Today in the Brooklyn Paper online edition I saw this: Park Slope: Change Thru-Ways to Two-Ways.
It’s a good headline and a good rallying cry. I’m all for it. I HATE the traffic on 8th Avenue and Prospect Park West. Hate it. This is a good proposal. And the fact that it was motivated by the death of Joanathan Millstein’s make it even more powerful for me. He was a friend of a a group of friends of mine from childhood and high school. So I feel really sad about his death. Here’s an excerpt.
A group of Park Slope residents is urging the city to convert the
one-way speedways of Prospect Park West and Eighth Avenue into two-way
streets in hopes of avoiding the kinds of car-bike conflicts that
killed a cyclist last month.At a neighborhood traffic forum on Wednesday, Slopers argued that
reconfiguring Prospect Park West and Eighth Avenue — where Jonathan
Millstein was killed in a Sept. 10 collision with a school bus at the
corner of President Street — would slow traffic and allow pedestrians
and cyclists to reclaim a share of the road.“You don’t have safe streets when you have cars barreling through in
a disorderly way,” said Michael Cairl, who argued during the meeting at
Park Slope Community Bookstore that one-way traffic often moves faster
and more erratically than two-way traffic.The cycling advocacy group Transportation Alternatives came to the
same conclusion, determining in a 2007 study that one-way traffic on
Eighth Avenue regularly travels 40 miles per hour (10 miles per hour
above the speed limit), while two-way traffic on Seventh Avenue does
not exceed 25 miles per hour.
I think it’s a good idea, but it will only help somewhat. I live in Windsor Terrace, down on Prospect Park Southwest, which is a two-way street, and that too is a thruway, and the traffic is just as dangerous, with cars racing through, and what’s worse, sometimes cross the line to pass slower cars.
So changing the streets might not help unless there is also enforcement, and that’s what we’re not getting on these streets.