ROAD RAGE AT POL GOLDEN
Kin of traffic vics slam ‘no-cam-do’ lead foot
Cops on Friday busted five protesters — including four whose loved ones were fatally mowed down by reckless drivers — after they demanded more speed cameras while blocking the street outside state Sen. Marty Golden’s Brooklyn office.
The group, which also included City Councilman Brad Lander, stood in the middle of the street, blocking traffic outside Golden’s Bay Ridge office on Fifth Avenue near 74th Street at about 8 a.m. at the end of a 24-hour vigil.
The protesters included Jessie Singer, a Transportation Alternatives staff member whose friend Eric Ng was killed by a driver on the Hudson River Greenway, and Jane Martin-Lavaud, whose daughter Leonora Lavaud was killed by a driver in Gravesend.
Also there were Dana Lerner, whose son Cooper Stock was killed by a driver on the Upper West Side, and Debbie Marks Kahn, whose son Seth Kahn was killed by a motorist in Hells Kitchen.
They were all led away with their hands zip-tied behind their backs, according to a Transportation Alternatives spokesman.
Golden, a Republican who originally backed expanding the number of cameras in the city, was targeted for his about-face on the issue. His change of heart came apparently after it was revealed that a car registered to him had been caught speeding 14 times since 2014.
He co-sponsored a bill last week that would pull the plug on speed cameras within six months and fund stop signs and traffic signals at the intersections of some 1,000 school zones instead.
His gripe with the camera program, he said last weekend, is that the owner of a speeding car — not necessarily the person at the wheel — gets the summons via mail.
In a tweet, Lander blasted Golden as “a reckless driver, and a reckless senator, too.”
But Golden’s spokesman, John Quaglione, insisted Friday that Golden has supported the speedcamera program since its initiation in 2013 — despite co-sponsoring the bill to kill it.
“Senator Golden is co-sponsoring legislation that will double the numberb off speedd cameras to 290, and is strongly advocating for the Senate to return to Albany to approve this measure,” he said.
Martin-Lavaud, Lerner and Marks Kahn, all members of the organization Families for Safe Streets, and the other busted protesters were given summonses and released, cops said.