On June 10, 2019, NYC Council Member Antonio Reynoso held a press conference alongside NYC Council Member Helen Rosenthal and safer streets advocates at City Hall addressing an incident where a motorist attempted to run over a cyclist near the Hudson River Greenway last week. Liz Gonzalez, a reporter with Barstool, witnessed the altercation and posted a video on Twitter which gained traction after it was picked up by Gothamist.
The video shows that the driver Brauley De La Rosa, a five-year veteran of the FDNY and who turned himself in at the 10th Precinct on Monday morning where he was charged with reckless endangerment and driving with a suspended license, is trying to run over the cyclist purposely. He confronted De La Rosa for running a red light, almost hitting him as well as Gonzalez. NYPD officers who arrived on the scene did not cite De La Rose and allowed him to drive off. Council Member Antonio Reynoso called on the NYPD to not only conduct a proper investigation of this particular incident but also to crack down on reckless drivers in general. “The NYPD is showing up and doing absolutely nothing about it. That action could have easily resulted in the death of an innocent person here in the City of New York.” He questioned why NYPD did not cite drivers while cyclists without bells or lights seem to pose a risk and are charged with traffic violations. “When a driver is pushing a person over with their vehicle, they are using that vehicle as a dangerous weapon. And we need to talk about what the PD should be doing in those types of cases.”
Marco Connor, Co-Deputy Director of Transportation Alternatives, added, “What we saw last week was quite literally car culture on steroids. What we saw was not only a blatant display of aggression, but it was also a display a sense of entitlement who actually should be on our streets.”
He criticized the narrow sidewalks and painted bike lanes that don’t provide enough protection for pedestrians and cyclists. “What we saw was just the tip of the iceberg. What we see every single day are more than 200 people being injured. Every 40 hours someone loses their life not just because of the aggressive type of behavior that we saw last week but also with the every single day occurrences of speeding and failure to yield.”
His organization, Transportation Alternatives together with Families for Safe Streets, are pushing for the installation of three different technologies to protect pedestrians and bicyclists with ride-of-way and don’t-block-the-box technologies, as well as bike lane enforcement cameras tracking cars parked in the bike lane.
Mary Beth Kelly of Families for Safe Streets, whose husband sustained fatal injuries when a tow truck driver failed to yield and hit her cyclist husband, wants reckless drivers to see consequences, “The domination of the automobile is something that I’ve always felt because I’m a cyclist and because I walk. We must find better ways, and we are. But if there is going to be people driving their cars that don’t have a code of how to be on the streets with people who are not as powerful as they are, as fast as they are then they are going to have face consequences.” She urged everyone to get behind the new technology that saves lives. She recalled the day of her husband’s accident and the devastating impact his death has had on her and her kids. “Think about it if that was your partner; if that was your daughter two weeks after college at the funeral of her father; a seventeen-year-old son at the funeral of his father. What that is like, to get a call ‘Come to the hospital your father has been very badly injured.’ And you watch that person die over three days.”
According to “How’s My Driving NY” the vehicle De La Rosa drove has a total of 16 parking and camera violations, 11 of those for speeding in a school zone. In June 2018, Council Member Brad Lander introduced the “Reckless Driver Accountability Act”, which would boot or impound cars that accumulate five or more red-light and speed camera violations within one year, until the owners complete a Reckless Driver Accountability Program. Lander introduced the bill after a driver with an extensive traffic violation record ran a red light in Park Slope, Brooklyn killing two young children. Under Lander’s proposed legislation, De La Rosa’s vehicle would have been booted or impounded because of six camera violations.
