Mission 311: Over 5,000 Sidewalk Cycling Reports to Spark NYPD Attention — What Can One Person Do?

Andy Kutruff knows that his sidewalk is primed for illegal cycling — and after over 5,000 documented reports to 311 thanks to a personally-programmed camera, he hopes that the NYPD and the city at large will finally take action. 

Combating some of New York’s most frequent quality-of-life issues — whether it be piles of trash and the accompanying rodents, a broken public transit system, or perilous pedestrian safety issues — can seem like a job only suited for those in legislative power. But while it’s true to an extent that the buck stops with the city and state government, there are individual citizens working across New York neighborhoods, including Hell’s Kitchen, in hopes of making change. 

For Andy —  a software engineer living on E14th Street with his wife and dog — the decision to begin a one-man 311 campaign began with a few very close calls.

“People ‘whoosh’ by you [riding a bike on the sidewalk], and so we found our behavior changing — we’d move to the side of the sidewalk,” he explained. After documenting several incidents with 311 and contacting his local Council Member’s office, “they were nice, but it kind of went nowhere,” Andy said.

After his wife was nearly struck head-on by a fast-moving e-bike on their block, he decided to take a new approach. Andy contacted one of the two local NYPD precincts assigned to his block, and while the individual officers “were very professional and caring — I genuinely felt that they wanted to do something…nothing happened, as usual,” he said. 

Searching for a solution, inspiration struck. Andy set up a camera facing the street from his apartment window, using AI-powered programming to capture when cyclists breached the sidewalk.

Well aware of the limits surrounding AI’s accuracy, Andy painstakingly checked, and double-checked every violation before individually submitting each one to 311. After just 60 days, he had accounted for over 5,000 individual incidents of cyclists riding on sidewalks and documented his findings on YouTube.

But despite providing the NYPD with overwhelming data — including analysis on time-of-day frequency to better determine when tickets should be administered — Andy found the organization’s response to be deeply mixed. 

“I know this is not the highest priority thing for the NYPD at all — and I just want to make sure [they knew] that was my reasonable expectation,” he said. “I made this graph because this [would show when] they can effectively write tickets. This graph is what I handed them,” he added, “and the 13th precinct handed it right back to me.”

Andy continued to ring the alarm with 311, Deputy Inspector Daniel J Orlando of the 13th precinct, Council Member Rivera, and his precinct community council — with vastly different reactions. He’s experienced stonewalling from the city’s Office of Technology, who he has implored to provide better technological access to developers in order to streamline 311 reporting. 

He’s also had police officers who have expressed genuine interest in wanting to help, and others who have made threatening phone calls or paid him unexpected visits, urging him to stop filing 311 reports. 

“I started getting calls from an unknown number,” said Andy. A voice advised him to move “‘someplace that shares your values’ — I’ve been living here for seven years and I’m a New Yorker,” Andy added. “I’ve been trying to be on the side of the NYPD, I’ve been trying to applaud what they’re doing, but I need hard evidence of what their actions are without hiding behind language-parsing and twisting — I’ll believe it when I see it.”

In continuing to fastidiously document and report the incidents, he hopes that his labor reaches enough people — and city organizations — that there can be real change in accountability. “As of now, this provides the most definitive evidence that the 311 system is not working,” he said.

A spokesperson from the NYPD told W42ST: “The NYPD is aware of this individual’s numerous 311 complaints made over the past several weeks. While the complaints include videos of individuals riding a bicycle or scooter, by the time officers arrive at the location, the bicyclists/scooter operators are no longer present the overwhelming majority of the time. However, to address these complaints, the NYPD conducted multiple joint operations and directed patrols with both the 13th and 9th Precincts to focus on these violations. As a result, the NYPD issued 77 bicycle/scooter related summons along this resident’s block from November 1, 2023 through January 20, 2024 and seized numerous scooters. Additionally, the NYPD has maintained contact with this individual to communicate the steps taken to address his concerns.” We have also reached out to the office of Council Member Carlina Rivera for comment and will update if we hear back. 

UPDATE 1/24/2024: W42ST has received new information from the City’s Open Data system showing that four bicycle-related summons were made in the 13th precinct between November 14 and December 31 and zero were issued in the 9th precinct for the same time period. 

In Hell’s Kitchen, safety advocates are making their own petitions known. Longtime resident, parent and streetscape safety advocate Jehiah Czebotar made 158 reports to 311 in 2023 concerning cars illegally parked on the neighborhood’s sidewalks and crosswalks.

Having experienced a number of close calls himself, “I have sympathy for this person encountering the same sort of responses in a different setting,” he said. “You end up with things that, on the one hand, can seem very black and white — but you end up with the response from the city being: ‘I don’t care and Car Is King and we’re not going to do anything’.” 

