By Skye H. McFarlane
As traffic picks up speed in northern Battery Park City, local residents are running into nothing but red lights in their efforts to get a series of neighborhood stop signs replaced.
On April 26, without notice, the city Department of Transportation removed the stop signs from three intersections in the north neighborhood of Battery Park City. Angry residents have been fighting ever since to have the signs on River Terrace (at Murray and Warren Sts.) and North End Ave. (at Murray St.) put back.
However, after hundreds of irate emails, a letter from the borough president and two meetings between D.O.T. and members of Community Board 1, residents have received only a promise that the D.O.T. will continue to study the traffic in the neighborhood. At a C.B. 1 meeting Tuesday night, neighborhood frustrations began to boil over when Transportation representatives insisted that putting back the stop signs would violate department policy and that no one, not even the mayor, could compel them to do so.
“If you’re not going to listen, then what is the purpose of this?” C.B. 1 member and Battery Park City resident Tom Goodkind said to the D.O.T. representatives. “We’re here to protect our children and we’re here to protect our neighbors. We’re all volunteers and we’re sick of this. You’re here to protect us. That’s your job.”
Residents and board members scolded the D.O.T. not only for the decision to remove the stop signs, but also for failing to notify or consult the community before doing so. Residents said that the fact that the signs had been in place since the neighborhood was built, combined with a subconscious assumption of traffic controls at Manhattan intersections, has caused many people to step out in front of cars, expecting them to stop.
“I kept walking and I almost got hit and I think a lot of people have done that,” said C.B. 1 member Bob Townley, who lives on River Terrace. “That’s what I’m worried about.”
Other residents said they were worried about the many children and seniors who use the crossings. In addition, they asserted that curves on River Terrace and North End Avenue block the sightlines of both drivers and pedestrians.
While the intersections in question can be found completely empty at certain times of the day, mornings and evenings often find them filled by pedestrians with strollers and dogs, who struggle to time their way past construction trucks, city buses, black cars and taxis. While the black cars speed through to pick up customers at the World Financial Center and the Embassy Suites hotel, taxis often make illegal U-turns after dropping off residents on River Terrace.
Lori Ardito, the Lower Manhattan commissioner for the D.O.T. until her recent promotion to first deputy commissioner, said Tuesday that the D.O.T. sent the community board a letter to warn them of the stop sign removal. She apologized that the letter was never received by C.B. 1 and suggested it might have been lost in the mail. She said she sympathized with the residents having come to rely on the stop signs, but blamed the Battery Park City Authority for installing the “illegal” signs in the first place.
The authority has said that the D.O.T. always knew about the signs. Authority president Jim Cavanaugh has said he strongly disagrees with the decision to remove the signs, saying they were put there “for a reason” as a part of a planned community that is still growing. The D.O.T. said Tuesday that decisions on traffic controls must be made based on current conditions, not future projections. The authority did negotiate with D.O.T. to keep the stops signs in front of Teardrop Park based on anticipated future use.
“These are the standards of the city of New York,” Ardito said. “We are applying the rules to the neighborhood.”
The city rules involve following a set of federal standards that say that certain combinations of pedestrians, cars and gaps in the traffic flow merit stop signs or traffic lights. While the federal standards say that the stop sign regulations are only “guidelines,” the city chooses to follow them to the letter of the law. That rigid stance has caused hand-wringing in the past for other community groups seeking signs and signals.
“I find it difficult to believe that federal guidelines for the whole nation are entirely correct for every street in Manhattan,” said C.B. 1 member Jeff Galloway.
The official guidelines mention special considerations for sightlines and school routes (P.S./I.S. 89 is on Warren St., two blocks from one of the removed stop signs), but a D.O.T. engineer said Tuesday that the intersections in question were “pretty far short” of meeting the need for stop signs due to their low volume of vehicular traffic.
In a February meeting with C.B. 1, a D.O.T. representative, Joshua Kraus, said that the city was afraid that making traffic control decisions on a case-by-case basis could open it up to lawsuits. When asked Tuesday if the city was afraid of lawsuits, however, the D.O.T. reps all emphatically said, “No.” In a letter to residents last month Ardito said that the removal of the B.P.C. stop signs would make the neighborhood safer by decreasing the risk of motorists speeding between signs or disobeying them altogether. She did not make that argument Tuesday. Rather, she continued to repeat that the city must follow its rules uniformly.
Asked if the mayor could force them to put back the stop signs, Ardito responded, “Actually, no. We’ve had times when the mayor will sit there with us and say, ‘Can we give them a stop sign?’ and we have to say no, because it doesn’t meet the standards.”
The D.O.T. did agree, however, to continue studying the Battery Park City intersections as new buildings open and street patterns change.
They also agreed to study the traffic flow on days and times suggested by the community — such as the nights of summer concerts or daytime during toddler events in the park.
“While you are studying and studying, this community feels unsafe,” said Linda Belfer, chairperson of the C.B. 1 Battery Park City Committee.
Skye@DowntownExpress.com
