Parents and Advocates Renew Calls for Traffic Safety Measures at FiDi School
Concerned parents and community leaders are pushing for better traffic safety measures at P.S. 150 on Trinity Place in the Financial District, starting with speed limits and crossing guards. Stacey Burt, president of the P.S. 150 Parent Teacher Association, says, “there’s nothing that indicates there’s a school here. In the morning, the [transit] buses go barreling past. There are so many buses, so many people. It’s so busy, it’s scary. The vice principal and the principal and some teachers stand out here telling cars to stop so they can get the kids off the [school] bus.”
“You’ve got kids as young as two out here,” Ms. Burt continues. “No one wants it to happen, but we are waiting for the day when a kid darts out.” Signage on Trinity Place indicating the presence of small children, along with a reduced speed limit, would make a significant difference. “Even just letting drivers know there’s a school here would be huge,” she says.
P.S. 150 parent Leonor Vivona calls the situation “critical and dangerous,” noting that “the safety of our children and community are at serious risk due to a combination of factors that require immediate action. The heavy traffic, combined with high speeds, creates a perilous environment for children, parents, and school staff who must cross the street multiple times a day.”
“To make matters worse,” she continues, “there are multiple construction sites in the area. These generate a constant flow of large trucks and equipment, further increasing the danger. There are no crossing guards to assist students and families at key intersections, and I have observed on many occasions that there are no construction flaggers to direct traffic and pedestrians safely around the work zones.”
Ms. Vivona recently wrote to a group of elected officials representing Lower Manhattan, urging that crossing guards, construction flaggers, and police officers all be assigned to the area around P.S. 150, while also calling upon the City’s Department of Transportation (DOT) to conduct a traffic study “to assess the need for additional traffic calming measures, such as speed bumps or a lower speed limit, and to enforce existing regulations.”
These calls are being echoed by Community Board 1, which, in its recent annual statement of District Needs and Budget Priorities, said, “P.S. 150 lacks adequate outdoor gathering space and a safe place designated for buses to stop and let children on and off. Funds are needed to complete the Edgar Street project to close a lane and create an expanded sidewalk or pedestrian area on the south side of the school. Planning and approval of the needed bus stops are also requested that will accommodate the children before and after school.” DOT’s official reply to this request was, “agency does not support and cannot accommodate.”
For years, P.S. 150 leadership has tried to implement an Open Streets program on the north side of Edgar Street on weekdays throughout the school year, to close the block so that children can safely get on and off a parked school bus. The DOT’s Open Streets enables schools to use the street in front of their building “to offer safe outdoor spaces as a versatile venue for recess, outdoor learning, lunch, assemblies, graduations, and safe pick-ups and drop-offs,” according to the agency.
“We were approved once, when we first moved here, but the DOT has denied it every year since,” Ms. Burt says. “It’s been frustrating. It’s unsafe to ask the kids to get on the bus around the corner or across the street.”
The proposal to convert the north side of Edgar Street into a plaza represented a compromise relative to CB1’s original position (dating from 2016), which sought to have both sides of the block-long street that connects Greenwich Street to Trinity Place converted into pedestrian space. That plan would have delivered a significant, additional benefit for P.S. 150 and the community, as it would have connected Elizabeth H. Berger Plaza safely to the school, and made it possible for children to get to the small park without crossing a street. This original vision was scuttled by the need for police, fire, and emergency medical vehicles to be able to move between Greenwich Street and Trinity Place, and also because closing Edgar Street entirely would have turned Greenwich Street (south of Rector Street) into a dead end, with no room for vehicles that entered to turn around and exit.
The delay in closing the north side of Edgar Street may be attributable in part to a procedural requirement that a traffic study must be conducted to gauge its impact. In 2017, CB1 urged the DOT or the School Construction Authority to conduct a study to enable the closure of the north side Edgar Street – but almost a decade later, that study has not been conducted.
In 2024, a team of fourth-graders at P.S. 150 took matters into their own hands and studied vehicle and pedestrian movement at the intersection of Edgar Street and Trinity Place. They discovered that the majority of people who traverse the intersection use what traffic engineers call a “desire line” – an easement that appears quickest and most convenient to pedestrians, but is not a legal crossing, often because it is unsafe. At the intersection of Edgar and Trinity, the desire line is a direct passage from Exchange Alley to the front door of P.S. 150, on the north side of Edgar Street. But DOT has never painted a crosswalk here, in part because the east side of Trinity Place at this location contains a loading zone.
In the wake of the 2024 traffic study conducted by P.S. 150 students, CB1 enacted a resolution urging the DOT “to study the ways that people walk to/from P.S. 150 across Trinity Place from the east and across Greenwich Street from the west and create a street redesign plan that would calm traffic and allow all pedestrians to safely walk to the entrance of P.S. 150 using the most convenient and ADA compliant route.”