The new entrance at 96th St. and Broadway is one near and dear to my heart. My parents live a few blocks south of the 93rd St. side of that station, and even though I no longer live on the Upper West Side, that station will always be home to me. Over the last three years, the station had been undergoing a comprehensive renovation that saw the main entrances at 96th St. moved to a new stationhouse on the Broadway median. Unfortunately, though, now that the new entrances have been open for a few months the neighbors aren’t too happy with it.
The problem, as DNA Info’s Leslie Albrecht reported this week, is one impacting pedestrians and drivers alike, and it was one entirely foreseeable. When the MTA rebuilt the 72nd St. stationhouse, they closed off Broadway’s uptown lanes to all traffic, but at 96th St., straphangers leaving and entering the station must compete with cars zooming down Broadway and trying to access the Henry Hudson Parkway. It has become a dangerous mess.
Albrecht has more:
Pedestrians cross Broadway to reach the bustling subway stop, which serves the 1 local line as well as the 2 and 3 express lines, and like most New Yorkers they stride into the crosswalk when there seems to be a break in traffic. But those bold walkers can’t see the turn signals guiding cars, and they don’t realize they’re sometimes stepping into the path of cars turning left onto southbound Broadway from westbound West 96th Street. “The way it currently is, it’s not flowing very well at all,” said Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell, who represents the 69th District.
O’Donnell says he is so worried about unsafe conditions at the busy crossroads that he wrote a letter earlier this month to the DOT, voicing concern about “construction, timing of turn signals and general pedestrian confusion” at the intersection. O’Donnell wants DOT to run a safety inspection at the intersection…
O’Donnell says problems at the intersection are compounded by cars racing to reach the West Side Highway via West 96th Street now that the West 95th Street highway on-ramp is closed. Parents at nearby P.S. 75, at West 96th Street and West End Avenue, say they worry, too, about the onslaught of cars.
Police at the NYPD’s 24th Precinct have also asked DOT to make safety improvements at the intersection and have even gone as far as submitting a list of suggestions, including using signs to warn people leaving the subway station from a median in the middle of Broadway to watch for turning vehicles, and prohibiting left turns onto Broadway from 96th Street.
As Albrecht notes, the MTA had to cut sidewalk space to accommodate traffic on Broadway while building a stationhouse wider than median. Thus, cars are battling people for space on the avenue while, at the same time, every passenger exiting at the north end of the station comes up in the middle of the street. The sidewalk entrances that kept pedestrians safer have been shuttered as part of the renovation. It’s a perfect storm for potential accidents.
Short of closing off parts of Broadway or attempting to siphon Henry Hudson-bound traffic around to 97th St., there is no easy solution to this problem. With the 95th St. entrance to the parkway shuttered, cars need to access 96th St. to reach the Henry Hudson. Cutting a lane of traffic to save sidewalk space and make the crossings shorter would have been ideal, but that ship has sailed. Instead, traffic calming and a delayed green should solve this pesky problem.
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