Community Board 3: Approve the Bed Stuy / Clinton Hill Slow Zone

As a concerned member of this community, I support a Neighborhood Slow Zone for the area bordered north-south by Lafayette and Fulton, and east-west by Bedford and Washington.

According to data from the Department of Transportation, this area has the highest rate of traffic injuries and fatalities in the entire city--an average of sixty-two severe crashes each year. Two hundred and nineteen people have been hit by cars in this zone in the last few years. Many of them were simply trying to cross the street--legally, with the light, and within a pedestrian crosswalk--but the cars were going too fast to stop as they turned the corner.

This area is thoroughly residential—people sit on stoops and cluster on sidewalks, dangerously close to racing traffic. Foot traffic is extremely heavy, partly due to the pedestrians streaming into the neighborhood from the transit hub at Fulton and Franklin. On weekends, the sidewalks are thronged with families going to churches and mosques. Most importantly, the zone is host to six large schools, several daycares, a playground, and a thriving public library, and it is therefore teeming with children, who must walk and ride their scooters perilously close to speeding cars.

Our vibrant, friendly, diverse neighborhood represents the best of what Brooklyn is. It deserves to be part of the future of sensible planning. It deserves a Slow Zone.

Learn more at http://brooklynlocal.info/slowzone/ and http://facebook.com/SLOWZONE