Students at FiDi School Lobby for Pedestrian Safety
A team of more than a dozen fourth-grade students at P.S. 150, in the Financial District, conducted a traffic study last fall of vehicle and pedestrian counts of the intersection at Edgar Street and Trinity Place, the location of the school’s main entrance.
They have discovered that the majority of people who traverse the intersection use what traffic engineers call a “desire line”—a trajectory that appears quickest and most convenient to pedestrians, but is not a legal crossing, often because it is unsafe. At the intersection of Edgar and Trinity, the desire line (red footprints at right) is a direct passage from Exchange Alley to the front door of P.S. 150, on the north side of Edgar Street. (This line also leads directly to the pedestrian passageway through the Battery Garage, then to Joseph P. Ward Street, and the bridge over West Street.) But the City’s Department of Transportation has never painted a crosswalk here, in part because the east side of Trinity Place at this location contains a loading zone, and City regulations bar crosswalks through loading zones.
The legal crossing of Trinity Place is approximately 75 feet to the south, connecting with the southern edge of Edgar Street and Elizabeth Berger Park. But using this route requires pedestrians coming out of Exchange Alley to walk south, out of their way, cross Trinity, and then walk north again, across Edgar Street.
A delegation of P.S. 150 students presented these findings at the February 7 meeting of the Transportation Committee of Community Board 1 (CB1). The students (who used first names only) included Amelia, who said, “in one week, five days in a row, we researched how people crossed, in the morning and in the afternoon, for 15- to 20-minute intervals.” Dashiell said, “we saw that typically, more people did not use the crosswalk than those who did.” Celine said, “if you’re rushing to class, then you’ll probably take the shortcut because then you wouldn’t have to like go all the way around.” After collecting data, the team of P.S. 150 students created bar graphs and line plots to illustrate their findings.
Rosa Chang, a P.S. 150 parent said, “our principal has been cursed out for trying to prevent the kids from being run over by very aggressive drivers, especially in the morning.” During the morning, the north side of Edgar Street (westbound) is closed to traffic, to allow school buses serving P.S. 150 to drop students off safely. “We have seen drivers who have tried to go along Edgar Street going westbound when it is closed. They literally get out of the car and move the barricade and then drive through.” Other drivers, she said, simply ignore the traffic signal at Edgar Street and Trinity Place and drive through when the light is red.
“Last year, we were given a traffic enforcement agent,” she continued. “But our traffic enforcement agent has not returned. Our school administration shouldn’t be having to put themselves at at risk of physical harm to protect the children.”
“The crosswalk we’re asking for would just make safer what people are already doing,” Ms. Chang said.
A DOT representative at the February 7 meeting said that agency would have to conduct its own traffic study before installing a crosswalk, but could not say when (or whether) this would happen. CB1 has been asking for such as traffic study from DOT since 2017, to no avail.
At its February 27 monthly meeting, CB1 enacted a resolution noting, “the lack of a crosswalk that crosses Trinity Place directly to the entrance of P.S. 150 creates dangerous conditions for pedestrians and vehicles, as most pedestrians used paths of convenience rather than crossing Trinity Place using the route that requires using two crosswalks to/from the school’s entrance. Pedestrians should have the most direct, and accessible, path possible.”
The same resolution concluded by urging the DOT “to study the ways that people walk to/from P.S. 150 across Trinity Place from the east and across Greenwich Street from the west and create a street redesign plan that would calm traffic and allow all pedestrians to safely walk to the entrance of P.S. 150 using the most convenient and ADA compliant route.”