ROADS OF RUIN
NYC’s worst spots for driver rage & other top hazards
These are the New York City streets you might want to avoid.
The streets on the map below have the most accidents caused by alcohol, road rage, speeding, sleepy drivers and sun glare in the last five years.
Northern Boulevard in Queens — the site of the deadly September bus crash that killed three and injured 16 — ranked in the top two in all five categories.
In alcohol-related crashes, the 12mile-long roadway logged 74 accidents between July 1, 2012, and Oct. 8, 2017, according to a Post analysis of 650,691 accidents posted in the NYPD’s OpenData log. It was second in speed-related accidents, with 18 crashes.
Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn was among the top two in three categories — road rage, speeding and sleepy drivers.
The only Manhattan road in the top five of any category was 10th Avenue, which was third in collisions involving road rage, with 15.
The heavy traffic in Manhattan leads to slower-moving vehicles and fewer accidents, said AAA New York’s Robert Sinclair.
“With 10th Avenue sort of on the outskirts, you might be able to get up more speed, leading to the common road-rage scenarios,” he said.
Sinclair pointed out that eastwest roads often have sun glare, while north-south roads do not.
The Bronx was the only borough that did not register a single road in the top five in any of the danger categories.
While NYPD officials were not surprised by the list of dangerous streets — because “they are the biggest streets with the most vehicular traffic” — community leaders and advocates were distressed by the data.
Caroline Samponaro, deputy director of Transportation Alternatives, points out that most of the streets on the list are wide, arterial streets that make drivers forget they’re sharing the road with pedestrians and cyclists and “feel like they’re on a highway.”
“These types of streets are really boulevards of death that are de- signed to fail,” she said.
While Samponaro’s group believes the answer is more bike lanes, green spaces and other amenities to make the streets feel more like local roadways and less like highways, Eugene Kelty, chairman of Community Board 7, whose area includes part of Northern Boulevard, said those amenities are part of the problem.
He noted that a bike lane and concrete barrier installed in September along Northern Boulevard between Douglaston Parkway and 223rd Street has become precarious.
“They want to protect the bicycle people,” he said about the Department of Transportation, “But you actually took a road away from the drivers. It’s not Germany, where they ride bikes all over the place.”
Queens State Sen. Tony Avella has also complained repeatedly to Mayor de Blasio’s office and the DOT that the lane creates dangerous merges that lead to crashes.
Lt. John Grimpel said the NYPD has increased enforcement against drivers who fail to yield to pedestrians, drive distracted, speed and ignore traffic signals. The department also recently acquired additional speed guns and increased the number of officers trained to use them, he said.