Carnage

Eyes on the Street: SUV Flips Across Houston Street Median

A tipster sends this photo of Houston Street near the corner of Mott, early yesterday morning at around 5:00 a.m. Our source says he was awakened when an SUV speeding east on Houston plowed into an electronic construction sign, hit the median and flipped over end to end, coming to a stop on its side in the middle of the opposite side of the street.

By Noah Kazis

1:25 PM EDT on August 31, 2010

The driver of this wrecked SUV had been traveling on the other side of on Houston Street before flipping over the median, according to the tipster who sent this photo.

He saw the SUV driver crawl out from the wreck looking basically uninjured, after which the police took him into custody. The NYPD couldn’t provide us with any further information.

That the driver escaped serious injury illustrates why legislators and law enforcement should take steps to protect people outside of cars through better enforcement and tools like Hayley and Diego’s Law and Elle’s Law. With seat belts, air bags, and ever-safer metal frames, today’s cars protect drivers from their own recklessness better than ever. If this SUV had followed a different trajectory after the motorist lost control, however, any pedestrian or cyclist in the way would have been crushed.

Noah Kazis

Noah joined Streetsblog as a New York City reporter at the start of 2010. When he was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox. Before coming to Streetsblog, he blogged at TheCityFix DC and worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Toledo, Ohio. Noah graduated from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the class politics of transportation reform in New York City. He lives in Morningside Heights.

Carnage | Lower East Side | Street Safety

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