Conference on the Well-Being of Asian American Senior Citizens – Session 2A

[Hiroko Karan] – Good afternoon, this is Breakout Session 2A, Safe Routers for Senior Elder Districts. We have with us three panelists, Karla Quintero from Transportation Alternatives; Margaret Chin, Deputy Director of Asian Americans for Equality; and Captain Michael Lau from the 5^th Precinct of the NYPD. Our first panelist, Karla Quintero, is the Outreach Director for the Safe Routes for Seniors campaign at Transportation Alternatives, a leading local bicycle, pedestrian, and transportation reform group in the United States. Over the last three years, her work has raised the consciousness of pedestrian safety issues for seniors and people with disabilities in northern Manhattan with elected officials. In this session, Karla will discuss the uniqueness of reducing senior pedestrian injuries and fatalities in Chinatown.

 

[Karla Quintero] – Before I start, I just want to thank my colleague, Amy Blackburn, who worked together with me on senior pedestrian safety issues at Transportation Alternatives, and so, I can’t take all the credit for the wonderful work being done. In my presentation, I just want to build a little bit more on what was presented today by Paul White on Asian American Elderly Pedestrians Risks, specifically in Chinatown, to actually improve safety and comfort for senior pedestrians through the establishment of what we call an Elder District.

 

Before I go any further, I just want to talk a little bit about why Chinatown is such a good area to focus on for improving pedestrian safety. One of the things mentioned has been the demographics. There’s an extremely high concentration of elderly residents in Chinatown. If you look at the Census tracks, pretty much over 20% of the population are 60+. The Department for the Aging has said that by 2030, about 23% of the population in New York City will be 60 and over. And so, people in New York City are getting older and especially in Chinatown as we heard today. This segment of the population is rapidly increasing. Seniors demand a higher level of pedestrian safety in order to feel comfortable while walking.

 

Chinatown has an extremely high pedestrian volume. Amy and I went out and did pedestrian counts on some of the busiest intersections along Canal and Bowery Street. Just within a fifteen minute period, for example, only counting two lights at the intersection, about half of the intersection, we counted 700 pedestrians. That’s really a lot of people, and somewhat similar to some of the volumes that you see in Times Square. If you’re wondering why so many people are walking in Chinatown, it’s pretty simple. There are a lot of outdoor commercial activities. As Paul mentioned earlier in his presentation, the streets were laid out in the 18^th Century, before articulated buses, trucks, and cars. They were made and designed for walking.

 

In addition, Chinatown has an extremely a high volume of senior pedestrians at these busy intersections where we counted 700 pedestrians within a fifteen minute period. At least a hundred of those pedestrians were seniors, if not more. It’s been said over and over again, that the senior population in Chinatown is extremely active. They walk everywhere they need to go, to the senior centers, shopping, and to the park. The streets are really small, so it is really comfortable for seniors to get around in the community. There are exceptions such as the larger streets, Canal, Bowery, and Grand.

 

Chinatown has an extremely high volume of truck traffic. If you’re a truck driver and you want to get from New Jersey to the east side of Manhattan or Brooklyn, chances are you will probably go through Chinatown. You’re going to need access to the Manhattan Bridge, and you’re going to have to use Canal Street or the Bowery to access it. So, this community really does receive a disproportionate amount of through-truck-traffic. As Claire mentioned in her presentation this morning, when trucks are passing through that environment, they’re not really paying attention to what’s going on, they’re just focusing on where they need to go. And so, this does tremendously impact the level of pedestrian safety for senior citizens when you have a bunch of trucks going through, and not paying any attention.

 

If you look at a lot of the intersections in Chinatown, the geometry and the signalization is very complicated. In this Power Point presentation, you see this man who is sort of waiting in the middle of what is a very large complicated intersection with high vehicular volume. He seems to think that the stripes that are on the ground is a dedicated place for him to wait, but we all know that’s not necessarily true. Even though when both pedestrian and driver are confused, it’s a lot more dangerous for a pedestrian that because they’re more vulnerable in traffic.

