Parents, safe-streets advocates and politicians all slammed the state Senate on Thursday for putting politics before safety in failing to renew a speed-camera program in the final hours of the legislative session.
Lawmakers tabled a bill to extend a four-year-old pilot program that installed 140 ticket-issuing cameras around city schools — and which would have brought the total number of cameras to 290 citywide.
Democrats blamed the Republican-controlled body for refusing to take up the bill unless it included a tacked-on, unrelated measure by Republican-caucusing Democratic state Sen. Simcha Felder.
Republicans accused Democrats of being unwilling to compromise.
Either way, parents say lawmakers in Albany need to set aside their internecine power struggle and do their job to protect kids.
“We need cameras or a stop sign or something because people just fly down Metropolitan [Avenue]. It’s a tragedy waiting to happen really,” said Wendy Mehmet, 45, as she was picking up her child from PS 132 in Brooklyn on Thursday.
Legislators “absolutely need to keep them in, and they should work on getting more,” PS 132 mom Veronica Rubio, 38, said of the speed cams. “If I was speeding on Metropolitan and I got a ticket, I would never speed here again because I would be aware.”
“The failure of the state Senate and governor to pass a bill extending and expanding speed safety cameras is a travesty,” said Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives.
The cameras reduce speeding by 63 percent and pedestrian injuries by 23 percent, according to Comptroller Scott Stringer, who also criticized the Senate.
The city Department of Transportation would not say whether the cameras will be removed or simply shut off when the program lapses on July 25.
“We are currently reviewing our options for how we would proceed under those circumstances,” said a DOT spokesman, adding the agency supports expansion of the “lifesaving cameras.”
Gov. Cuomo on Thursday threatened to call a special legislative session to push the speeding-camera bill through before school resumes in autumn.
“I will bring them back at any time at a moment’s notice,” he said. “I think it would be an atrocity and literally a public-safety hazard if the Senate doesn’t renew the cameras before the children come back to school in September.”
Additional reporting by Katherine Lavacca and Max Jaeger