Transportation
It's Shockingly Common for New Yorkers to Blow Through Red Lights
A new study finds that one in 10 drivers do it.
If you stand at the corner of 50th Street and 7th Avenue, in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, you might notice something disturbing. At this heavily traveled intersection, swarming with people on foot, a lot of drivers aren’t obeying the most fundamental rule of the road: stopping when the light turns red.
When students from Hunter College conducted an observation of the traffic at 50th and 7th, they saw almost 30 percent of drivers running the red there. At the intersection of 88th Street and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, another spot that the students studied, a staggering 37.3 percent of drivers kept cruising after the light had turned against them.