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A West Village resident says drivers tear down her narrow street at 50 miles per hour, beverage trucks rumble through at midnight, and neighbors have spent three decades asking the city for a speed hump, only to be told “somebody has to die first.”
The block is Barrow Street off of Bedford, which was on the agenda at Tuesday night’s meeting of Community Board 2’s Traffic and Transportation Committee. Barrow Street resident Susan Ginsburg told the committee the street has a 20 mph speed limit, but drivers turning right off Seventh Avenue South “go 50 miles an hour down the street.”
Ginsburg noted that while the street is narrow, with parking on one side and no commercial businesses, it still draws big trucks despite a sign limiting it to local deliveries. On the day before the meeting alone, she said, there was “a huge beer truck” and “a huge Pepsi truck.” Trucks come through at midnight, sometimes park overnight, and damage the street trees. She said her own magnolia tree lost half its canopy a couple of months ago.
She traced much of the problem to GPS, which she said sends drivers down Barrow as a route to the West Side Highway. City buses also come down the street when Christopher Street is closed on weekends, she said, along with party buses.
“We’ve asked for 30 years, we’ve asked for a speed bump,” Ginsburg said, adding that the answer was that somebody would have to die first. “Most of us have been hit in one way or another.”
She said drivers routinely park at fire hydrants and in no-parking zones, and that traffic agents who used to write tickets on the street no longer come, especially on weekends. Neighbors have asked the NYPD’s Sixth Precinct to run a sting operation.
A photo shown at the meeting, labeled Friday, Sept. 18 at 8:25 a.m., shows a Chefs’ Warehouse box truck stopped at Barrow and Bedford in a spot marked “no parking anytime.” When the photo went up, the Department of Transportation’s representative reacted with “oh wow.” “You know it’s bad when DOT says oh wow,” committee chair Jeannine Kiely said.
Ginsburg said her corner has had as many as 12 Ubers at once. Many are waiting not for passengers but for their next call, she said, and they won’t turn off their engines when asked. Kiely noted that the city has anti-idling laws.
Foot traffic is its own problem, Ginsburg said. Influencers sit on stoops and walk up to front doors to take photos, restaurant crowds fill the sidewalks on weekends, and promises restaurants make to the State Liquor Authority about lines and smoking aren’t kept. When neighbors complain, she said, the Sixth Precinct asks, “Don’t you want the neighborhood lively?”
She said Commerce Street is now “almost impossible” and Bedford Street has the same trucks, though drivers move more slowly there because of stop signs at every intersection. She said many children use the area because of the music school, and Kiely noted that Bedford is the back entrance to P.S. 3.
A committee member floated using bollards to close the street to everything but local traffic, turning it into what the member called a “virtual dead end.” “We’d love if the street were cut off,” Ginsburg said. The DOT representative said the agency would have to look into it and work with the NYPD on enforcement.
Kiely noted the difference with 12th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, where some neighbors who spoke earlier in the meeting said they don’t want a speed hump. On Barrow, Ginsburg said, neighbors have “been wanting it for years and years.”
The committee voted for a resolution calling for limits on through traffic, diverting traffic off the street, more enforcement, and a speed hump along with the study DOT requires before installing one. It also voted for a broader resolution calling for every street redesign in the district to include space for deliveries.
