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Solution for Safer Passage on Greenwich St. Still Up in the Air The city is rethinking its announced plan to make the intersection of Duane and Greenwich Streets a safer place to cross. This past summer, the Department of Transportation’s Manhattan commissioner Luis Sanchez told Community Board 1 that by the start of this school year it hoped to widen the sidewalk on both sides of the Greenwich Street crosswalk. The sidewalk extensions, called “bulbouts,” are meant to make for faster crossing and enable pedestrians on the west side of the street to see oncoming traffic that can be obscured by unloading trucks at the nearby Food Emporium. That plan went on hold after the DOT learned that a complex network of utilities beneath the street would make the installation difficult. An interim measure, the DOT said, called for raised asphalt at the crosswalk that could be installed in one or two days. “We’re hoping to get something in there soon,” DOT spokesman Craig Chin told the Trib in August. That plan is still on the drawing board, Chin said last month. “DOT is evaluating several design alternatives in terms of layout and appropriate materials,” he said in an e-mail. Questions have been raised about the safety of the asphalting plan. Would drivers recognize the raised asphalt, similar in color to the street, as a pedestrian safety zone? “There has to be a barrier between pedestrians and oncoming traffic,” said Nelle Fortenberry, president of the Friends of Washington Market Park, a group that has long been pushing for a stoplight at the intersection. Chin would say only that barriers, such as planters or posts, are “part of the current design evaluation process.” Charles Komanoff, a Friends of Washington Market Park board member who has been active in advocating a light, called the interim option “fragile and flimsy.” “It seems like a real second best to the bulbout plan, which is a distant second best to a traffic light,” he said. Community Board 1, local elected officials and the Friends group have been advocating for a light or at least a stop sign at the intersection for years. The DOT studied traffic and pedestrian flow at the intersection earlier this year and determined that it did not meet federal guidelines for either. As for installation of the permanent bulbouts, Chin told the Trib in an e-mail, “We are investigating whether the work 1. can be added to an existing street reconstruction, 2. incorporated as part of a future project or 3. designed as a stand-alone independent project.”
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