Attention, D-train riders: the first of the R160s (fancy term for ‘brand new train’) have been spotted on your line.

(The train in the photo says ‘D’ – just trust me on this one.)

There’s been a lot of news lately about the spate of traffic accidents involving pedestrians in Bay Ridge.  A recent sad story caught the media’s attention when local legend, Joe Rollino, age 104, was struck and killed while crossing Bay Ridge Parkway at 13th Avenue. 

Unfortunately, he was just one of many.  Around the same time, there were reports that an elderly woman and child were struck on 92nd and Third Avenue. Last month, the Daily News reported that a local dentist was struck and killed on 4th Avenue and 79th Street by a hit and run driver who later turned herself in.  Another news report  told of an elderly man killed by a hit and run driver on Fourth Avenue in Sunset Park. Perhaps it’s not surprising that Fourth Avenue was recently named one of the most dangerous thoroughfares for pedestrians in the tri-state area in a study issued by the Tri-State Transportation Campaign. 

One of the worst incidents I’ve heard about was recounted by Allison Robicelli, (owner of Robicelli’s Gourmet Market, 8511 Third Avenue).  Her mother-in law-was struck and nearly killed by a hit and run driver on the corner of 75th Street & Ridge Boulevard. She ended up in critical condition at Lutheran Hospital with severe head injuries.  Fortunately, she recovered, but they never found the driver. 

These stories and others led to a spirited discussion on the Bay Ridge Parents Yahoo Group of which I am a member. Nearly everyone had a story of a near miss or an actual accident. There were the oft-cited complaints of drivers ignoring four-way stops, running red lights, speeding, texting and talking on cell phones as well as acknowledgment that pedestrians share the blame by crossing in the middle of the street, ignoring traffic lights and committing other bone-headed moves. 

In a commendable effort to try to do something about the problem, the group formed a Facebook page, organized a petition, and testified at the January Community Board 10.  As reported in the New York Post, they suggested better enforcement of traffic laws and particular attention to certain high accident areas, including Fourth Avenue.

I hope that these efforts pay off, but I wonder if there is something else going on that makes Bay Ridge a more dangerous place to walk and drive than other parts of the city.  Here are my theories:

 - A suburban car culture in an densely-populated urban neighborhood.  I sometimes think of Bay Ridge as populated by suburban wannabes who for some reason don’t want to leave Brooklyn. We have lots of private homes and multi-car families. The cars tend to be of the super-sized  SUV variety. We drive when we could walk.  No wonder the streets become wildly congested.  Just try squeezing past a Lincoln Navigator on a small side street.  Witness the daily traffic jam in front of Visitation Academy on Ridge Blvd between 89th and 91st Streets where cars are double parked dropping kids off for school. It’s no better down the block at  PS 185 on 86th Street and Ridge Blvd.  Marcie, the crossing guard, wears her voice out shouting at the cars that won’t let the kids cross the street or that block the intersections. 

 - Lack of public parking.  It’s a war out there when it comes to getting a legal parking spot.  Most of the illegal u-turns I see (and do) are an effort to snag a meter that just became available.  

 - The Gowanus Expressway (there’s an oxymoron for you!).  There’s nothing “express” about it.  It’s as lousy as the smelly canal it’s named after. It’s such a bottleneck that Fourth Avenue becomes the surrogate expressway.

 - Frustration.  All of the above leads to tremendous frustration trying to drive around the neighborhood.  You’ll be tailgated while looking for a parking spot.  You’ll be honked at while letting a little old lady cross in front of you. The parking spot you’ve been patiently waiting for will be stolen out from under you. You’ll be bested at the four way stop when others barely pause before driving through. You’ll be ticketed by the parking vultures (ahem: traffic agents) if you double-park even just to let someone out of your car.

 - Aggression…and maybe all of that frustration makes us a little keyed up, quick to anger, easily provoked, less likely to yield the right-of-way.  I know it’s not a good sign when I hear my six year old in the backseat say “Mommy, you just said a bad word again!”  I always think it’s the other guy’s fault, but sometimes it’s my fault too. 

What to do about it?  Maybe just acknowledging that we’re all part of the problem can go a long way. Let’s take a deep breath before getting in the car and consciously try to take it easy out there. Don’t honk your horn at the briefest delay. Let the other guy go first.  Realize it probably won’t make a difference in your day if you miss the green light on Fourth Avenue. Hey – maybe even try walking a block or two?  It’d be good for the environment, your waistline, and your mental health (if you’re not hit by a car, that is).

