Unexpectedly dangerous: These 20 one-way intersections average 1 crash every 9 months
A new report that focuses on the safety of intersections of one-way streets found a high rate of accidents in Corona, Queens; Williamsburg and Ditmas Park, Brooklyn; and on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
If you’re on the hunt for a NYC apartment and have picked out a new neighborhood to live, you’re likely checking the proximity of subways, parks, or schools. But if you walk or bike a lot, or have children, you might also want to check out the safety of its streets.
A new study from real estate data site Localize.city focused on the most dangerous one-way street intersections to see where the most pedestrians and cyclists were injured between January 2013 and January 2018.
Intersections of one-way streets, which account for 40 percent of all the intersections in the city, are quieter and have less traffic, and so have fewer overall crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists and are generally safer. However, the 20 intersections outlined in the report averaged one crash every nine months. During that same five-year period, however, the majority of one-lane intersections had no incidents that injured a pedestrian or cyclist.
“Over the past five years, nearly 8 percent of pedestrian and cyclist injuries or fatalities caused by traffic crashes occurred in single-lane intersections,” says Israel Schwartz, a data scientist at Localize.city.
There are several of these dangerous one-way intersections, which you can see in the interactive map below, in every borough except Staten Island, where one-way streets didn’t meet the survey's criteria. Some dangerous hotspots are clustered in Corona, Queens; Williamsburg and Ditmas Park, Brooklyn; and Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
For example, the intersection of 37th Avenue and 101st Street in North Corona is the most dangerous one-way intersection in the borough, Localize.city says. A 13-year-old boy was injured by a hit-and-run driver there in April 2018. There's another one-way intersection a block away. The reports shows more than a dozen cyclists and pedestrians have been injured at these two locations.
These dangerous intersection clusters also include both sides of the Williamsburg Bridge, and where Rivington Street connects to Clinton Street and Ludlow Street on the LES, a spot where 18 pedestrians and cyclists have been hurt. Two one-way intersections of Newkirk Avenue in Ditmas Park, at Rugby Road and Argyle Road, saw a total of 13 injuries over the five-year period studied by Localize.city.
Other neighborhoods with dangerous one-way intersections include Crown Heights, Boerum Hill, and Downtown Brooklyn; Concourse, Fordham, Mount Eden, and Norwood, Bronx; and Ridgewood and Jamaica, Queens.
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