trucker smashes into New York monument to those killed by traffic accidents...

A truck crashed into a half-finished monument on south Fourth Street meant to honor those killed in traffic fatalities in New York on Saturday.

Right of Way, a group of road safety activists, had put nearly 10 hours into an art installation depicting the silhouettes and names of the 264 people killed in traffic accidents in 2014 when a truck hit one of the walls.

South Fourth Street is not a truck route. Witnesses say that the driver spent 30 minutes to an hour trying to extricate himself from the monument and the narrow street.

http://cdllife.com/2015/top-trucking-news/truck-crashes-into-monument-honoring-traffic-fatality-victims/

The back end of a tractor-trailer smashed into a wall in Williamsburg where a group of activists were installing a memorial to New Yorkers killed in traffic accidents.

The crash rattled the memorial wall where more than 40 volunteers of the transportation group Right of Way were almost pasted as they pasted silhouettes of 264 dead people on the temporary wall along Kent Avenue and S. Third Street on Saturday.

The group spent 10 hours on Saturday hanging wooden planks and then pasting on the 264 5-foot-high, 20-inch wide panels that now covers two-and-a-half sides of the full-city-block construction fence. Each silhouette reads “Killed by traffic” and has the name of the victim underneath.

The 18-wheeler sped around the corner at about 11 am, and the back left portion of the truck slammed into the wall, according to the activists. The force of the crash cracked the wall on impact. The volunteers, many of whom were perched on ladders and scaffolding, were shaken, but no one was injured.

The irony of the situation was not lost them.

The group installed the memorial to protest what they call the city’s insufficient steps taken to quell traffic deaths in the year since it instituted “Vision Zero” — the mayor’s plan to decrease the number of pedestrian fatalities to zero.

The temporary wall is wrapped around the construction site that will be one of the massive skyscrapers of Two Trees Management Co.’s Domino sugar factory project.

This all happened on the same weekend that the New York City Street Memorial Project, which installs white bike sculptures in spots where bicyclists have been killed, hosted its Ghost Bike ride across the city. The two projects are unrelated, but have many crossover members and supporters.

http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/38/17/dtg-truck-crashes-into-traffic-death-memorial-2015-04-24-bk.html

- by Be For