Oopsie: Car Accidents in Western Queens

As a disclaimer, the shot above was captured back in 2009, and it depicts a Hollywood crew dressing the set for the Angelina Jolie movie “Salt.” The sequence they were filming was located under the Queensboro Bridge, and since I was one of the Parade Marshals for the centennial parade, I made the most out of the unique vantage that a traffic free Queensboro Bridge offered.

Of course, if you live in Western Queens, sights like this are fairly common. People drive wildly around this densely trafficked area, something I’ve always chalked up to drivers being so close to their Manhattan destination.

You see A LOT of accidents around these parts, more often than not it’s just a fender bender, but sometimes… sometimes you see things that just confound…

The other day, Monday in fact, I was invited to visit the Brooklyn Navy Yard and was walking from Astoria over to the East River Ferry via Jackson Avenue.

That’s where I came across this scene, and couldn’t understand the physics of how these two cars ended up in this position. It takes a lot of energy to lift this much mass off the ground.

It should be mentioned that the driver of the gray car was still in the drivers seat, and seemed to be attempting to reverse out of this somewhat impossible position before the driver of the white pickup stopped her.

I was immediately reminded of the first shot in this post, the Hollywood setup, upon encountering this scene. Much ado and hubbub has been made recently over Mayor de Blasio’s intention to reduce the speed limit on NYC streets to 25 mph, with the intention of vouchsafing pedestrian and bicycle traffic. The shots in today’s post are part of the reason why the effort is underway.

The NYC DOT can supply statistics which show a direct correlation between the severity of an accident and the speed at which the vehicles were traveling, which is driving the effort to reduce the limit by a third.

As a note (and this is one of those little points of language which I’m obsessed with), if you are in a moving vehicle and you strike another moving “thing” it’s a collision. If your moving vehicle strikes a static object (tree, lamp post, sign etc.), it’s an allission.

That’s something picked up from the maritime world, by the way, where the distinction is quite a bit more important than it is on land.

A series of allissions is what happened to this NYPD vehicle a couple of summers ago in Astoria, when this 114th Precinct patrol car crashed into a series of parked cars on 44th Street, and eventually hit a tree, while answering a call with lights and sirens blazing. The commander of the unit (DI Stephen Cirabisi) informed me, at a later date, that the officers were injured in the crash, but both made a full recovery and returned to duty.

The vehicle lost control after hitting a series of pot holes along the irregularly graded asphalt while traveling at speed, according to my network of neighborhood moles – which is something that DOT should be working on as well.

Newtown Creek Alliance Historian Mitch Waxman lives in Astoria and blogs at Newtown Pentacle.