A New York rainstorm is to umbrellas
What a light dusting of snow in Maryland is to cars

(The totally awesome, valuable, and so naturally slated for demolition Feltman’s Kitchen mural as seen in 2007. Photo credit: Brian Hedden)

Last week, I met up with Ned Berke, editor of Sheepshead Bites and all around cool dude. While talking with him, I mentioned that I think Sheepshead Bites is the best news blog in Brooklyn right now. Which is extremely high praise, considering (a) the sheer number of hyper-local news blogs here – Brooklyn has been determined to have the most bloggers per block or per square mile or per normal person or some damn thing by an actual academic study on the subject – and (b) that a number of those people take citizen-journalism very, very seriously and are running circles around traditional news outlets.

Funny thing about that, though. That’s a reputation earned largely by the North Brooklyn blogforce – yet there are any number of South Brooklyn news blogs I would pick as “best” before looking north, even without Sheepshead Bites. Certainly GerritsenBeach.net deserves extremely high praise as well – not just Dan Cavanagh’s reporting, but his lovable community of commenters. Is that regional bias? Perhaps… but I also think we have a lot of really interesting – and underreported – stories in this corner of the town, and more than a handful of good writers to cover them.

Which explains the length of this week’s wrap!

• The mural pictured above could be worth $250,000. The good news – it’s on a City-owned building. That will be a nice boon for the City treasury! The bad news – it’s actually slated for demolition instead. (Amusing The Zillion)
• Popular history teaches us that access to the upstate watershed was one of the driving factors behind Brooklyn’s decision to approve Consolidation with New York City in 1898. So seriously people – why is THIS even a matter of debate? Pass the damn bill! (Bay Ridge Journal)
• The land grabs at the end of dead-end streets, and the title laws that love like like work against them. (GerritsenBeach.net)
• Now that we know are pretty sure who will set up shop on Coney Island this summer, there’s a good chance we’ll be seeing one of these. (Amusing The Zillion)
• Some more praise over the Zamperla/Coney Island decision, but refreshingly less than the man-crush we got from Councilman Recchia. (Kinetic Carnival)
• Moviegoers mourn the loss of the Kings Plaza theaters hope Kings Plaza itself can’t be far behind. (Sheepshead Bites, L Magazine)
• My general opinion of the New York State Senate is that Hiram Monserrate should be removed, Pedro Espada and Carl Kruger should resign ASAP, and the other 59 Senators should be defeated at the polls this November. That said, is it my imagination, or does this Marty Golden guy really know his stuff when it comes to constituent services? I mean, a telephone town hall? That’s awesome. (MarnieParker.net)
• The Coney Island-bound Q-train platforms at Avenue U and Neck Road reopened last Monday. The first reported sighting of graffiti was on Saturday. (Sheepshead Bites)
• Tearing down a building without a permit… check. Broken construction fence across the street from an elementary school… check. Corrective enforcement by the DOB… um, well… (Sheepshead Bites)
• A new gourmet supermarket prepares for a late-February opening. Take that, 69th Street Key Food! (Sheepshead Bites)
• An elementary school in Gravesend is getting New York’s first “edible schoolyard.” I guess Brownstone Brooklyn is holding out for a vegan schoolyard. (The Village Voice)

On Friday morning, I published a story detailing the transit service cuts, based on the plan the MTA adopted last month. On Friday afternoon, the MTA released a revised plan. Oops. If I knew that was going to happen, I would have waited a day or two before publishing.

Go back to the original story – I have made all of the appropriate updates. The biggest changes are the number of shortened routes (i.e. no more B4 in Sheepshead Bay). I was a little shocked – the last month’s tweaking and fine tuning was supposed to make things slightly better. But with all of the shortened and shifted routes, I actually think South Brooklyn got hosed.

(Starting in July, the B4 disappears on weekends. Photo credit: Brian Hedden)

[UPDATE Jan-23-2010] The MTA released a much more detailed – and slightly revised – service reduction plan a few hours after I posted this. The story has been updated to reflect this revised plan. New cuts are in italics, saved routes are struck out.

Nobody likes the MTA’s proposed service cuts – not even an MTA apologist like me. But Dyker Heights residents probably have more reason to be upset than most. The service cuts that are currently on the table would eliminate weekend service on two of the bus routes that serve the transit-poor neighborhood (the B4 and X28), and cut weekday hours on a third (B16). So unsurprisingly, members of the Dyker Heights Civic Association signed not one, but two petitions aimed at staving off service cuts. (YourNabe.com)

I went through the MTA’s comprehensive list of proposed cuts and listed the ones that affect South Brooklyn below. These changes are scheduled to go into effect in July.

