Washington Heights Targeted In New Campaign To Slow Down Drivers

WASHINGTON HEIGHTS, NY — Washington Heights is one of the neighborhoods being targeted in a campaign launched Monday to slow down drivers, the New York Times first reported and city officials confirmed.

"Speeding Ruins Lives, Slow Down," is a $4 million multi-platform campaign to counter rising traffic violence and pump the brakes on speeding incidents that are taking place at higher rates since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a press release from the city.

Washington Heights, along with neighborhoods that include Canarsie, Brooklyn, Jamaica Queens, Harlem, and Hunts Points, Bronx, will be targeted areas for the campaign due to elevated crash data, city officials told the New York Times.

“Traffic safety is public safety, and today we are continuing to take action against traffic violence,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a news release. “This unprecedented campaign will reach New Yorkers across the five boroughs in nine languages with one message: Slow down."

Drag racing and speeding cars are well-documented issues in Upper Manhattan.

Patch found in June 2020 that New Yorkers making complaints to 311 about drag racing quadrupled in the first three months of the COVID pandemic, with a substantial number of the complaints coming from Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood.

All three are neighborhoods near major highways such as the Harlem River Drive or the Henry Hudson Parkway.

The campaign kicked off Monday with the unveiling of a new billboard on Pennsylvania Avenue in East New York, Brooklyn.

Content for the campaign will be put up in all five boroughs through media, radio and television ads, billboards, bus shelters, LinkNYC kiosks and gas station pumps.

There will also be newspaper and online digital ads running in nine languages: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, Haitian Creole, Korean, Polish, Russian and Spanish.

The new campaign follows Adams' $900 million commitment to street safety as part of the 2023 executive budget.

Department of Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez, the former uptown Council Member, said the new campaign would be "unprecedented" in terms of its outreach.

"It will be in more communities, cover more community and ethnic media, and speak to New Yorkers in nine different languages," Rodriguez said in a news release.