BIKE-LANE CHANGE
Plan for B’klyn horror site fix
The city plans to add a protected bike lane and narrow the driving lanes along Ninth Street in Brooklyn where a seizureprone driver fatally struck two children earlier this year, Mayor de Blasio announced on Wednesday.
Dorothy Bruns, 44, who mowed over the kids in the middle of the day, suffered from a number of medical conditions and was told by her physicians to stop driving just weeks before the deadly crash, authorities have said.
She is charged with manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and other counts for the crash that killed Joshua Lew, 1, and Abigail Blumenstein, 4. She faces up to 15 years in prison on the top count.
The city’s plan will move the bike lanes to the other side of parked cars from traffic between Prospect Park West and Third Avenue. The city will also narrow the traffic lane along that same Park Slope stretch, according to Polly Trottenberg, commissioner of the city’s transportation department.
“For the last few months, DOT’s planners, designers and engineers have been hard at work coming up with a safe and smart redesign of Ninth Street,” said Trottenberg.
The city will present the proposed street redesign at Community Board 6’s June meeting and plans to start construction this summer, she said.
The city has redesigned hundreds of streets as a part of de Blasio’s Vision Zero plan to reduce traffic deaths.
De Blasio also urged the state to let the city install more speed cameras in school zones throughout the five boroughs.
“We are doing our part with a redesign of Ninth Street to reduce speeding and make it safer. Now we need Albany to do its part,” de Blasio said.
“We need school-zone speed camera legislation extended and expanded immediately to prevent future tragedies on our streets. Speed cameras save lives,” said de Blasio.
Current state laws only allow 140 speed cameras in school zones, and those can only be in operation during school hours. Many city and state lawmakers have called for the number of cameras to be raised to 290.
Bills to increase the number of speed cameras have failed at the state level in the past few years, and a measure was left off of this year’s budget.
But a handful of lawmakers who voted against it before — including State Sen. Marty Golden (R-Brooklyn) — have said they are now in favor of it.