NYPD & DOT Insist That Opening Streets To New Yorkers Isn't Safe Or Feasible

The NYPD and the Department of Transportation told the City Council on Friday that it wasn't feasible to open up city streets to give pedestrians and cyclists room to maintain proper social distance. Yet while the agencies acknowledged that there is a need for more public space to slow the spread of COVID-19 as the weather warms up, they conceded that they had no plans to create it.

"What I haven't heard is what are the administration's ideas? What ideas do you all have? I haven't seen anything proactive put forward," City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said during the oversight hearing, which was conducted over Zoom. "I have not heard a plan from you all. We've been talking about this for weeks, and I thought you'd come in and say we've identified x number of streets covering x number of miles where we could do this. I hope that will happen in the coming days."

Although former city officials, epidemiologists, and safe street activists have all argued that the council's plan to open up to 75 miles of streets throughout the five boroughs is achievable and necessary, DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg and NYPD Deputy Chief Michael Pilecki echoed Mayor Bill de Blasio's previous skepticism on the idea, saying it would require too much police personnel and posed too many dangers.

"Closing or restricting 75 miles of city streets is not the equivalent of a one day block party," Pilecki said, adding that Oakland's proposal of using barriers to block drivers would pose a "Catch 22," and that New Yorkers would be "lulled into a false sense of safety and false sense of complacency" on the closed streets.

"If we use movable barriers, someone must be someone present to make sure people are compliant and to move them for deliveries. If we use immovable barriers, emergency vehicles will have to be rerouted and we need people to redirect traffic."

Johnson later pointed out that Central Park only has a "tiny, small barrier to block cars," and very little NYPD presence: were drivers plowing through the park?

Pilecki admitted he was not aware of any reports of drivers disobeying the signage.

The bill's co-sponsor, Councilmember Carlina Rivera, argued that the plan should be a community-led program instead of relying on unnecessary police officers. But Pilecki countered that officers would still have to respond to 311 calls about people not wearing face coverings or not abiding by social distancing guidelines.

Trottenberg sided with the NYPD, saying it wasn't fair to try to enact Oakland's plan here. "New York City is tragically still seeing more COVID-19 fatalities every few hours than Alameda County has seen to date. Our agencies are therefore under very different strain resource-wise, and we also have to be far more cautious about enforcing social distancing in the public spaces we create," Trottenberg said.

She added, "we do want to work with the council to find ways, given our current resource constraints, to create more miles of open space for pedestrians and cyclists while not causing crowding that requires additional NYPD enforcement or significant disruptions to emergency vehicles, trucks or mass transit."

Yet Trottenberg or the NYPD never adequately explained how dense cities like Milan, which have been hit just as hard by COVID-19, have managed to create their own open streets plans, while New York City cannot.

Johnson wondered whether the DOT was "letting the perfect become the enemy of the good."

"It sounds like you’re setting a bar that is so high it’s impossible to clear...Other cities are doing this. Is NYC so different that we can't apply any lessons here?" Johnson said.

Trottenberg responded, "I don't believe that, but we are different in the U.S. in terms of the severity of the coronavirus.”

The DOT Commissioner also noted that there have been no pedestrian deaths on the road in over 40 days, which is the longest period without a pedestrian fatality since NYC started keeping records.

But there has been an increase in drivers speeding recklessly as the streets have emptied out, and she lacks “confidence” that NYPD can “put up a sawhorse and trust drivers not to just run through it."

Mayor de Blasio was also asked about the council's safe streets plan on Brian Lehrer today, and he said he was open to working with the city council on it, but stressed he wants to make sure whatever the city does is safe: "We have to be careful to make sure that we don't put people in a situation where they think they are safe from cars and trucks and they turn out not to be."