A Traffic Turf War for N.Y. Roadway

You don’t have to travel to Australia to test your survival skills. Just try crossing Queens Boulevard in New York City.

Since 1993, statistics show, 74 pedestrians have been killed attempting to navigate the broad and busy roadway, with its dozen lanes of traffic.

Getting across Queens Boulevard, especially for the many elderly neighborhood residents, can be a frightening game of beat the clock as impatient drivers wait for the light to change much like the jockeys atop horses in the starting gate at nearby Belmont Park.

Some residents here call it “the boulevard of death.” Others prefer “the killing field.” By any name, the thoroughfare has become the city’s most deadly.

“It’s quite dangerous. It’s not very pleasant crossing. You get very nervous,” said Morton Moskowitz, 92, walking slowly with a cane.

“The lights change too fast,” said Moskowitz, who has lived near the boulevard for 47 years.

Several blocks east, where four people have been killed trying to cross, Larry Wishnow, a former pattern maker in the garment industry, glanced at rush-hour traffic.

“Sometimes you’re fine. Sometimes you’re not fine,” said Wishnow, 88. “More or less, if you walk fast and follow the lights, you’ll be OK. But I don’t give you any guarantee.”

City officials are trying to improve the roadway’s safety with a massive campaign that includes increased police patrols and pedestrian education, but many people worry that the effort is still inadequate and that all the attention could fade over time.

Over the years, Queens Boulevard has served as a principal pathway to suburban Long Island, an alternative to the city’s network of decades-old highways. As the highways have grown more crowded, so has the boulevard.

Complicating the difficulties, the neighborhoods along Queens Boulevard are home to one of the biggest populations of senior citizens in the nation. Also, tens of thousands of newcomers to America live in the area; many are learning English and have trouble reading traffic signs.

In the Forest Hills section of Queens, site of many of the accidents, a busy subway station and a Long Island Rail Road stop add to the congestion.

Jaywalkers Take Some Blame

Then there are the jaywalkers.

“Queens Boulevard is unsafe because people are disobedient,” said Maisie Wright, a retired legal secretary who lives in the area. “Everybody wants to get away with something. . . .

“I get very upset when I see what they’re doing. It’s a busy boulevard. The residents have to learn to obey signs or else the police should give them more tickets.”

At some intersections, jaywalking has been raised to the art of ballet.

One recent afternoon, a woman disobeyed the crossing signal, darted across three lanes and perched on a narrow center median until the sign read “walk.” A man wearing a Yankees cap started to cross as the signal was about to turn against him. He was quicker than the woman and made it to the median as cars and trucks passed. Stranded, he waited until the signal changed, then nonchalantly went on his way. Later, another man stepped off the curb as traffic whizzed by. A truck narrowly missed him.

“The road itself has to be redesigned,” said Estelle Chwat, president of the Forest Hills Action League, which sponsors pedestrian education programs in several languages and has staged demonstrations after some of the deaths.

“There should be a bridge over certain areas,” she said. “The contours of the road are so bad that three or four streets converge into each other. . . .

“What is frightening is the humans are fighting the cars.”

Not only that, pedestrians are fighting medians that are too narrow when they can’t make it all the way across.

“You are unsteady and exposed,” said Charles Komanoff, a founder of Right of Way, an organization devoted to pedestrian rights. “You feel terribly vulnerable if you are pushing a shopping cart or a stroller or leaning on a cane or a walker.

“From the driver’s vantage point, there is so much concrete, there is so much pavement and there is so little human element on the horizon. It’s unusually easy to deny any human presence. You feel you are on a superhighway out there.”

A study conducted by Right of Way concluded that people older than 60 are 2 1/2 times more likely to be killed by motor vehicles than are younger people on New York City’s streets. The ratio soars to five times more likely on Queens Boulevard.

Death doesn’t discriminate.

The roll call includes a 92-year-old woman out on an errand, a 58-year-old woman who was struck by a truck, men ranging in age from 24 to 94 and a 15-year-old high school student, according to the New York Daily News. The latest victim, a jogger, was struck April 1. He was running against traffic and had just berated a taxi driver who honked at him. He was hit by a bus.

Faced with such tragedies, New York has mounted an aggressive safety campaign.

The seven-mile stretch of Queens Boulevard where most of the deaths have occurred is peppered with police cars to catch speeders who ignore the limit, which has been reduced to 30 mph. More than 53,000 citations for moving violations and jaywalking have been issued in the last several months.

The Department of Transportation has erected 400 signs at intersections urging people to cross with care. It has lengthened some traffic signals, and fences are being erected to prevent people from jaywalking in the middle of a block.

Iris Weinshall, New York’s transportation commissioner, recently visited the Rego Park Senior Center to stress the importance of pedestrian education.

A woman, still sounding a bit shaken, told Weinshall that she witnessed a close call when commuters, including a girl, ran to board a bus. “If that car did not have good brakes, that girl would be gone,” she said.

Another person asked about installing signals that count down--allowing senior citizens to see exactly how much time they have left to cross the boulevard.

‘This Has to Be a Hot Spot Now’

But Weinshall expressed fear that teenagers might use the signals as a potentially disastrous game to see how fast they could make it across the street.

“My No. 1 priority is pedestrian safety, whether it is Queens Boulevard or Times Square,” the commissioner said when the meeting concluded. “. . . This has to be a hot spot now.”

But some residents worry that the attention will dwindle.

Said Chwat: “We don’t want these blitzkriegs. We just want 24 hours of vigilance on this boulevard.”