u/calebpan

A 62-year-old driver was killed and his 39-year-old passenger critically injured early this morning at Ocean Parkway and Avenue S, just two blocks from where Miriam Yarimi killed Natasha Saada and her two daughters on March 29, 2025, and severely injured her young son. Brooklyn Driver Sentenced to up to Nine Years in Prison for Killing Mother and Two Daughters While Speeding Through a Red Light

According to police, an Audi A5 rear-ended a Toyota Camry, setting off a three-car crash. The Audi driver allegedly abandoned the car and fled with its license plates. Driver sought in Brooklyn crash that killed 62-year-old man.

The similarities are disturbing: the same road, two blocks apart, an Audi striking a Toyota Camry, multiple vehicles involved, and people killed with survivors critically injured.

Mamdani's administration is focusing on a broad swath of Brooklyn just south of Prospect Park for a neighborhood-level housing push that would allow taller buildings and new apartments in areas long defined by low-rise shops and small homes.

If you live, work, shop, commute through, or regularly visit these neighborhoods, this is an opportunity to tell the city what you want the future of the area to look like.

More housing? Better transit? Safer streets? More retail? Infrastructure improvements? Preservation of neighborhood character? Whatever your priorities are, now is the time to get them on the record

Fill out the city survey here:

https://forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=x2_1MoFfIk6pWxXaZlE775Fv_fzeB99JsOlgpC6JvGRUMkMzTUxKM1FVU0EwRExDTjdWS0JLUVJNUC4u&route=shorturl

For those who live, work, or visit the neighborhoods below and around south of Prospect Park, have your voice heard and fill out this survey!

• Kensington
• Prospect Park South
• Borough Park
• Ditmas Park
• Parkville
• Flatbush
• Midwood
• Mapleton

Another absolutely insane crash, and once again the language used to describe it feels completely disconnected from what actually happened.

Three teenagers aged 16, 17, and 18 years old are dead with four others severely injured and hospitalized.

As many people know, the Mamdani administration has announced a plan to rehabilitate the triple-cantilever section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Brooklyn Heights. A temporary two-level bypass would be constructed above Furman Street alongside the existing structure, allowing the triple cantilever to be taken out of service and rehabilitated while maintaining existing traffic capacity.

Construction of the temporary bypass is expected to begin in 2030. Traffic would be shifted to the bypass, and rehabilitation of the existing structure would begin around 2032. The temporary highway would then be dismantled, with the restored BQE expected to reopen by 2040.

For some perspective on the scale of the investment, the original BQE was constructed for approximately $137 million, equivalent to roughly $1.48 billion in 2026 dollars. The newly proposed BQE Central project, meanwhile, is expected to cost as much as $4 billion for the 1.5-mile city-owned portion between Atlantic Avenue and Sands Street. BQE Central represents only about 12% of the BQE corridor in Brooklyn.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, New York City is proposing to spend roughly 2.7 times the original construction cost of the entire BQE on the rehabilitation of roughly one-eighth of its length.

Imagine you bought a house that cost $500,000 in today's dollars. When it was built, it was designed to accommodate a certain amount of people and a certain amount of use. But over the decades, it gets used far more heavily and in different ways than anyone originally expected.

Maybe the house was designed for four people, but eight people ended up living there; your plumbing runs almost continuously, and the basement gets converted into living space. The electrical system carries loads it was never intended to handle, and the structure and foundation of the home experience more wear than anticipated.

For decades, you keep repairing it. You patch leaking pipes, but you can only do so much since your plumbing is continuously running. You try to add more electrical capacity, but your electrical panel can only handle so much. The floors, the stairs, and the general structure of the house experience considerably more wear than anticipated; you try to patch cracks, reinforce sections that are deteriorating and failing. At a certain point, your emergency repairs can only do so much, and you reach a point where the broader issue can no longer be ignored - you need a major rehabilitation.

You originally spent $500,000 for a new home, and now it'll cost you $1.35 million to rehabilitate it. But here is an important distinction: you're not adding more bedrooms, you're not adding more bathrooms, you're not substantially changing how many people it can accommodate, and you're not fundamentally changing what the house does. It'll be essentially the same house you started with, except you're spending more than double the original cost of the house for something that may be in slightly better condition and is not fundamentally more functional than the first day you bought it. And in about forty years, you may have to go through the same exercise again.