 

This is something that’s very common in Chinatown. We often see crosswalks and sidewalks that are blocked. If you look at some of the busiest intersections along Canal Street and just observe them for a couple of minutes, you’ll see that pedestrians have to make a very difficult choice. They either have to wait close to eight seconds until the crosswalk is clear from all the vehicles that are backed up, or they have to make a decision to weave through dangerous traffic in order to get across the streets. These two for example, they have the right of way, but at the same time they have to compete with all this traffic. Drivers aren’t really paying attention to pedestrians while trying to vacate the intersection because there’s all these honking and commotion going on. It really creates a very dangerous situation.

 

As I mentioned before, Transportation Alternatives did a study and found that there were 115 vehicles within a one-hour period, parked illegally within a five square block area in Chinatown. This is a huge safety issue for senior pedestrians, particularly because volumes on some of these streets are so high, that they can’t really compete with other pedestrians that are trying to use the streets. If you go on Catherine Street for example, you will see a lot of seniors that are in wheelchairs or have canes, walking along the side of parked cars and moving traffic. It’s really dangerous. A Daily News article was published about a man who had to walk out into the intersection because there’s an illegally parked car in the crosswalk right in front of the curb cut.

 

Safety in numbers is something you see a lot in Chinatown. Busy intersections are safe when there are seven hundred people that are crossing it, because the guy driving a SUV is not going to run over seven hundred people. But what happens when there’s only one person trying to get across the street? Here in this slide, we have a man trying to get across the street. He has the light, and yet is forced to yield to this vehicle.

 

Chinatown also has a very high rate of senior pedestrian injuries and fatalities. It’s probably the highest rate in all of Manhattan between the periods of 1995 to 2001. Seniors account for 20.7% of all pedestrian injuries and fatalities in Chinatown. There were 232 seniors that were killed or injured in traffic during that period. In addition, three of the most dangerous intersections for seniors are within this neighborhood. They’re the intersection at Mott and Canal Street, Bowery and Canal Street, and I believe the third is Bowery and Bayard Street or Bowery Street and Grand Street. Why are elderly pedestrians more than likely to be killed by an automobile? We always cite three reasons. First is because of sensory changes as people age. Watch an older person try to get across the street. It really takes them a longer time to figure out what’s going on and actually start to cross. Second is because they’re less likely than a younger person to survive the trauma of a crash. Third is because the streets are too hard for them to cross. A lot of people think that redesigning the streets is a very complicated and costly process, but that isn’t necessarily the case. We will discuss later a little more about really small inexpensive modifications that we can make to the streets, that can really make a big difference. For example, a curb cut was mentioned. Something as basic as an inexpensive curb cut can really make a difference for somebody in a wheelchair to be able to get across the street and access different areas of the neighborhood.

 

About three years ago, we started working on a program called, “Safe Routes for Seniors,” and received funding from the New York State Department of Health to work in Northern Manhattan with seniors, to redesign dangerous intersections and corridors for walking. We get to work with seniors and really understand what it means to design streets specifically with the needs of seniors in mind. We learned that there are four improvements that we can implement right now at a very low cost at every intersection to significantly reduce the rate of injuries and fatalities among seniors on city streets.

 

The first is adjusting the walking time to 2.5 feet per second. Seniors walk at an average rate of 2.5 feet per second, but most lights in the city are timed at a rate of 4 feet per second. If we adjust the lights to actually accommodate this walking speed, it will be a lot safer and more comfortable for seniors. Fortunately in Chinatown, the issue isn’t that the seniors don’t have enough time to get across the streets, but rather when its their turn to cross the streets. Often times the crosswalks are blocked by either cars that are backed up in the intersection or illegally parked in front. Something else that would really work well in Chinatown is creating what we call a Leading Pedestrians Interval (LPI). This simply means dedicating 5 to 7 seconds at the beginning of the base, so that pedestrians can walk exclusively before turning vehicles get the green light. Another is general maintenance, by making sure that all streets are clean, that there are no potholes, cracks, and trip hazards in the crosswalks or on the sidewalks. I know a lot of people complain about the conditions of the sidewalks on Canal Street, but pretty much throughout all of Chinatown, the crosswalks and sidewalks are in decent condition. Last, making sure that every curb cut is installed per the American Disability Act’s specifications, and that every intersection has an adequate curb cut ramp.