Read more »

…likely going to be Zamperla, an Italian ride manufacturer that also happens to run the Victorian Gardens amusement park in Central Park. The City is currently negotiating an agreement and hopes to have a signed contract as early as next week. (NY Times)

Councilman Domenic M. Recchia, whose district includes Coney Island, said that Zamperla had submitted a creative proposal that set it apart from the other bidders. “You’ll love it,” he said, declining to give details. “We’ll have what the bigger amusement parks have, on a smaller scale.”

Meanwhile, Carol Albert declined to submit a bid for an Astroland return to the City, and has put the For Sale sign back on her rides. (Brooklyn Paper, CIUSA message board)

“Reluctantly, we pulled out at the last minute because we could not possibly put [a proposal] together in the six weeks that the [EDC] required,” said Albert, who sold her land to Sitt in 2006 and ran her park as a renter until 2008. “But Zamperla will provide great rides and a beautiful experience like they did with Victorian Gardens.”

In fact, pretty much everyone seems happy with this development. They certainly seem to have their act together, and I sure hope Zamperla can live up to all of this high praise. Even though I should know better, there’s just no way I’ll be able to guard my optimism this time.

Guess we’ll find out for sure on Memorial Day Weekend.

Update [8:32 PM]: I just wanted to mention, while NY1 is largely credited with breaking the story with sources inside the NYCEDC (um, newspapers, asleep at the switch much, losing out to the Robin Scherbatsky network?), Tricia over at Amusing The Zillion first noted that Zamperla was expected to win a full week ago.

Happy Martin Luther King III Day! Hopefully you’re lucky enough to be celebrating the way Chris Rock wants you to celebrate – by reading Ebony Magazine by watching Soul Train by not working. If so, enjoy this week’s blogwrap! If not… Hey! Why are you reading blogs at work???

• Last year’s Coney Island rezoning, in addition to diminishing the allowable amusement park footprint and establishing the area where hotels may be built, will also allow the construction of 5,000 new residential units in 26 high-rise towers both north of and west of KeySpan Park. This was an idea Tricia touched on briefly in the comments here – now she has fleshed out some more of the details, including maps, the likely developer, and the identity of the organization that thinks Coney Island will look like Tron. (Amusing The Zillion)
• Kevin Walsh visits The Big X – the intersection of Borough Park’s diagonal streets, New Utrecht Avenue and Fort Hamilton Parkway. Um, to be fair, he actually visited this place 2-1/2 years ago, but finally posted it as a “Forgotten Slice” last week. (Forgotten NY)
• The John Strong sideshow is pitching a summer comeback to the winner of the Coney Island Sweepstakes. (Amusing The Zillion)
• Missing no parking signs, and the resultant parking, are playing havoc with garbage pickup at three dead-end streets in Gerritsen Beach. (GerritsenBeach.net)
• What part of DOH’d didn’t this Emmons Avenue restaurant understand? (Sheepshead Bites)
• Two Brooklyn communities lost Joe Rollino, aka “Kid Dundee,” a former Coney Island strongman and 104-year-old Dyker Heights resident. Rollino was struck by a car as he was crossing the street. (Kinetic Carnival, Bay Ridge Journal, Luna Park Gazette) (Can’t promise anything, but there may be a BK Southie follow up to this a little later on.)
• There might also be a BK Southie follow-up to the opposition by some members of the Sheepshead Bay community to a planned mosque in their neighborhood. Just as soon as I stop foaming at the mouth about it. (Sheepshead Bites)

True story: I was half-asleep when I wrote the last two days posts. The following are the remaining week’s stories I thought were worth repeating, yet I can’t bear another sleep-deprived night, so I’m giving you the extra-skinny version!

• The ethanol tank on a ship in Gravesend Bay ruptured on Sunday morning when it was evidently overfilled. No ethanol is reported to have leaked into the water. (Staten Island Advance)
• A heavily-polluted two-acre section of Floyd Bennett Field will be getting a $2.4 million cleanup. (NY Post)
• 38 acres of wetlands in Canarsie polluted by sewage overflow will be getting $15 million for their restoration. When complete, the restoration will include a five-acre park. (NY Post)

Beachside Neighborhood Patrol, the private security organization for Manhattan Beach, announced it would continue to provide patrols at a neighborhood association meeting last week, according to YourNabe.com. The private security service had previously announced that it would suspend its patrols on January 1 unless 150 more households in the community paid dues to the organization.

It has been stated by Beachside that only about 25% of the households in the community were contributing to the patrol (prior to the December membership push), and Sheepshead Bites took a close look at the effect on the patrol of the fissure between two rival community groups.

UPDATE [Jan-21-2010]: Sheepshead Bites has lots more on the story here.