Here we are in 2026, and we're about to spend as much as $4 billion on a 1.5-mile section of highway that, when the work is finished, will fundamentally perform the same transportation function at roughly the same capacity it does today. It will still remain responsible for carrying an enormous volume of traffic, and 40 or 50 years from now, New York City may once again have to go through the same rigamarole.

I'm not debating the value and importance of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but I am highlighting a deeper, more fundamental question about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that I feel like more people need to be asking: Is this how we want to spend $4 billion? Do we want to spend that much money and only get more of the same?

There is a puddle at the northeast corner of Church Avenue and East 18th Street that simply refuses to go away.

Whenever we get enough rain, water pools around the crosswalk. When it snows, it turns into a giant pool of water and slush. It gets large enough that people have to maneuver around it - people vault over the puddle into a very dangerous congested roadway. For someone using a wheelchair, walker, or other mobility device, that's not just inconvenient, it's incredibly hazardous.

In February 2021, this exact location was featured by Patch in an article about some of NYC's worst slush puddles. The article even used a photo I took of the intersection.

See The City's Worst Slush Puddles — Patch (2021)

Five years later, the puddle is still here. But now there's an opportunity to fix it! The old pavement has been removed and the street appears to be awaiting resurfacing. I've contact DOT, CB14, several elected offices to fix this issue before the new asphalt goes down.

Could it be the day that the puddle goes away?

Church Avenue and East 18th Street (circa 2021)

Church Avenue and East 18th Street (circa 2025)

Church Avenue and East 18th Street (today) - Could this be it!?

Pretty typical passive, minimizing reporting of an absolutely insane act of roadway violence.

Just look at the photos and then read the language CBS uses to describe what happened.

A speeding Corvette slammed into another car, struck a pedestrian, and hit a building. The impact sent a Mercedes flying through the air. Witnesses said the Corvette had been driving recklessly for more than an hour, including doing doughnuts. The driver was arrested and charged with reckless driving and endangerment.

And somehow, in the middle of describing all of that, the article still calls it an “accident.”

We were at 444 comments in the last update. Now we’re at 519, up another 75 submissions since our last update.

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to add a comment. Whether you flagged one dangerous intersection or added several ideas, you're helping build a much clearer picture of where Central Brooklyn's streets can be better for everyone

The newest comments are continuing to identify some pretty clear problem areas:

• Flatbush Ave between Parkside Ave and Clarkson Ave: trucks blocking intersections, dollar vans interfering with buses, and unsafe pedestrian crossings.
• Flatbush Ave between Winthrop St and Parkside Ave: traffic getting stuck and drivers ignoring the bus-only signal.
• Clarkson Ave between Bedford Ave & Rogers Ave: buses getting caught in traffic.
• Clarkson Ave between Woodruff Ave & Bedford Ave: double-parking, deliveries, and service vehicles squeezing buses and residents onto an already constrained street.
• Church Ave and Caton Ave: people are starting to suggest bigger corridor-level changes rather than fixing the same problems one intersection at a time.

Now you add yours! Be creative and comment on everything! Note garbage piles, improper drainage, lack of lighting, anything that can improve people's lives in tiny ways!

https://nycdotprojects.info/project-feedback-map/feedback-map-centralbk

And if someone already reported your problem spot, add your experience anyway.

Share this with your neighbors, block association, building group chat, local Facebook/WhatsApp groups, or anyone else who walks, bikes, drives, or takes the bus through Central Brooklyn. The more people who know this map exists, the more representative the feedback becomes.

Thank you again to everyone who has contributed. Let's see if we can get 1000 comments by end of next week

I came across something pretty interesting while adding suggestions to NYC DOT’s Fast Buses: Central Brooklyn feedback map:

https://nycdotprojects.info/project-feedback-map/feedback-map-centralbk#

I started looking through some of DOT’s older work on Church Avenue and discovered that NYC DOT actually studied converting Church Avenue into a one-way street in 2013:

https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/church-ave.pdf

In February 2013, DOT proposed making Church Avenue one-way westbound between McDonald Avenue and Utica Avenue. DOT considered it one of the more ambitious options for dealing with the corridor’s chronic congestion, but ultimately decided against it because there wasn’t a suitable parallel route for eastbound traffic and because of concerns about pushing additional traffic onto streets like Linden Boulevard and Caton Avenue.

I find it fascinating that DOT considered something this ambitious and ultimately pulled back, in part because of concerns about parking and displaced traffic.

