Protect the pedestrians
Every urban pedestrian’s nightmare turned real in the horror on Thursday morning in the heart of Times Square — one teenage tourist dead, nearly two dozen people injured, some grievously. Terrorism raced the collective mind of a city, aware of the deadly vehicular assaults that have violently stolen lives in France, Israel and elsewhere. How else to explain why a driver would mow down person after person with seeming deliberation — not stopping even when one victim sprawled on his windshield — and then spring from the wreckage and, ranting, storm toward responding police?
More likely, police say, the savage conduct of Richard Rojas, a Navy veteran from the Bronx with DWI arrests behind him, can be explained by mind-warping drugs.
If investigation proves his to have been a murder-suicide mission, and not mere byproduct of impairment, the devastation Rojas wreaked in the city’s most conspicuous location differs not at all as a practical matter from the dread scenario the NYPD and traffic officials have long braced for: a vehicular rampage like the one that devastated a crowd gathered in Nice, calculated by Islamist fanatics to inflict maximum pain, injury and death.
That means aggressive probing of Rojas’ mental state and intentions, followed by the fullest prosecution the law allows, must not be the end of the reckoning with the lives he ended and ruined.
The seemingly easy access of a speeding vehicle to sweep thronged sidewalks now invites others bent on destruction to repeat the act.
Thank goodness for those bollards, erected among hundreds to protect the Times Square pedestrian plazas from just this scenario. It worked, stopping Rojas as intended.
Even so, the plaza-fied Times Square presents an open and unsecured target: throngs of pedestrians on the sidewalks opposite the plazas, where vehicles may accelerate without impediment.
What must follow now is a speedy and serious evaluation by the police and Department of Transportation of how to buffer those spaces, and action before tragedy repeats itself.