OFFENDER OF THE DAY - JULY 7, 2022
This update is for Tuesday, July 5 to Thursday, July 7. I continue to have problems managing memory on the iPhone 12 due to the volume of clips I shoot every day. My old photos and videos are uploaded to iCloud only when the phone is on a charger and connected to wifi so it does just enough every day that I can record an hour or so the next day before I run out of memory. Hopefully, this will resolve over the next few days.
Thursday saw another incredible incident in the crosswalk. Here is an iCloud link to a 30-second clip of a Competitive Cyclist Crashing Thru Pedestrians in Our Crosswalk. The crosswalk was completely full of pedestrians yet this guy insisted on charging between pedestrians as fast as he could go. Both the downstream and the upstream cams recorded this incident and the downstream cam provided a screengrab of his face.
In other news, I made two requests to NY DOT using the general form provided on their website. I requested APS signals be installed at our crosswalk and was assigned case number DOT-553939-B9J6. I also used this site to request a speed reducer be installed here and was assigned case number DOT-554219-C8K7.
I also reviewed the remedial order in American Council of the Blind of NY v City of New York to learn more about when we could expect NYC to install APS buttons in our crosswalk. The crosswalk at West Drive and 77th Street in Central Park is on the list of the Court‐Mandated APS External Requests. I emailed Joshua Benson, Deputy Commissioner for Traffic Operations at NY DOT, who has been assigned by the court the role of single point person within DOT with responsibility for overseeing the implementation of the remedial order to ask how we can prioritize the installation of APS buttons at our crosswalk before Labor Day. I also emailed Andrew W. Schilling at the law firm of Buckley LLP, who is the Independent Monitor chosen by the court to oversee the implementation of the remedial order, and asked if he could help me to understand when we could expect APS buttons to be installed in our crosswalk. No response from anyone yet.
Speaking of no responses, the Commander of NYPD Central Park Precinct, Deputy Inspector William J. Gallagher, promised me he would review the file on Jill Tarlov, the woman who died in our crosswalk 8 years ago, and would get back to me with some statistics about injuries in our crosswalk over the last few years. That was several weeks ago. Nothing from him yet. Officer Vazquez, who showed up twice to try controlling traffic in our crosswalk, also never showed up again.
I now have a bullhorn to use in the crosswalk, too. On Friday, I plan to experiment to see if alerting cyclists to respect the red light using a pre-recorded message will make any difference.
Today's screengrab is a headshot of the competitive cyclist who ignored the red light while the crosswalk was crowded with pedestrians and squeezed thru a very small gap as fast as he could. Please review the full video to really understand how dangerous this was. The link expires in 30 days, so better watch it now than later.