Greenwich Street
A popular crosswalk (at Greenwich and Duane Streets) used by children, the elderly and families walking to Washington Market Park is constantly ignored by motorists. The dangerous situation has been the target of reforms by local schools and community organizations, including The Washington Market Park Board. The Park Board has formed the "Tribeca Kids Safety Zone" and would like to see a stop sign or a red light and a commitment to traffic calming before tragedy strikes.
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">[intro music]</font> <br>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Nelle Fortenberry:</i>
[00:09] About two years ago the Board of Directors at Washington Market
Park here decided something finally needed to be done about the increasing
traffic dangers for children and other pedestrians trying to cross into
our park and along this six block corridor here on Greenwich Street.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [00:23]
I shop here on a weekly basis and have two children that I have to pick
up from school in the area. I find that trying to cross the street
with shopping in hand and kids can be quite dangerous. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [00:33]
You have to be alert or very quick. And if there’s anybody or
anything in the way, you in trouble. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Nelle Fortenberry:</i>
[00:41] We created something called the Tribeca Kids Safety Zone initiative
and backed by the 12 schools and community organisations, all of whom
have pedestrians crossing this Greenwich Street corridor every single
day. We took our initiative to Councilman Gerson and the Community
Board want. With their support we then met with the Department
of Transportation. That meeting took place about ten months ago.
All they agreed at that meeting was to study this area as part of their
Lower Manhattan street works project. That was supposed to begin
in January. It’s now mid-August and there has still been no
study, and we are experiencing increasing dangers along this corridor. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [01:21]
It’s a little scary, especially when the taxicabs are coming down
the street, and basically a lot of times you have to wait for all the
cars to clear out before you can even attempt to cross because they
just want to get to the next light.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [01:33]
What did that that cab driver just tell you back when you… </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [01:36]
Ah, forget about it. Look it’s ridiculous, they’re… I have
two kids in school here and they are going down on Greenwich.
There have to be Stop signs and red lights on every single cross street. </font></p>
<p> <br></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Nelle Fortenberry:</i>
[01:45] We took some photographs here in front of the park showing pedestrians
attempting to cross here at Duane Street. Not only is their sight
line block by the dumpsters that are left here, but these parents are
forced to cross out into the crosswalk with their strollers in order
to see if traffic is coming. And here indeed is what is coming
down Greenwich Street. It’s impossible for a pedestrian to even
see oncoming traffic or visa versa, requiring pedestrians then go halfway
out into the intersection to see if cars are coming. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [02:14]
It’s a tentative process to kind of creep out on the crossing, gage
whether the person has seen you and whether they’ll stop or whether
you have to kind of wait for a break in the traffic and then dash across.
It’s a bit like a game of frog really. Scary.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Harriet Grimm:</i>
[02:27] As the neighbourhood is becoming increasingly residential, we’ve
got skyrocketing population of young children and everyday children
who attend PS34 or PS150, Park Pre-School Washington Market Park, pre-school,
they are all using this park daily and we’re just really concerned
about the safety of our children. We also here in Pennants Plaza
a senior centre and a concentration of seniors, concerned about them
as well.</font></p>
<p> <br></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [02:56]
There’s some old people, they can’t really walk across the street
that fast. There’s young people, there’s strollers, there’s
bikers, there’s dogs.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [03:10]
And there are also lots of children here [unintelligible 03:11] a bunch
of schools.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [03:13]
And I see people around me who are standing on one side of the street
hovering because they really don’t want to cross. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [03:19]
We’ve lived here 30 years and we’ve been fighting for a crosswalk
light for that amount of time. It took somebody dying on Chambers
Street, it was a professor from BMCC who died because of a car accident
that we got our light on Chambers Street. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Harriet Grimm:</i>
[03:41] I feel like I’m gripping my eight year old by the hand when
I cross the street and well, it sounds really dramatic to say I feel
like I’m taking their lives in our hands. But we need some kind
of traffic control here to ensure safety.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Charles Komanoff:</i>
[03:53] The city needs to decide whether Greenwich Street is an arterial
like Varick Street or 7<sup>th</sup> Avenue or a neighbourhood street.
And the parents, the schools, people who live here want it to be a neighbourhood
street and the volume of children and others, requires that it be a
neighbourhood street. So we start by changing the texture.
We actually need to narrow the roadway by putting in neck downs on both
sides of the crosswalk, or just even extending the sidewalks further
into the roadway. Drivers know, they get the message intuitively
that when the street is narrow they go slower. It’s for their
own safety as well as the community’s safety. We need to raise
the crosswalk to send the message to drivers that they’re not on a
highway anymore but that they’re in some new zone which requires them
to slow down and pay attention. At the same time we establish
a 15 mile per hour speed limit for this entire six block stretch that
has so many public schools, nursery schools, day-care centres, this
wonderful park that’s at the heart of Tribeca. And we enforce
the 15 mile per hour. We do that with a judicious helping of police
enforcement that before long sends the message to drivers that if they
just speed through here, or even drive here at 15 miles an hour but
force people to wait at the crosswalks, that they’re going to get
cited. And that begins to change the culture of driving, and it
also changes the culture of pedestrians, and gets us more in the habit
of asserting the right-of-way that the law entitles us to. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [05:30]
It’s time for the DOT to put the safety of children and other pedestrians
ahead of the convenience of cars and trucks along Greenwich Street.
The pedestrian situation here is unique, requiring the DOT to step outside
of their normal requirements. We want them to stop looking at
rules on paper and start looking at the reality of the danger. </font> <br>
</p>
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