 

There are some areas, however, in a neighborhood that either should function differently or requires additional improvements to actually make them safe enough for seniors. To do that, we’ve developed the concept of an “Elder District.” Just so you can get a better sense, the corner of Mulberry at Bayard Street is where there’s a senior center. There’s also a park in a different corner, with a huge amount of seniors congregating in this area. And so, the way we would treat this intersection in terms of designing it and evaluating it for safety, should be significantly different from the way we look at Mott and Canal Street. And so, an “Elder District” would be a designation, much like a school zone. Areas around schools get special crosswalks and signs to indicate that you are entering a school zone. Once you’re in a school zone, drivers are required to reduce speeds to 15 to 20 miles per hour, and also yield to pedestrians. The reduced speeds are achieved either through signage or through the implementation of speed reducers such as speed humps.

 

An Elder District is more complicated to implement just because it’s not everywhere like schools are. So how would you designate an Elder District? Well, anything can be really an Elder District. An area where there’s a high concentration of senior residences is a good example for an area that would potentially require a higher standard of pedestrian safety. Maybe an area where there’s a high rate of senior pedestrian injuries and fatalities an area where there are land uses that attract a huge amount of seniors, or parks, or even an area where a community gets together and decides they want to make this area safe for senior citizens and want to provide a higher level of pedestrian safety within this area.

 

In our research, we wondered what an Elder District look like in Chinatown. We actually followed seniors to where they went, and noted where they needed additional improvements. And so, this is a naturally emerging Elder District. There are a lot of seniors living down at Knickerbocker Village and around housing complexes that surround Catherine Street. Virtually all of them walk up Catherine Street to access the market. They have to cross East Broadway and Catherine Street, and congregate at Chatham Square where there are benches. If they wanted to go over to the senior center, they would need to cross Bowery Street, or sometimes walk up Mott Street to get to the senior center which is on Mulberry and Bayard Street. There are lots of seniors that also live around Confucius Plaza, and they have to cross at Bowery and Bayard Street to get to the senior center or the park. So this is our map if an Elder District for Chinatown.

 

In addition to some of the issues and problems, we really want to focus on protecting pedestrians from fast turning vehicles, as well as reducing the blockage of crosswalks and sidewalks. We want to make sure that they have enough time to cross the street, usually the result of blocked crosswalks and sidewalks. We also want to make sure that they have enough safe and comfortable places to wait. Catherine and Madison Street, happens to be one of the more dangerous intersections in the neighborhood for seniors. If you go there and just cross it, you don’t really get a good sense of why it’s dangerous. But once you stand there for fifteen minutes, you’ll start to understand that there are a lot of seniors that live on southern side of Madison Street that have to cross in order to get to East Broadway and Catherine Street to do their shopping or get to other parts of the community. Both of these streets dramatically changed in width at the intersection. At Catherine Street, the width increased from 23 feet to about 60 feet, and so, with this dramatic increase of width comes a lot of speeding.

 

There are a couple of things that we can do to actually reduce speeds and keep seniors safer. Most of these things were mentioned in General Session 3 this morning. Something very simple that we can do to reduce speeds is to narrow the streets or channelize the traffic, and there are a couple ways to do that. One is adding diagonal parking, which is virtually inexpensive. You can put up just signage or put up striping, to use up some of this excess width to reduce speeding.

 

Something that is a little more costly, and still pretty inexpensive, is just adding a little median at the intersection. It’s nice because it creates a safe place for people to wait. It doesn’t take care of the excess width after the intersection, but at least it slows vehicles down at the point where people are crossing. We can also paint a bicycle lane with a bumper. If you don’t want to create a bicycle lane and just want to use striping, drivers usually like striping. They like to be told where they need to go, and so, this is also a good way to remove some of that excess width which induces speeding.

