We are on the Agenda at Community Board 7 Transportation Committee Feb 14 at 6:30!
This update is for October 30, 2022, to February 8, 2023. A lot has happened in 131 days. A trifecta of good news.
OUR CROSSWALK IS ON THE COMMUNITY BOARD 7 (CB7) AGENDA FOR FEBRUARY 14 AT 6:30 PM
On Friday morning, February 3, I had a Zoom call with Susan Schwartz and Natasha Kazmi, the Co-Chairs of CB7's Parks & Environment Committee. It seems the Parks & Environment Committee is having a joint meeting with CB7 Transportation Committee at 6:30 PM on Tuesday, February 14th. The second item on the agenda will be about our crosswalk at West Drive at the 63rd Street entrance to Central Park. Here is a link to the agenda. Scroll down to the Transportation Committee where you will find a link to register for the meeting.
Please attend if you can but be aware that these meetings can go very long into the evening before audience members are allowed to speak. You can also leave a comment for the committee here. Comments must be submitted before noon tomorrow, February 10, to be included in the discussion at the virtual meeting on the 14th.
The following items will be discussed on February 14th at 6:30 PM via Zoom:
- Regarding the proposed e-bike charging station at the old newsstand on the pedestrian plaza south of the subway station at West 72nd Street and Broadway.
- Regarding ongoing pedestrian safety concerns at the pedestrian crossing at West 63rd Street crossing the West Drive in Central Park.
There is a Google Form link on the agenda page to leave your comments for the meeting. Susan pointed out that leaving a comment on a Google Form leaves a durable, machine-readable record of your comments that a verbal comment does not. Selected comments from the Google Form will also be addressed before audience feedback. It also means that if you can’t stay until the end, you can still be heard.
I highly recommend that if you have something you want to add, some personal experience in our crosswalk, or a suggestion, put it into the discussion using the form even if you plan to stay until late in the evening to make your opinion heard verbally. I would also point out that much of the language in Gale Brewer’s letter to DOT was drawn from comments from our Change.Org petition so your written comments make a real difference.
I understood from the discussion with Susan and Natasha that the powers-that-be are once again touting their never-ending project to redesign all of the roadways and crossings in Central Park, with a master plan that is presented to the public and all of the Community Boards for the traffic problems in Central Park and that this is the excuse they will present once again for the reason they are doing nothing right now. This is the same song and dance they have been singing and dancing for several decades now and you can see the result every time you use our crosswalk.
The argument I passed along to Susan and Natasha is that our crosswalk is the only crosswalk in Central Park that is or should be a school speed zone and deserves expedited action because public policy strongly favors protecting our kids from vehicular traffic near schools. I also raised the absurdity of employing 1960’s solutions to this problem in 2023. It would be far better to make an open-source hacker challenge with a ~$100k prize for bringing in a solution for under $20k per crosswalk that involves using off-the-shelf audio, video, AI/ML, IOT to solve for the real-time traffic control that we need in just this one crosswalk before adapting it to the other 40 crosswalks in Central Park. I think such a challenge could easily be solved in six months by a handful of teenagers with an Arduino board and a copy of Make Magazine. If you like this idea as much as I do, please leave it as a comment on the Google Form for this meeting.
I also pointed out to Susan and Natasha that our lawsuit will get concrete results in something like four years as compared to the bureaucratic paralysis we see in the political process like CB7 that has gone on for decades and is being proposed once again in the upcoming CB7 meeting.
SUMMONSES FOR USE OF BULLHORN - DISMISSED!
Over the summer of 2022, I stood in our crosswalk virtually every day from late May to Labor Day and recorded the behavior of the vehicles and the pedestrians traversing our crosswalk for at least one hour every day. Towards the end, I began using a bullhorn to call out the assholes running the red light while pedestrians were trying to cross. Eventually, this went viral on Instagram and several news stories were written about it.
Often, NYC Parks Enforcement or NYPD would stop and threaten to issue a summons for using the bullhorn. Each and every time, I demanded and begged they write the summons they threatened to write, and every time, they declined, citing any number of reasons. The bullhorn routine eventually became known as the Asshole Show and I developed a very cordial relationship with the officers. Finally on October 15, during an encore performance of the show, two NYC Parks officers obliged me and wrote two summons, which you can find here.
I requested an in-person hearing. It was scheduled for January 10. Neither NYC Parks officer appeared at the hearing and in their absence, I explained to the hearing officer that contrary to the requirements of the statute, nobody was offended by the use of the bullhorn but instead, virtually every one of the pedestrians in the crosswalk was either amused or thankful that I was there stopping the vehicles and calling out the assholes with the bullhorn.
Case dismissed and in the record!
OUR LAWSUIT AGAINST THE CITY OF NEW YORK IS MOVING ALONG SMOOTHLY - SWIMMINGLY WELL
This suit has gone exceptionally well. Our case has recently been reassigned to Jennifer H. Rearden. Judge Rearden was first nominated by Trump and then renominated by Biden. Hard to argue political bias.
I have managed to keep our costs down to under $500 so far and the lawsuit is at the stage where Judge Rearden has ordered the defendants to confer with us and write a report about the status of the case. This is far more attention than we got over a whole summer of activism. And it is safe to assume that somewhere down in the bowels of DOT, NYPD, Parks, and CPC, someone is thinking about this problem.
Unfortunately, contributions have only amounted to $10, leaving me to carry the burden of almost $490 on my $936 monthly Social Security check. If you believe in what we are trying to do and you think we are doing the right thing, then it behooves you to contribute something, relative to what you can afford. I don’t expect you to reimburse me for the hours I put into my summer of 2022 project. But soon, this case is going to start costing real money and I am not prepared to prosecute it with the means I have on my own. We need a cushion of several thousand dollars to ensure we can proceed to completion. Contribute here if you believe what we are doing is a good thing for the community.
I expect this case is going to follow roughly the course of The American Council of the Blind of NY v NYC and thus far it has. Their case was filed on June 27, 2018, and decided on October 20 of 2020, resulting in a court order that NYC install some 13,000 APS crosswalk buttons by 2036. Our problem is limited to 41 crosswalks so it is much more manageable and more prone to an early and amicable settlement. I also think that the $100k challenge idea has a lot of merit and could gain some traction as a low-cost experiment.
SUMMARY
Our cause is going mainstream as evidenced by its agenda item on the upcoming CB7 meeting. Our activism is not likely to be constrained by threats of enforcement, as evidenced by the result of the summonses issued to me for using the bullhorn to call out the assholes. And we seem to be getting much better traction in the judicial system than in the political system.
Our sole reason for existence is to solve one problem. The problem we are addressing is the vehicular traffic across the only school speed zone crosswalk in Central Park. That is the crosswalk at West Drive and the 63rd St entrance to Central Park. Our progress was negligible using citizen political activism as a vehicle but the judicial system seems to be much more effective.
TODAY'S PHOTO
Today's photo is an aerial view of illustrating the traffic flow of how the competitive cyclists swerve across the two lanes of one-way vehicular traffic and into the two-way jogger lane to run the red light when other traffic is lawfully stopped at the crosswalk.