Thirteen years later, NYC DOT is once again looking at Church Avenue through the Fast Buses: Central Brooklyn project, and it made me wonder whether DOT should revisit this idea.

Church Avenue is trying to accommodate buses within a pretty constrained street. Anyone who regularly uses Church Avenue knows how quickly it turns into a mess: double and triple parking, blocked buses, conflicts at intersections, illegal U-turns, unpredictable traffic movements, dollar cabs/vans, trucks with insanely long trailers, scooters, bicycles, pedestrians, the list goes on and on.

Reviving DOT’s old plan exactly as written probably wouldn’t work, and making Church Avenue one-way wouldn’t solve everything. But it could potentially give DOT much more flexibility to organize the roadway. They could eliminate street parking, end illegal U-turns, eliminate left turns at key intersections, create dedicated loading space, and generally make traffic movements much more predictable.

But the most interesting part of DOT’s old study is actually why they rejected the idea: they didn’t have a suitable parallel street to handle traffic in the opposite direction.

So why not study Church Avenue and Caton Avenue together?

Church Avenue could operate one-way westbound while Caton Avenue operates one-way eastbound, creating a complementary one-way pair. Instead of treating the congestion, safety, and usability problems on Church and Caton as separate issues, DOT could look at the entire street network and determine whether the two corridors can be redesigned to work together.

A Church/Caton one-way pair could potentially simplify intersections, reduce turning conflicts, eliminate U-turns, make room for bus priority and loading zones, and create a much more predictable street environment for pedestrians, buses, cyclists, and drivers alike.

It would obviously require a detailed traffic study, and there would be tradeoffs. But DOT’s own reason for rejecting the 2013 proposal was due to the lack of a suitable eastbound counterpart. This exactly why I think Caton Avenue should be part of the conversation this time.

There’s also a broader change in how we think about street space compared with 2013. What may have been politically difficult to contemplate then, particularly removing significant amounts of curbside parking, may be much more realistic today as the city increasingly prioritizes bus riders, pedestrians, cyclists, and safer street design over maximizing space for parked cars.

With DOT actively asking the public for ideas about how Church Avenue should change, this seems like exactly the right time to revisit ambitious ideas like this rather than limiting the discussion to small tweaks to the existing street.

If you use or cross Church Avenue regularly, this is a really good time to put your experiences and suggestions on DOT’s map. I’d also encourage people to look through NYC DOT’s February 2013 Church Avenue study, particularly its discussion of converting Church Avenue to one-way operation, when submitting feedback.

https://nycdotprojects.info/project-feedback-map/feedback-map-centralbk#

Church Avenue and East 18th Street - CitiBike Dock is Gone!

Can anyone tell me where I can follow up with this? Looks like the whole dock was yanked out earlier today (August 10th 2026)

We’re up to 444 comments. 124 more since Update #2!

• Triangle at Bergen St, Bedford Ave, Rogers Ave (Grant Gore Monument) people are calling out the confusing mix of two-way traffic, buses and bike lanes and asking for pedestrian-safety improvements.
• Bedford Ave between Sterling Pl and St Johns Pl: support for extending the Bedford bike lane to Eastern Parkway and improving the B49.
• Rogers Ave between Prospect Place and Park Place: requests for trees, shade and better bus stops.
• Utica Ave and Atlantic Ave: serious concerns about how dangerous Atlantic Avenue is to cross, especially for families, kids and seniors.
• Flatbush Ave and Empire Blvd: more calls to finally complete the protected bike connection.
• Lincoln Rd between Ocean Ave and Flatbush Ave: reports of aggressive drivers using the oncoming lane to get around traffic and turn onto Flatbush.
• Lefferts Ave between Flatbush Ave and Washington Ave: drivers turning into crosswalks too fast and poor pedestrian visibility.
• Flatbush Ave between Midwood Street and Beekman Pl: potholes creating hazards for cyclists.

You know that intersection where you have to look over your shoulder three times before crossing? The bus stop that's always blocked? The street where cars fly through? The bike lane that suddenly disappears?

Put it on the map.

https://nycdotprojects.info/project-feedback-map/feedback-map-centralbk

If someone already commented about your problem spot, add your experience anyway! The more people that report problems, the more attention it will get.

There are now 320 comments on NYC DOT's Central Brooklyn feedback map, up from 268 from the last update! A lot of people are using it and some patterns are becoming increasingly obvious.