 

We want to protect pedestrians within our elderly district from fast turning cars that don’t yield, particularly some of the larger streets along Canal Street and Bowery. All of those intersections, you wind up seeing cars not yielding to pedestrians, also at Catherine Street and East Broadway. Here are some of the things that we can do that are also virtually free. One is installing a LPI so that pedestrians can establish themselves into any intersections before turning vehicles can get the green, or before any vehicles can move for that matter. There’s an intersection at 23^rd Street and Sixth Avenue where the Department of Transportation has installed the LPI. You get a good eight seconds to actually start walking before the vehicles coming down Sixth Avenue start turning. If you’ve been there before the LPI, you know that a lot of time the turning traffic tries to compete with the pedestrian traffic and tries to cut them off before they actually start crossing.

 

Something else we can do is called a Pedestrian Scramble. It’s quite successful in Oakland, California’s Chinatown. Essentially you are separating the pedestrian phase from the vehicle phase. At the beginning of the pedestrian phase, pedestrians get about 40 seconds to get across the intersection. You can see that it’s striped so that people can cross in the traditional way, or they can also cross diagonally. It reduced pedestrian/vehicle collisions by about 40%. However, it’s something that won’t work everywhere, but could work really well somewhere like Catharine Street and East Broadway, where there’s a really high volume of pedestrians and a medium volume of traffic. If you watch people, they’re forced to wait 8 to 11 seconds when there’s no traffic, and you start to see them to start crossing against the light because there’s a high volume of pedestrians. This would be a good area to potentially pilot something like this.

 

Again, there’s this ubiquitous issue of blocked crosswalks and sidewalks. Sidewalks and crosswalks are not only blocked by illegally parked vehicles, but they’re also blocked by articulated buses. The MTA bus stops were placed way before articulated buses existed, and so you wind up seeing the tail end of the articulated buses just sticking out into the crosswalk, and people having to walk out into the intersections to get across the street. One solution for this would be to move the bus stops further away from the intersection. This is pretty self-explanatory, although now the intersections are probably blocked by newsstands.

 

Another solution is to fine or tow illegally parked vehicles. We’ve been working with the community to do advocacy around this illegal parking issue, particularly sidewalk parking by municipal employees. We’re happy to know that Mayor Bloomberg and the 5^th Precinct have been doing a lot lately to actually crack down on this issue.

 

Another solution would be to install bollards along the sidewalk. Bollards are very inexpensive and come in many shapes, sizes, and forms. They cost about three hundred dollars each. You can install them along the sidewalk, and in addition, prevent cars from jumping onto the curb when parking.

Of course, installing a LPI is also a good solution for unblocking crosswalks in particular. Even though the crosswalk might be blocked for this initial 8 seconds, it gives the vehicles an additional 8 seconds to clear and actually get out of the crosswalks. And so, at least people have more time to get across the street.

 

Removing parking spots closest to the curb by extending it is something that was also mentioned before. This would work really well on the larger streets like Canal Street and Bowery, where there’s already a high volume of pedestrians that are congregating at the corners and waiting to cross. It also provides more visibility for oncoming traffic, so they can actually see pedestrians a little bit better.

 

Finally, there’s an issue of not having enough safe places to wait. So what can we do? We can take stripe medians, which exist all along Bowery Street for example, and raise them, add median tips and bollards. Bollards are inexpensive, but it costs about ten thousand dollars to add the median, and one thousand dollars to add the median tip. Despite the cost, this is really good. It provides a safe place for people to wait, and it protects them from vehicles that are turning.

 

Just to conclude, I want to thank the 5th Precinct for all the work that they’re doing to actually improve pedestrian safety by towing cars that are illegally parked on the sidewalk. Also I want to thank Mayor Bloomberg, and also urge him to do a little bit more, such as installing curb extensions, bollards, changing some of the signal times, adding LPI to really protect seniors pedestrians on some of the large streets where they have the most trouble. So it takes about two minutes, you can just fill one out and send it out. Thank You!

 

[Hiroko Karan] – Thank you, Karla! It was very interesting. I was talking to Prof. McKnight earlier about how in Tokyo, Japan, they already have some solutions like what Karla has discussed. By making narrower streets for cars, wider sidewalks for pedestrians, and intersections with diagonal crosswalks. So I’m glad to hear some of these ideas are coming into crowded cities like New York.

