BEDFORD-STUYVESANT — A new traffic light was installed on a dangerous Bed-Stuy street corner after complaints from the community, officials said.
The intersection of Taaffe Place and Willoughby Avenue was a hot spot for crashes, thanks to a limited line of sight and heavy traffic coming east on Willoughby, according to neighbors.
After performing a traffic study, city officials agreed and the light was installed last week, according to the Department of Transportation.
"DOT studied the intersection after receiving a request from the Community Board," a Department of Transportation spokesman said.
Neighbors submitted a petition to Bed-Stuy's Community Board 3 last year after witnessing two accidents on back-to-back days, one Taaffe resident told DNAinfo New York in October.
The light is the second traffic change made to Taaffe Place in the past year.
To reduce congestion, the DOT in October switched the direction of one-way traffic on Taaffe from south to north without notifying residents — causing a brief moment of vehicular chaos as cars drove down the street in both directions and parked facing each other.
The intersection of Taaffe and Willoughby has seen 19 collisions since August of 2011, according to NYC Crashmapper, a website that logs accidents based on NYPD data.
Much of that problem had to do with the bad line of sight, residents said. As cars pulled up to the intersection, drivers struggled to look past cars parked on the corner of Willoughby Avenue, Taaffe Place resident Aharon Kolatch said.
"Cars would be coming up [north], someone's going to make a right turn and you basically have to pull out into the street," said Kolatch, 26.
The new light will fix that problem, Kolatch said.
"It's going to make things safer, which is a good thing," he said.
