DRIVERS will be moving a lot slower in this major city after the speed limit was pulled back to only 20mph, with new slow zones expected to hit 250 locations this year.
The New York City Department of Transportation announced in March that the city will implement Regional Slow Zones across the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island.
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The move comes after the first slow zones were launched in Manhattan, south of Canal Street, last year.
Regional Slow Zones are specific geographic locations where speed limits are set at 20 miles per hour to improve traffic safety, according to a press release from the department.
“Lowering vehicle speed limits by even a few miles per hour could be the difference between life or death in a traffic crash,” said NYC DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez in a statement.
“Our newest Regional Slow Zones will save lives and protect our most vulnerable New Yorkers in some of our busiest pedestrian communities.”
The changes can already be seen in Staten Island after a .25-mile section of New Brighton was chosen as a Regional Slow Zone.
The zone is bordered by Jersey Street from the east, Richmond Terrance in the north, Tysen Street and Clinton Avenue in the west, and Prospect Avenue from the south.
That particular area has been the site of 12 severe injuries over the last five years.
Other zones in the rest of the city include City Island in the Bronx, a 0.18-square-mile section of Dumbo in Brooklyn, and the Broad Channel — from East Sixth Road to West 22nd Road — in Queens.
The DOT said it plans to put the slow zones in 250 locations by the end of the year, focusing on areas near school zones and open streets.
The zones are part of the changes stemming from Sammy’s Law, which went into effect last year.
Sammy Cohen Eckstein was a 12-year-old boy who was fatally struck by a driver in Brooklyn in 2013.
Since then, his mother, Amy Cohen, has become an activist for pedestrian safety and co-founded Families for Safe Streets.
“The United States fares abysmally in pedestrian safety and traffic fatalities compared to every other industrialized nation – we’re at the bottom of the West and four times as dangerous per capita as all of Europe, Australia, and Japan, and twice as dangerous as Canada,” Cohen told the New York Post last year.
“It does not have to be this way.”
Under Sammy’s Law, certain major roads outside of Manhattan with three or more lanes traveling in the same direction would be exempt from having lower limits.
If New York City wanted to raise or lower any speed limit by more than 5mph, there needs to be a 60-day written notice provided to the local community board to allow the public to comment on the proposal.
The law was the first change to the city’s speed limits since former Mayor Bill de Blasio signed a bill lowering the default city speed limit from 30mph to 25mph in 2014.
Commissioner Rodriguez thanked Cohen and Families for State Streets for pushing the bill into law.
“I want to thank the herculean efforts of Families for Safe Streets and Amy Cohen, who has tirelessly advocated in honor of her son Sammy Cohen Eckstein, for the city to have greater control over our speed limits,” she said in a statement.
For Amy Cohen, this is the culmination of a four-year battle pushing to pass the law, which she said shouldn’t have taken so long to pass.
“Nothing will bring back my Sammy. If he were still alive today, he’d be the bright, kind, and inquisitive young man he aspired to become, someone who was curious about the world while improving it any way he could,” she told the outlet.
“In his memory, I’m doing all I can to make the city safer for other children — and to spare other parents this monumental pain.”
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