Jehiah decided to run his concerns up to the Department of Transportation (DOT), filing a rulemaking position that would require the agency to enforce ‘daylighting’: a policy barring cars from standing or parking within 20 feet of a crosswalk, pedestrian ramp, or intersection, providing critical visibility to both drivers, cyclists and pedestrians (several of 2023’s fatal traffic incidents occurred when cars blocked crosswalk intersections). The DOT rejected Jehiah’s petition — a move that he “was not particularly surprised” by. For city agencies, “No action is always going to be easier than some action,” he added.

“In Hell’s Kitchen (CB4 specifically), only 4.6% of residents drive to work,” said Jehiah. “Even though 84.3% don’t even have a car (and arguably 100% are pedestrians) DOT still allocates a disproportionate amount of our public space to cars — not prioritizing sufficient space for sidewalks, safe cycling infrastructure and dedicated bus lanes. The city could do so much more.” 

Jehiah believes there’s a lack of political will within the city administration to make acute change. “They relied on their recent announcement of physical sort of daylighting,” he added, but “it’s ironic that this is happening at a point in time when they have repeatedly failed to meet their legal obligations around physical changes to the streets in terms of building out bus lanes, building out protected cycling infrastructure,” he noted.

“They’re trying to say, ‘Hey, we’re doing so much that we don’t need to actually change the rule everywhere,’ but it’s unlikely that they’re even going to make their recent promise of a thousand intersections that they’ll do daylighting a year.” DOT spokesperson Mona Bruno told W42ST that “this administration is using every tool available to implement safer street designs, including a historic commitment to improve visibility at 1,000 intersections each year through daylighting. We will review the requests outlined in this letter.”

Manhattan Community Board 4 (MCB4) Transportation Planning Committee co-chair and CHEKPEDS pedestrian safety founder Christine Berthet cited infrastructure and enforcement as the dual steps to change for pedestrian safety in Hell’s Kitchen and the city at large.

“I watched [Andy’s video] on Reddit, and it’s documenting a lot of infraction — but now, what do we do about it?” Christine said. “We clearly have infrastructure issues — with parking entrances (such as the one in front of Andy’s building on E14th Street), the infrastructure is conducive to this kind of behavior,” she added. “If you look at 14th, 23rd, 42nd and 57nd Street — those cross streets with large sidewalks and no bike lane are absolutely an invitation and almost a necessity to use the sidewalk. Either we say the bus lanes are shared with bikes or we need new infrastructure.”

She believes that the city needs to significantly assess the number of bike parking spots, citing the need for more storage like the free Oonee pod at Port Authority. “It would be interesting to find out about how many spots we have for bicyclists — what is our ratio? How many parking spots do we have for cars versus bikes? It’s completely out of whack.”

In addition to infrastructure, “we need education through licensing” for cyclists, said Christine, who recommended a city-backed training system for other cyclists as well as a multi-phase enforcement policy of warnings, followed by traffic tickets. She hopes that public officials and the city’s many delivery apps will step up to ensure that drivers and other cyclists ride safely. “The apps should be doing more,” she said, “but they’re all trying to make a profit.” 

In October, grassroots advocacy group Pedestrians for Bike Safety (PBS) organized an outreach and education event in Hell’s Kitchen with local elected officials, Los Deliveristas Unidos and CHEKPEDS. Volunteers spoke with nearly 200 delivery workers along 8th, 9th and 10th Avenues and handed out flyers in English, Spanish and French that reinforced the most basic safe riding tips of not riding on sidewalks or against traffic and not riding mopeds in bike lanes. PBS has been in contact with representatives of the top four delivery apps to coordinate efforts to address these safety concerns.

For now, there are still multiple campaigns in place to increase pedestrian safety. Despite the DOT rejection, Jehiah plans to continue advocating for better pedestrian protections, knowing he is joined by many other New Yorkers with similar concerns.

“I feel like most of my friends are people that I know on Twitter who all complain about all the same things,” he laughed. “Ultimately, we want the city to be better for everybody.”

Council Member Erik Bottcher has launched a new campaign entitled “Slow Your Roll, Respect The Stroll,” urging cyclists “to be mindful of pedestrian safety by yielding to pedestrians, avoiding biking on sidewalks, stopping at red lights and refraining from biking against traffic.”

And over on E14th Street, Andy Kutruff is still checking his camera for sidewalk violations in the hopes that the city will take notice. “I can’t think of a better way to prove how broken the system is than from an individual trying to get something fixed in New York,” he said. “Maybe when someone important enough’s loved one gets hit, that’ll be the catalyst. But it’s inevitable, right? People have been seriously injured.” 

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UPDATE: Andy has published the program that he used for public use on Github. “I released the project publicly after adding many safety layers that further enforces human review,” he told us.