Thursday, December 1st, 2011

Interesting story brewing over at 72nd & Riverside.

A crush of taxi drivers attending daily prayers at the Islamic Cultural Center (1 Riverside Drive) are creating a traffic nightmare in the area. By flaunting parking rules and double- and triple-parking, they’re forcing other drivers to veer into oncoming traffic to get north on 72nd.

DNAinfo has the full-story.

Apparently it’s been going on for years, but the recently opened stretch of Riverside Boulevard is now highlighting the problem (I thought I did a post last month on the new traffic patterns, but apparently I did not — you can read the story on DNAinfo).

Per DNA:

“It’s an accident waiting to happen,” said James Beale, the resident manager at 240 Riverside Blvd., one of four Trump high-rises along the boulevard. “It’s a very dangerous situation. It’s like all the rules of the road are thrown aside.”

And on the flip-side…

“For me, my prayer is more important, because that’s what I’m going to take with me the day I die,” said cabbie Abdoulaye Diallo, a 30-year-old immigrant from Guinea, who left his taxi in a no parking zone outside the mosque at 1 Riverside Drive on Tuesday evening so he could dash in for a quick evening prayer, one of the five mandatory prayers he performs daily.

Because religion is involved, you can bet this will turn into a hot-button issue. Thomas Pienkos, senior vice president of operations for the Trump Corporation, probably put it best when he said this to DNAinfo:

“We didn’t want to get into a local squabble with people, especially over religious issues,” Pienkos said. “I think that’s the same reason the police were reluctant to write tickets, because of the sensitivity of the situation. They’ve got kind of a hot potato of an issue.”

It will be interesting to see how the NYPD handles this going forward. Their apparent lack of enforcement in the past seems to have created turbulent situation as they now try and crack-down. Per DNA:

Jim Littlefield, a security director at the Trump Corporation, said that as police have stepped up their enforcement on the illegal parking, tensions have flared. He said he saw a police officer who had been asking double parked cars to move handcuff a taxi driver on Nov. 18. Littlefield, a retired NYPD cop, said he then called 911 because he saw several cabbies approach the officer and was concerned about his safety. Several police cars responded to the scene, Littlefield said.

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Tags: 1 Riverside Drive, Islamic Cultural Center, mosque, New York City, NYC, NYPD, Riverside Boulevard, Taxi, Traffic, Upper West Side, UWS, West 72