 

Our next speaker is Margaret Chin, Deputy Executive Director of Asian American for Equality. She has over 25 years of experience working in the Asian Community in the field of education, housing, advocacy, and accessing equal opportunity for all people of color. Margaret will first respond to Karla’s presentation and then present on an aspect of the community.

 

[Margaret Chin] – Thank you. I’m really looking forward to have some discussion about what Karla presented, especially the whole Elder District concept. Some of the remarks that I want to make is about my own personal experience working in Chinatown, and some of the difficulties of pedestrians trying to cross the streets. I think what’s good for the seniors is good for us too. One of the main points that I really want to get at is for our community, especially seniors that we really have to do a massive education campaign on pedestrian safety on how to cross, and also how to advocate for their rights to have a say in their own community. We work with a lot of seniors on a day to day basis, and lot of time we bring them down to City Hall to rally and to testify.

 

I think a lot of the areas in Chinatown highlighted in Karla’s presentation gave a challenge to navigate through. When we were doing the Rebuild Chinatown Initiative and we looked at East Broadway, one of the suggestions that we made was a mid-block crossing. This way, we could prevent people from jaywalking, and provide another safe way for people to cross from one side to the other. The concept Karla raised about cars turning is really a dangerous situation for seniors and for all of us. When they turn, they don’t care if you’re crossing, they just come right at you.

 

The concept that you have where pedestrians come first, the city doesn’t really have that. One of the cross sections on Canal and Centre Street allow cars to turn first, and sometimes people don’t realize it, so they start crossing because the other cars on the other side of the street stops. They assume they can cross, and meanwhile cars are coming at them.

 

The other intersection that comes in mind is by our office on Pike Street and East Broadway, which is a huge street where MTA and tour buses turn. There was one fatality recently right in front of our office. This is an area where also lots of seniors have problems crossing because the street is so wide.

 

Going back to mid-block crossing, some of the area Karla spoke about had high volumes of pedestrians. Why can’t we look at some of those streets, such as Bowery and Canal Street, and see whether we can do a mid-block crossing there, instead of crossing at the corner of Bowery and Canal where truck traffic is coming off from the bridge and turning down Bowery? So, we can also look at that.

 

Lastly, the point I want to make is that it’s very dark at night at all intersections along Canal, whether you cross at Mott, Mulberry or Elizabeth Street. Some of the street lights aren’t there, only traffic lights. So at night, seniors, like the group that performed this afternoon, go to a lot of parties, and have to cross that street going home because restaurants are on the north side of Canal Street. Going home at night is very difficult for people crossing that street.

 

We’re really looking forward to working with Transportation Alternatives to try to help create this Elder District so that our seniors are protected. I’m a board member of the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corporation, where we’re also looking at traffic patterns and issues. Community education is also a major key component. Thank you.

 

[Hiroko Karan] – Thank you Margaret. Our third panelist is Michael Lau. He grew up in Chinatown, and served on the police force for 20 years. Since January, 2006, he serves as the Commanding Officer at the 5^th Precinct of the NYPD. He has a lot of statistics and information about the Asian community and also traffic issues. So, without further a due, Michael.

 

[Michael Lau] –Since January, I’ve been the Commanding Officer of the 5^th Precinct, and what’s funny is that some of these things that we’re talking about today, I experienced them 18, 19 years ago. My parents are actually two little seniors that follow the route that Karla mentioned. They don’t like Catherine and Madison Street, because the projects are on one side, and the bus stop is right at the corner. They like East Broadway a little better.

 

I’ll just start with a couple of stats. As of Monday, we’re actually down by 1% in total accidents, and for pedestrian accidents we’re down about 6%. When we break it down in regards to pedestrian accidents, Whites make up about 27%; Blacks, 5%; Asians, 55%; and Hispanics, 12% of the pedestrians that were injured. When we look at it a little closer, out of these, thirty-one Asians that were injured crossing the streets, six were in their 60’s or 70’s, so that is about 19%. When we talk about everybody all together, it’s about 11% for seniors. We had one fatality so far this year that involved a bicyclist that was actually cutting in between streets. A couple of you mentioned crossing mid-street. Unless we have a lot of controls in place, we’d rather not do that. That was what this bicyclist was doing. He ran into a tractor trailer, right between a cab and the trailer.

