Drivers in a Harlem neighborhood could soon be forced to step on the brakes.
Residents of the area just east of Morningside Park say their streets have long been plagued by speeding vehicles. Last week, they applied to designate the area bounded by 114th and 123rd streets and by Morningside and Manhattan avenues a slow speed zone.
“We really need it, right here in this spot,” said Tobie Childez, who has served as a crossing guard on the corner of 119th Street and Manhattan Avenue for almost 13 years. “They’re going against the light, and they don’t care.”
When the school day ends, “the kids are running out of school, it’s hectic,” Childez said, as cars raced past P.S. 180 across the street. “It’s all about protecting the kids.”
The new initiative by the city’s Department of Transportation, established last November, reduces the speed limit in a contained area from 30 to 20 mph, a limit enforced by a number of physical street changes.
According to Paimaan Lodhi, district manager for Community Board 10, which represents Central Harlem, residents have been complaining about speeding in the area for years.
“Speeding happens all throughout the city, but this is a predominately residential neighborhood,” with many pedestrians, making it a bigger problem, Lodhi said. He added that the churches and schools in the area make residents particularly sensitive to speeding problems.
“The residents applied for it, and whether or not the Department of Transportation goes forward or not—they’re going to take a look and study it,” Lodhi said.
CB10 voted to submit a letter of support for the application to DOT at a general board meeting last week. Applications are reviewed by DOT, which will make selections in March and start construction of approved zones in the summer. The DOT will evaluate whether or not to slow down an area by analyzing traffic patterns and looking at the concentration of schools.
“The application is a pretty arduous process,” community organizer Lisa Sladkus said. “DOT wants local community support, a pretty large swatch of the community.”
“It requires community outreach, the community coming together to slow things down,” she said.
Molly Mills, who lives on Manhattan Avenue, said the zone was a “great idea.”
“They should put big fat speed bumps in,” Mills said. “The speeding is insane.”
Mills said she always tells her daughter Hannah to look both ways on the street. “These idiots don’t look, and they drive too fast down Manhattan and Morningside,” she said.
David Gilyard, Sr., a P.S. 180 parent and graduate, said, “A lot of the time the kids don’t pay attention, they dash out there across the street.”
“We’ve been trying to get speed bumps here since I was his age,” Gilyard said, motioning to his son.
Despite the lengthy application process, Sladkus said she believes that “DOT will be surprised by the number of applications they will get.”
“That shows the latent desire for traffic calming,” she said.
The Claremont neighborhood in the South Bronx was the first neighborhood to receive a slow zone in a pilot program enacted in November. The zones include signage and an education component and are designed for contained, residential areas with no arterial roads.
“Local neighborhood streets are not highways, they are not shortcuts, they are where New Yorkers live,” DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said in a statement at the time. “A pedestrian struck by a car going 40 mph has a 70 percent chance of dying while a pedestrian stuck by a car going 20 mph has a 95 percent chance of surviving.”
Sladkus and other activists are trying to get a slow speed limit of 20 mph for the entire Upper West Side. In contrast with slow speed zones, which are demarcated by gates and physical components such as speed bumps, curb extensions, and foldouts in the middle of the street, slow speed limits rely more on enforcement.
That effort, Sladkus said, is going well—letters of support have been written to city officials, and Sladkus hopes to bring the issue to the Community Board 7 transportation committee in March.
“We want to get the word out and educate people, try to dispel any myths about slower speed limits,” she said. “This is an issue that has remarkably broad appeal.”
“Even car drivers say, ‘Yeah, that makes sense to me.’ Slowing things down doesn’t mean a longer trip, just a saner trip for those who are driving.”
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