Further Reductions in Speed Limits Planned for Lower Manhattan
The City’s Department of Transportation (DOT), which cut speed limits on local streets in Lower Manhattan in 2024, plans to reduce them further later this year. The DOT has identified five streets close to public schools where it intends to lower the legally permitted speed from 20 to 15 miles per hour. The locations are Battery Place (at P.S./I.S. 276), Warren Street (at P.S. 89 and I.S. 289), Beekman and Spruce Streets (at the entrance to the Spruce Street School), and Beaver Street (near the Lower Manhattan Community Middle School at 26 Broadway). The DOT has not announced plans for similar speed reductions in the vicinity of the Peck Slip School, P.S. 234, or P.S. 150.
DOT selected Lower Manhattan as the site of its first “regional slow zone” last autumn. This move reduced the speed limit on all roads south of Canal Street to 20 miles per hour, with the exceptions of West Street and the FDR Drive, where speeds of 30 and 40 miles per hour (respectively) are still permitted. (DOT originally sought to reduce the speed limit on West Street to 25 miles per hour, but has delayed implementation of this plan for two years, pending the completion of an overall study of safety and usability on West Street.) Since rolling out the first slow zone in Lower Manhattan, DOT has reduced speed limits at 70 targeted zones throughout the five boroughs, a total that the agency plans to increase to as many as 250 by the end of this year.
This initiative springs from “Sammy’s Law,” a 2024 statue named for 12-year-old Sammy Cohen Eckstein, who was killed by a speeding driver when chasing a soccer ball into a Brooklyn street in 2013.