A lot of the feedback continues to concentrate around places many of us already know are a mess: Church Ave, Flatbush Ave, the southeast side of Prospect Park, Parkside Ave, Ocean Ave and Utica Ave.

More recent comments are calling out things like:

• the mess around Flatbush/Parkside, including dangerous pedestrian conditions, double parking, trucks, dollar vans and B41 buses getting stuck in traffic
• Utica/Eastern Parkway, where the B46/B46-SBS gets caught in traffic and blocked by private vehicles and dollar vans
• speeding, illegal parking and poor pedestrian conditions on neighborhood streets surrounding the major corridors

What I think is useful about this map is that the more comments it gets, the easier it becomes to see where the same problems keep coming up.

https://nycdotprojects.info/project-feedback-map/feedback-map-centralbk

And don't avoid a location just because someone else already mentioned it. If you experience the same problem, add your own experience.!

Let's keep filling this thing out!

I've posted this before, but I’m sharing it again because the NYC DOT feedback map is still open and many of Central Brooklyn’s most dangerous and frustrating streets still need more attention.

The comments already submitted show several recurring problem areas, including:

• Church Avenue, Ocean Avenue and Caton Avenue
• The southeast corner of Prospect Park
• Tilden Avenue and Regent Place
• Flatbush Avenue near Glenwood Road and the Junction
• Bedford Avenue, Farragut Road and Glenwood Road
• Utica Avenue around Eastern Parkway and Empire Boulevard

People have reported dangerous crossings, double-parking, blocked bus and bike lanes, speeding, flooding, poor signal timing and intersections that simply do not work.

Please add the streets and intersections that frustrate you or make you feel unsafe:

https://nycdotprojects.info/project-feedback-map/feedback-map-centralbk

Even if someone has already reported the same location, add your own comment. Multiple reports help show NYC DOT that these are persistent problems affecting many people.

A Brooklyn livery cab driver was shot in the face after a minor fender-bender led to an argument. While most outlets report on this as another isolated act of violence, it also highlights an issue that receives far less attention than the crashes, pollution, congestion, and traffic deaths caused by motor vehicles: streets built around cars routinely create the conditions for hostile confrontations.

An otherwise inconsequential disagreement can quickly become intensely personal and, in the worst cases, result in a form of violence unique to an environment built around cars. Most of these encounters end with yelling, and many end with nothing at all. But the environment continually creates opportunities for intimidation, assault and, in the worst cases, lethal violence.

In the past three months, there have been four prominent road rage incidents in New York:

July 8th 2026: Bedford-Stuyvesant; Two drivers in a road-rage incident crashed into each other, a pedestrian and a building, injuring three people: https://abc7ny.com/post/multi-car-crash-crown-heights-brooklyn-sends-vehicle-building-injuring-3-including-pedestrian/19468959/

July 14th 2026: East-Village; A dispute over a parking space escalated into a fight resulting in the driver hospitalized with a head injury: https://nypost.com/2026/07/18/us-news/skateboarder-mercedes-driver-battled-over-prime-nyc-parking-spot-in-wild-video-police/

July 23rd 2026: College Point; A collision and an argument ended with a driver attacking someone with a meat cleaver, causing wounds to the head, arms, and chest: https://abc7ny.com/post/man-attacked-meat-cleaver-during-suspected-road-rage-incident-queens-search-attacker-continues/19562145/

July 24th 2026: Fort Greene: A minor fender results in a livery cab driver getting shot in the face: https://www.nydailynews.com/2026/07/24/nypd-brooklyn-livery-cab-driver-shot-in-face-following-fender-bender-nyc/

EDIT:

July 26th 2026: Belt Parkway, Exit 21B Farmers' Boulevard: A man dies after being attacked by someone with a bat. https://pix11.com/news/local-news/man-dies-after-being-struck-in-the-head-on-belt-parkway-in-nyc/

NYC DOT is asking residents to identify transportation problems across Central Brooklyn. This is a real opportunity to document the places where buses get stuck, drivers block intersections, pedestrians feel unsafe, sidewalks become impassable, and flooding repeatedly affects the street. This is the time and place where we as residents of Flatbush can highlight all the issues that affect our ability to get around quickly and safely, and improve the limited valuable space that we have.

Please be specific when leaving feedback. Instead of writing only “traffic is bad,” identify the intersection, time of day, bus route, recurring obstruction, and the improvement you think would help.

