Northern Boulevard while walking to school less than a mile from where Trottenberg stood.
“Three years since Mayor de Blasio first came to Queens to give us our marching orders on Vision Zero, New York City has seen three successive years of fatality declines,” she said. “While we of course have much more work to do, we are proud of the progress of DOT’s traffic planners, designers and engineers to reduce traffic fatalities on challenging streets like Northern Boulevard.”
City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer (D-Sunnyside) had requested the safety improvements at the intersection at the southern end of Astoria near Sunnyside Gardens where 329 pedestrians were injured between 2010 and 2017, he said. Van Bramer remembered rushing to the intersection on one night in February 2014, when a car jumped the curb and smashed into a bus stop, injuring five people including a 7-year-old girl who suffered cuts and bruises.
“It injured a little girl who had been shopping with her mother,” he said. “Not one more child, pedestrian, cyclist or motorist should die or be injured along the Northern Boulevard corridor. Northern Boulevard is busy, it is noisy, there are pedestrians, cyclists and automobiles coming from lots of different places, going to lots of different places and in many different directions. It’s an important corridor and in the past has been a dangerous corridor, and we all have an obligation to make it safer.”
Other work completed on Northern Boulevard, which was designated a Vision Zero “priority corridor” in 2014, includes concrete median extensions being added at several intersections The concrete pedestrian island at 48th Street is the first of 14 along the corridor from 39th Avenue to Broadway.
“This boulevard is an unheralded success of Vision Zero all the way to 114th Street,” Make Queens Safer Co-founder Cristina Furlong said. “It’s not just about bike lanes. This is what DOT is actually doing — street safety improvements like this that have saved lives up and down this corridor, making traffic more predictable for all road users.”
Trottenberg also announced that Deputy Commissioner Ryan Russo, a chief architect of the Vision Zero initiative in charge of transportation planning and management, has moved home to the Bay Area where he will become the first director of Oakland’s Department of Transportation, an agency created less than a year ago.
“Ryan Russo’s visionary and life-saving work has helped transform New York City’s streets, making them safer, more vibrant and more livable,” Trottenberg said. “Generations of New Yorkers to come will benefit from Ryan’s extraordinary legacy of transportation accomplishments. We are so proud to see this remarkable leader become the director of the newly established Department of Transportation for the city of Oakland. We in New York look forward to working with him in his new role as we strengthen the partnership between our two cities.”
Reach reporter Bill Parry by e-mail at bparr
