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The city is lowering the speed limit on one Upper East Side block, and the community board didn’t get much say in the matter.
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At Wednesday’s Community Board 8 Transportation Committee meeting, a Department of Transportation representative confirmed that the speed limit on East 76th Street between York Avenue and the FDR Drive will drop to 15 miles per hour. The block is home to both the Lycée Français de New York and The Town School, and because it dead-ends at the FDR, it isn’t a through street.The change was laid out in a July 20 letter from Manhattan Borough Commissioner Danielle Zuckerman to CB8 District Manager Ian McKnight, which described the block as approved for a new “School Slow Zone.” The letter cites Sammy’s Law, the 2024 state legislation that gave the city authority to set lower speed limits on individual streets, and says DOT intends to bring the limit down to 15 mph at every eligible school location across the five boroughs. The board has 60 days from the notification to submit comments.
The DOT representative was blunt about what the letter was and wasn’t. “This is not a request from the school,” he said, explaining that the agency identified the block on its own and that the reduced limit would be in effect 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Co-chair Craig Lader added that DOT is required to notify community boards before making these changes but doesn’t need their approval, and that the mayor’s stated goal is to have reduced limits at every school in the city, public and private, by the end of his current term.
That didn’t sit well with everyone. Board member Michele Birnbaum said the notification was “insufficient,” and pushed the DOT rep to spell out the exact speed, the hours and the boundaries, which weren’t all explicit in the letter. Judy Schneider asked why DOT chose these two private schools and not others in the district, and specifically raised PS 267 on East 63rd Street, where traffic pours off the FDR Drive and the Queensboro Bridge. The rep said the rollout is gradual because each location needs new signage, and that he’d escalate the 63rd Street request.
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Alida Camp asked whether the new limit would apply to bikes and scooters as well as cars. The rep said there’s no speed limit for bikes, before Lader reminded him that e-bikes have been capped at 15 mph citywide since last year. The rep said he’d take the question back to the agency.Sebastian Clarke moved a resolution supporting the plan and calling on DOT to expand it to as many schools in the district as possible. It passed, with Birnbaum abstaining on the grounds that the change is “already a mandate” and a vote would be duplicative, and a second member abstaining over the pace of expansion.
The move follows the committee’s vote in May to advance a resolution calling for a 20 mph limit on every eligible street in the district, along with 15 mph school zones near Hewitt, Dalton and St. David’s. DOT is also lowering the limit on Central Park’s drives to 15 mph under the same law.
