get serious about vehicle terror
We’re nearly a decade into the age of Islamist terror via motor vehicle, beginning with the 2016 Bastille Day truck attack in Nice, France that killed 86 people.
New York should be hardening vulnerable public spaces. Instead, the city relies on temporary measures and good luck — leaving us little better prepared than New Orleans.
Last week’s New Year’s Bourbon Street attack, which killed 14 people, is the fault of one person: ISIS adherent Shamsud-Din Jabbar of Texas.
But vehicle terrorism is a fact of modern urban life. The New Orleans attack came two weeks after a Christmastime vehicle assault in Germany that killed five people.
We’ve had other such incidents here: In 2017, an ISIS terrorist driving a rented truck killed eight people on the Hudson River bike path on Halloween.
Earlier that year, a drug-crazed Memorial Day attacker (of hazy ideology — he got off due to insanity) killed a tourist when he plowed a car through Times Square.
Before terrorists started moving people down, we had the risk of truck bombs, like the 1993 World Trade Center attack.
Even without deadly intent, people in vehicles don’t mix with large pedestrian crowds. Just last year, an allegedly drunk driver killed four people at a July 4th barbecue downtown.
In 2001, two months after 9/11, a bad driver killed seven people on a sidewalk outside Macy’s.
No, we can’t prevent all terror attacks or other mass-casualty car and truck crashes.
But we can be smarter: We know terrorists like to target high-profile places, such as Times Square or Bourbon Street.
So in places where the city can’t practically shut down traffic — as former Mayor Rudy Giuliani did on Wall Street, permanently, after 9/11, and as Mayor Mike Bloomberg did in much of Times Square — it makes sense to separate trucks and cars from people.
That’s why everyone is asking the obvious question about New Orleans.
New Orleans knew that Bourbon Street was at risk, which is why it had previously deployed bollards to protect people strolling.
Why, then, with the bollards out of commission for replacement, did the city not block off the street and sidewalk with a garbage truck?
And why did the city, in its planned redesign of street bollards, not account for the fact that car and truck drivers could mount the sidewalk to go around them?
Seems like Big Easy ineptitude — but are we faring better?
Yes, after the 2017 Hudson River truck attack — but only after — New York installed steel bollards on the bike path.
But take a look at other high-profile targets, and New York — across two administrations, Bill de Blasio’s and Eric Adams’ — is acting like this problem might vanish overnight.
To protect walkers, 42nd Street sidewalks are littered with giant cement cubes, as is the walkway outside Trump Tower on 5th Avenue and 57th Street.
Huge cement blocks permanently constrict pedestrian access to the Columbus Circle entrance to Central Park.
At Rockefeller Center, the NYPD protects Christmas-tree visitors by deploying temporary gate-like barriers on 49th and 50th Streets — barriers that impede the pedestrian traffic they are supposed to protect.
And the city’s stance is inconsistent.
On Fifth Avenue, to give walkers more room at Christmas, the city puts metal barriers out to create a pedestrian lane in the street — but those barriers aren’t going to protect anyone from a crash.
At some parades and events, the city guards marchers and spectators with parked sanitation trucks. But at others — street fairs and “summer streets” — only flimsy metal or wooden barriers stand in the way.
It’s past time for the city to acknowledge that the need to protect people on foot from people in cars and trucks isn’t lessening.
Mayor Adams should direct a deputy to do a full-scale, street-by-street analysis.
Which avenues, streets and sidewalks, measured by pedestrian traffic and “famousness” visibility, need permanent changes, such as layers of retractable steel bollards or permanent, retractable anti-vehicle ramps embedded in the road?
Bollards and ramps can serve a dual purpose: During busy times of year, they could reserve some streets or lanes for walkers only, for all or part of the day, without cluttering pedestrian paths with chunks of cement.
Trump Tower, for example, is always going to be a terror risk, even after the soon-to-be-reinaugurated president is out of office.
A great candidate to carry out such an audit would be NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch.
She likes data. She understands terrorism. As former sanitation commissioner, she grasps truckers’ need to access the curb at predictable times of day for deliveries and pickups.
And she is hard-headed enough to realize that street management by cement block isn’t management.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
