Despite efforts to crack down on New York City’s legendary drivers, New York University and connected car company Dash discovered that residents are still speeding through the streets, and getting worse the later it gets.
NYU’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management got to peek at driving data from Dash that allowed them deeper insights into the city’s drivers than traditional research has offered.
“Traditional traffic policies are based on spot measurements that often do not show the entire picture,” Sarah M. Kaufman, assistant director of the Rudin Center, said. “However, Dash provides a platform for gathering and developing a policy around actual driver behavior, not only what is assumed and expected.”
This allowed researchers to track not only where these bad driving behaviors were concentrated, but what form they took. They determined that speeding hit the Henry Hudson Parkway/West Side Highway in Upper Manhattan through the Belt Parkway, as well as Gowanus Parkway and Brooklyn Queens Expressway the hardest. Those speeding cases only worsened the later it got, with 92 percent of night drivers 50 miles per hour streets driving above the speed limit.
Pedestrians and cyclists face the most dangerous areas in downtown and midtown Manhattan, and downtown Brooklyn, though. This is due to the sheer number of hard braking events, such as New York drivers’ tendency to quickly accelerate after things like speed bumps — which can lead to them having to brake just as quickly.
Researchers hope the report’s findings will aid city policy, lending greater insights into drivers, their environments and potential ways to penalize them — or at least, a better understanding of potential speeding hot spots.