 

Another thing, like Margaret said, is education. I was born in Hong Kong, so I remember years ago when I went back to Hong Kong, most of the major streets actually had railings so you couldn’t cross except at intersections. In fact, I remember seeing these neon signs, public service announcements, basically showing a pedestrian crossing midway and getting splattered by a car. Even though it was back in 1990, that image left an imprint in my mind.

 

One of the things that our department really looks into, and this before I even came to the 5^th Precinct, was the changing demographics. I want everyone here to know that we really put a lot of effort into studying the community. So from the Census numbers, we looked at the people coming in and broke down the different groups and looked at the changing demographics, the Asian population in general, because one of the things we saw from news articles was that people were getting struck by vehicles. This is a chart that we incorporated from the Census numbers and also from the Department of Aging. It shows that Manhattan is up there in regards to the Asian population, but also Queens. My last command before working at NYPD headquarters was actually the 109^th Precinct, which probably had the highest concentration of Asian.

 

We provide these charts and presentation also in Chinese at community fairs. In regards to education, we talk about tips, such as crossing only in sidewalks and watching for cars turning, which is something that I try to get my own parents to do. People assume that once they step off the curb, the whole world stops for you, including all the cars. We explain to people that they don’t see you. One of the techniques that we teach is to get eye contact when you’re in the intersection. I always told my parents to try to wear bright color clothing so they’re more visible, especially if they’re going out late in the evening. We also teach never to cross against the light, and again, never assume that drivers see you.

 

We look at this situation almost like a crime type of deal. We looked at what the problem was, which was congestion. You mentioned blocked sidewalks, people having to walk around vehicles. Karla didn’t mention some of the other safety hazards these vehicles pose including blocking fire hydrants and bus stops which cause somewhat of a dangerous condition. Starting in January as the new Commanding Officer of the precinct, we looked at who the violators were, and it turns out they were multi-agencies. It wasn’t just the police, but other city agencies. Our first step was to bring in these different agencies and speak to them. We talked to representatives from the Courts Division, Corrections, FBI, Sanitation, Federal Security, Homeland Security, and the Federal Protective Services. We brought all of these agencies together and had a series of meetings at the 5^th Precinct. Of course, not everyone attended the meeting, but we made sure that a high ranking representative from each of these agencies attended. Following the meetings, we actually agreed that safety violations at hydrants, crosswalks, and bus stops, couldn’t be tolerated. As the Commanding Officer of the 5^th Precinct, what I did was summon these vehicles regardless whether they were civil servants or not.

 

Now, I don’t want to say that this was a problem posed by government agencies only. For example, a private security company was using Mott Street as a garage for all their vehicles. Everyday, they would park five or six vans on the block and just leave it there for eight or nine hours. So, it wasn’t just city agencies we met with. We met with private companies, and instructed them that if they didn’t stop, we’d take strong enforcement actions. Following the initial meetings, we started to put out warning notices on vehicles and started contacting those agencies to speak to their representatives. Following that, we started giving summons, and then I started towing.

 

Somebody mentioned earlier today that they walked down Mott Street and saw five vehicles improperly parked. I spent about twelve hours yesterday at the precinct, and went down Mott and Bayard Street several times. At 9 o’clock, Bayard and Mott Street were totally clear, other than trucks making deliveries at the time. I don’t think we can solve these problems overnight, but it’s a work in progress. We’re making strives to improving the situation, and I think the community have been very supportive. They let me know very vocally when I make a mistake, or when there are issues. As a member of the police department, as well as members from all the other city agencies that we’ve met, everybody took very quick action when we expressed these community’s concerns. Thank you!

 

Hiroko Karan: I’d like to thank all of our panelists today for their presentations, and providing as with a better picture on how we can and are improving the streets for seniors.