Park Slope Drivers Are Getting Ticketed More Than Anyone Else in the City
Looks like Park Slope’s crackdown of reckless drivers isn’t going away any time soon—since they started sending out cops as undercover pedestrians back in January, the NYPD has issued 63 tickets for failure to yield. For context, over the course of January, Carroll Gardens cops issued two.
“The 78th is the NYPD’s number one Vision Zero precinct,” said a member of pedestrian safety group Right of Way. “Still, just one ticket a day for failure to yield, thus far in 2014, is pretty slim.”
The neighborhood has been a major focus of De Blasio’s Vision Zero program thanks in part to the activism of Amy Cohen and Gary Eckstein, whose 12-year-old son was killed by a car on Prospect Park West back in October (the speed limit on the road has since been lowered).
This particular crackdown focuses on the ubiquitous problem of cars that fail to give the right of way to pedestrians in a crosswalk, and Park Slope Street Safety Parternship’s founder told Brooklyn Paper, “I think it’s great that they’re out there turning this into a regular enforcement detail. I don’t think they would be doing things if the deputy inspector thought they didn’t have the manpower to adequately staff them.”
Which all leads to an obvious follow-up question—when are they going to start doing this everywhere else?
Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.