What is Traffic Calming?

Traffic calming is a set of street designs and traffic rules that slow and reduce traffic while encouraging walkers and cyclists to share the street. Behind traffic calming is the belief that streets are valuable public spaces that should be shared equally by all users. Traffic calming devices are simple, inexpensive, self-enforcing, and easily modified to accommodate emergency vehicles, garbage trucks, and buses.

Reclaiming the Crosswalks

Most pedestrian crashes occur at crosswalks. In the overwhelming majority of cases the pedestrian was crossing legally with the light. Many traffic calming measures exist that can drastically reduce the crash rate and intimidation at crosswalks.

Reclaiming the Sidewalks

Precious pedestrian spaces are under constant attack from parked cars, misguided street widening, and out-of-control cars that careen onto sidewalks, killing or seriously injuring hundreds of NYC pedestrians every year.

Speed Humps

One of the traffic calming methods that is wildly popular with NYC communities is the speed hump. Speed humps are very effective in reducing speeds on neighborhood streets, contributing to greater quality of life and fewer crashes.

Trucks

New York City is overrun with oversize trucks that often turn down neighborhood streets illegally. T.A. is working to reduce NYC's reliance on trucks, to increase enforcement of laws relating to truck routes and truck size, and to encourage the city to install traffic calming devices that make it difficult for trucks to take shortcuts down neighborhood streets.

Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming

The innovative $1.2 million Downtown Brooklyn project study, first ever collaborative traffic planning venture for New York City, was the result of intensive negotiations between neighborhood groups, T.A. and City officials in late 1997 and early 1998. It came in response to a virtual uprising, manifested by a series of morning rush street blockades, by residents fed up with heavy traffic in their neighborhoods. By far the highest priority of both T.A. and the neighborhood groups who spurred the city into conducting the planning process is to reduce the number of cars traveling on west Brooklyn streets. TA continues to work with Brooklyn groups to ensure that the DOT does not stray from the original purpose of the project.

Report: The Bronx Five

The Five Most Dangerous Intersections for Children in the Bronx. T.A. demonstrates methods for improving some of the most unsafe intersections in the Bronx.