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By Will Bredderman
Brooklyn Daily
A car struck a woman as she crossed Fourth Avenue near the corner of 86th Street on April 1 — the latest in a series of collisions in accident-plagued Bay Ridge, and on a thoroughfare the city has targeted for a controversial overhaul.
Police said the 30-year-old white woman was crossing mid-block at around 6:18 am when a blue Honda sedan hit her, breaking one of her arms and causing severe head trauma. The FDNY said they took the female to Lutheran Hospital in a state of cardiac arrest.
An NYPD spokeswoman said that the driver was uninjured and remained at the scene. An investigation is ongoing, but there is no evidence of a crime.
“It looks like it was just an accident,” the spokeswoman said
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has declared Fourth Avenue the third-most-dangerous corridor in Brooklyn, and Borough President Markowitz and the Department of Transportation have rolled out a plan to turn the thoroughfare into a pedestrian-friendly “Brooklyn Boulevard.” But the plans for the Bay Ridge stretch of the avenue — which involve reducing 13 blocks to a single lane in each direction and raising a concrete island on the southern side of the 86th Street intersection — have run into opposition, despite being derived from resident suggestions.
“It’s going to back up everything,” objected Kathy Byrne at the March 25 unveiling of the proposal.
Community Board 10 approved a safety makeover for 86th Street last summer that banned left turns off of Third and Fifth avenues and installed countdown clocks at pedestrian crossings along the corridor, but only after months of battling an earlier plan that included removing two traffic lanes and installing a median. The Fourth Avenue plan will go before the neighborhood board sometime in the next two months.
Reach reporter Will Bredderman at wbredderman@cnglocal.com or by calling (718) 260-4507. Follow him at twitter.com/WillBredderman.