Slow Zones Must Be Enforced

Submitted by Admin on

NYC's decision to expand Slow Zones to neighborhoods across the city needs to be enforced.

No amount of signs, speed bumps and other traffic-calming measures will do the proper job when idiots and jack asses, who do not know how to read, or do not give a damn about the safety of others insist on driving recklessly.

Until NYPD targets speeders on our local streets. And, as anyone who lives here can attest, speeding is rampant throughout City Island.

Since the creation of Slow Zones, which began in 2011 and featured the reduction of the city’s standard speed limit of 30 miles per hour to 20 miles per hour, more than 800 slow-speed signs have been posted along over 65 miles of city streets.

Slow zones are marked by high-visibility blue gateway signs at all streets entering the area, as well as speed bumps and stenciling of “20 MPH” in 8-foot letters to make sure motorists get the message.

Speeding is the single greatest contributing factor in traffic fatalities in our city.

We believe they have been a factor in bringing traffic fatalities to the lowest levels in recorded city history and making the last six years the safest ever.But speeding remains out of control in many places, a problem widely apparent on City Island.

”Speeding played a role in 81 traffic deaths in New York City just last year and more and more communities across the five boroughs are demanding that traffic along neighborhood streets return to the speed of life, yet 79 percent of the speeding tickets issued by the NYPD in 2011 were written by the Highway Unit, not by precinct-level patrol officers.

Neighborhood precincts in 2011 issued about four times as many tickets for tinted windows in motor vehicles (65,900) as they did for speeding (16,300).

City Island Images urges NYPD to enforce the laws and focus on actually catching speeders.

We also urge anyone who sees this type of activity to write down the plate number and report it to your local NYPD precinct.