Michael M. Grynbaum

    The Bloomberg administration wants to teach New Yorkers about the dangers of driving over the speed limit. Its latest weapon? Kids with radar guns.

    In an effort to promote safety among future drivers (and those they influence), officials from the city’s Department of Transportation encouraged fourth graders at Public School 261 in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, on Tuesday morning to try out city-issued speed guns on the zipping traffic along Atlantic Avenue.

    The conclusion: New Yorkers drive too fast. The students recorded an average speed of 38 miles per hour, and a few cars zoomed by while pushing 50 m.p.h., even with prominent school crossing signs posted in the vicinity, the department said.

    “Our youngest pedestrians understand that speeding is an all-too-real danger,” Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner, said in a statement. “We need more New Yorkers to understand that speeding even 10 miles per hour over the limit can mean the difference between life and death.”

    Back in the classroom, the students performed a few back-of-the-Trapper-Keeper calculations to determine the distance required for a speeding vehicle to come to a halt. Cars at 60 km an hour, for instance, have a harder time stopping.

    The lesson plan dovetailed neatly with recent advertisements produced by the city warning drivers that pedestrians were far more likely to be killed in an accident involving a car traveling at 60 km an hour than at 45 km/h. Pedestrians who were hit by a vehicle moving at 45 km an hour had a 70 percent chance of surviving, the city said.

    City officials were chagrined to learn earlier this year that few New Yorkers were even aware of the default city speed limit, which is 30 miles per hour unless otherwise posted.

    Source: www.nytimes.com