Motorpsycho woe
M’hattanites plead for cops to halt convoys
Outraged residents are challenging cops to shortcircuit illegal ATVs and bikes that are causing throbbing quality-of-life headaches in Washington Heights.
“Our corner of the neighborhood has intense and long-running problems with public safety and livability affecting our health and well-being,” Eileen King told The Post. “The way that streets are laid out make us a destination for drag racing, motorcycle gangs, and dangerous driving of all kinds.”
King charged, “There is little to no enforcement of any traffic/reckless driving laws, and the scale of the problem transcends periodic drive-bys by police.”
She said the outlaw drivers “are emboldened by the lack of enforcement and the situation is now cemented into place.”
“Every night and for hours and hours from Friday afternoon through Monday 4 a.m., a portion of our neighborhood is taken over by reckless drivers from other parts of the city,” she said.
‘A giant racetrack’
King called a section at West 193rd Street and St. Nicholas Avenue “the beginning of the drag racing,” and said the motorcycles and cars come up Fort George Hill and turn left — which is illegal — onto Fort George Avenue and then onto Amsterdam, which is four lanes wide and borders a “densely residential area that is traumatized by these cars and motorcycles.”
One disgusted resident, who declined to be identified, said the area becomes “a giant race track with dozens of cars, motorcycles and quads racing through doing loops on all of these streets, running red lights, on the sidewalks, with super loud mufflers that sound like gunshots, doing donuts.”
The resident said that local cops from the 34th Precinct will post pictures on social media trumpeting “we took this one speaker” or “we grabbed two bikes from Inwood Hill Park” but “ignore 25 speakers the size of a small refrigerators on top of cars on Amsterdam and ignore the 30 dirtbikes tearing through Highbridge Park, on the Micheal Buzek astroturf ballfield.”
King said cops from the 34th Precinct reported this week that they will put up barriers on the problematic stretch of Amsterdam and Fort George avenues, saying, “We hope it will work.”
“As the weather warms up the NYPD is conducting focused enforcement, and deploying additional resources, aimed at reducing this problematic and dangerous behavior,” the NYPD said. Saturday.