Even if someone else has already commented on a location, add your own experience. Multiple reports can show NYC DOT that a problem is recurring and affects many people.

Please share the map with neighbors, bus riders, local businesses, block associations, pedestrians, cyclists, seniors, and people with disabilities. Flatbush needs strong participation so its problems are fully represented!

To get things started, I've highlighted some of the problem areas that many others have pointed out, as well as some general comments:

• Flatbush Avenue between Church Avenue and Caton Avenue: severe congestion, slow and unreliable buses, double parking, blocked bus stops, unsafe crossings, and a lack of safe bicycle infrastructure.
• Intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Church Avenue: heavy turning traffic, crowded sidewalks, bus delays, loading conflicts, and difficult pedestrian crossings.
• Intersection of Church Avenue and East 18th Street: recurring flooding and drainage problems that can make the curb and crosswalk difficult to use, double parked vehicles, vehicles running red lights.
• Intersection of Church Avenue and Ocean Avenue: congestion, turning conflicts, bus delays, and uncomfortable pedestrian crossings.
• Intersection of Church Avenue and Coney Island Avenue: double parking, delivery vehicles, blocked bus stops, and traffic that slows buses.
• Intersection Church Avenue and McDonald Avenue: congestion, difficult transfers, loading activity, and conflicts between buses, drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians.
• Lincoln Road between Ocean Avenue and Ocean Avenue: congestion due to bus stop, double parked vehicles
• Flatbush Avenue bus stops throughout the neighborhood: buses unable to pull fully to the curb because of parked or standing vehicles.
• Intersection of Parkside Avenue and Ocean Avenue: many conflicts between motor vehicles, confusing signaling, inaccessible crosswalk
• Intersections with faded markings, poor lighting, short crossing times, missing curb ramps, or drivers failing to yield.
• Locations that need benches, bus shelters, trees, loading zones, daylighting, protected bike lanes, or wider sidewalks.

Today is the Democratic primary, and I hope everyone gets out to vote. In a heavily Democratic area like ours, the primary is arguably more important than the general election itself. Yet the candidates at the state and federal levels are consistently disappointing and uninspiring.

I’m not here to endorse a specific candidate. How and why people vote is complicated and nuanced, and Reddit (or social media in general) is not always the most productive or healthy place to debate those decisions.

That said, I think it is important to keep the conversation going, especially around street safety and the future of our neighborhoods. We may disagree about how to get there, but most of us want the same things: cleaner and safer streets, more responsive leadership, and a better Flatbush.

Vox has a really good article on something that often gets treated as “just the cost of transportation”: road deaths.

The main point is that cars and road crashes kill around 1.19 million people globally every year, with another 20–50 million people injured, often with life-altering consequences. Road crashes are also the leading cause of death worldwide for people ages 5–29. What makes this especially striking is that more than 90% of road deaths happen in low- and middle-income countries, even though those countries have only about 60% of the world’s cars.

One detail I found especially important: global road deaths have stayed roughly flat for the last 20 years, even as the world has made huge progress on other public health problems like child mortality and AIDS. Wealthier countries, especially in Europe, have reduced road death rates substantially, but many poorer countries have seen deaths rise or remain stubbornly high.

One of the article’s strongest arguments is that road deaths are not like deaths from infectious disease. A disease only harms people; nobody is asking what “value” malaria adds to society. But cars and motorized vehicles are different: they genuinely help people move, work, deliver goods, access services, and participate in modern life. That makes road safety politically and culturally harder to address, because the danger is attached to something people also depend on.

But that reframing is exactly why the issue matters. If we treat cars as either “good” or “bad,” the conversation becomes ideological. If we treat road deaths as a systems problem, the question becomes more practical: how do we preserve the benefits of mobility while reducing the predictable deaths and injuries that come from unsafe streets, unsafe vehicles, high speeds, weak enforcement, and car-first planning?

https://forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=x2_1MoFfIk6pWxXaZlE775Fv_fzeB99JsOlgpC6JvGRUMkMzTUxKM1FVU0EwRExDTjdWS0JLUVJNUC4u&route=shorturl

For those who live, work, or visit the neighborhoods below and around south of Prospect Park, have your voice heard and fill out this survey!

• Kensington
• Prospect Park South
• Borough Park
• Ditmas Park
• Parkville
• Flatbush
• Midwood
• Mapleton