Fourth Avenue Car Crash

Here was the scene on Saturday at 4th Avenue and Baltic Street across from my apartment building.  According to a person I spoke with who witnessed the incident, one of the cars ran the red light and hit the other.  Some might call this an accident, but when a driver runs a red light the consequences of that action are hardly the result of chance.

I saw one person on a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance; no word on whether it was one of the cars’ occupants or a pedestrian.

The debris was cleaned up later, but the bumper was still on the sidewalk on 4th Avenue as of Monday morning.

The other car:

When Fourth Avenue is not choked with morning rush hour traffic it’s a speedway, and for cars to sustain damage like this it’s likely that at least one of the motorists was driving faster than 30 mph.  According to CrashStat, there was a pedestrian fatality one block away near Warren Street in 2004 and too many other cyclist and pedestrian injuries in the past seven years to tally right now.  As a parent who pushes his daughter in her stroller across Fourth Avenue every day, traffic calming and pedestrian safety enhancements can not come fast enough.