A 25-year-old woman was fatally struck by a truck when she fell off her bicycle near Brooklyn’s Prospect Park yesterday morning.
The woman was biking east on Parkside Avenue near Parade Place in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood around 7 a.m. when for some reason she fell off her bike and landed on the street. Then the driver of the truck, who was heading in the same direction, knocked her to the ground, police said.
The unidentified victim was discovered with trauma to her body and pronounced dead at the scene. The tractor-trailer driver stayed at the scene and no arrests were immediately announced, the NYPD said. At the time it was unclear what had caused the woman to initially fall off the bike.
In a similar case, in late July a 28-year-old woman died when she fell from the Citi Bike she was riding and was hit by a tractor-trailer on a street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in broad daylight.
This year has been particularly disastrous on New York asphalt in the five boroughs. From January 1 to July 31, some 150 people died in road accidents, according to the city’s Department of Transportation (DOT). In particular there is a 129% increase in hit and run incidents throughout the city.
In addition to gun violence, traffic accidents have been another big challenge for the new mayor, Eric Adams. This despite “Vision Zero” road safety plan created in 2014 by then-new mayor Bill de Blasio, who promised to make the city safer for pedestrians, cyclists and motorists, with a goal of zero deaths by 2024.
New York City had already experienced in April a 35% increase in traffic accidents, NYPD alerted. At the end of that month there was a tragic streak at an average of one person killed by a run over every day.