To prevent car accidents related to speed, New York City lowers speed limit to 25 mph on key roads in 5 boroughs

During the Covid-19 lock-down, NYC car accident deaths and motorcyclist deaths related to reckless behavior, mostly speeding, increased. City officials were expecting fatalities to go down as the city was getting more active again but statistics show that instead traffic accident fatalities surged after the lock-down.

As a result the DOT announced yesterday that it was lowering the city speed limit from 30 mph to 25 mph on the most dangerous roads of the 5 New York City boroughs on:

• Riverside  Drive from 165th street to 181st street in Manhattan
• 7 miles of Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx
• 7 miles of Northern Boulevard in Queens
• 1 mile of Flatbush Avenue from Grand Army Plaza to Empire Boulevard in Brooklyn

New signs and speed cameras will be installed along this streets in the coming months said DOT Commissioner, Poly Trottenberg, in a press conference on Tuesday. Trottenberg said that the speed limit was lowered on these dangerous street segments after more than 70 drivers and motorcyclists died in crashes since the beginning of the year in accidents mostly related to speeding. Trottenberg also mentioned that a pedestrian hit by a car going at 30 mph is twice as likely to die than a pedestrian hit by a car going at 25 mph.

2000 speed cameras by the end of 2021

So far the city has installed a total of 950 speed cameras in 750 in school zone areas and has seen an average 60% decline in speeding where cameras were installed. The city is planning to extend the number of speed cameras to 2000 by the end of 2021. The camera are operating on weekdays from 6:00 am to 10:00 pm including during school summer vacations. According to the law, school cameras can be installed within a quarter-mile radial distance of the school. Car drivers who are caught speeding more than 10 miles above the speed limit are fined $50.

Read more in the New York Times