Online Delivery Spike Creates Lower Manhattan Traffic Mess: CB

GREENWICH VILLAGE, MANHATTAN — A Lower Manhattan community board fed up with safety hazards caused by the hundreds of thousands of online deliveries each day wants to investigate whether new loading zones can help keep their streets clear.

Community Board 2 decided last week that they will ask the city's Department of Transportation to study curbside access in the district, specifically so that they can test out where adding loading zones might help traffic and double parking problems that have popped up in the area.

The board, which stretches from Chinatown to the West Village, says that a spike in online deliveries has made it hard for drivers and pedestrians to stay safe on the neighborhoods' streets.

"We are very concerned about the increasing incursion of e-commerce package deliveries on our streets, which cause a tremendous amount of congestion," Traffic and Transportation Committee Chair Shirley Secunda told the board. "Particularly, the amount of double parking hinders the movement of traffic and endangers pedestrians."

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Online deliveries in New York City have more than tripled in the last decade, meaning that households now receive more packages than businesses, the board said. As of last year, New York City residents were getting 1.5 million package deliveries per day.

The spike, the board said, means that delivery trucks are parking in travel lanes, causing double parking and making it difficult for other vehicles, like taxis or access-a-rides for the neighborhood's seniors, to reach the curb.

"There is not enough available curb space to accommodate this growing demand," they wrote in the resolution.

Each new loading zone could serve up to 100 households per day, members said.

They added that, on top of deliveries, it would give a designated spot for pick-ups and drop-offs of the neighborhood's seniors, disabled residents and families who need to unload baby strollers or other equipment.

The board's request specifically asks the Department of Transportation to select "test areas" for new loading zones based on community input and return to them after six months of studying the zones with the results.

It is the second request for a study of curbside access by a Manhattan community board this year. The Upper West Side's community board also asked DOT to look at their streets in February, though with a different focus than CB2.

The Lower Manhattan study would be in addition to an existing Department of Transportation program that is investigating loading zones across the five boroughs. In Community Board 2, the department is already looking at several blocks on West 15th Street and West 16th Street.

But, the board argued that this program didn't take into account which streets residents feel are the most problematic.

"These sites are solely selected by DOT rather than the community," they said. "CB2 has observed that communities are highly knowledgeable of conditions in their own locales."