Major Manhattan roadways like Park, Sixth and Seventh avenues will have their speed limits slashed by 5 mph in a desperate bid to reduce traffic fatalities, officials said Friday.
A total of 14 arterial roads across the city were added as reduced speed zones as part of Mayor de Blasio’s ambitious Vision Zero plan — an attempt to end all deaths on Big Apple streets.
All the roads will be reduced from 30 to 25 mph, excepts parts of Jerome Avenue in The Bronx, Victory Boulevard in Staten Island, and Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn that will drop from 35 to 30 mph.
The first reduction will be Monday on a five-mile stretch of Jerome Avenue between East 161st Street and Bainbridge Avenue in The Bronx, where four people were killed between 2008 and 2012.
Later in August, Seventh Avenue will drop to 25 mph between Central Park South and West 11th Street.
Almost all of Amsterdam Avenue will be lowered in October — a six-and-a-half mile stretch from West 59th Street to West 190th Street.
Deborah Frasier, a 45-year-old psychologist and mom of two young children from the Upper West Side, said the move is long overdue.
“I live on a corner where five people have died in the last three months from pedestrian car accidents,” she said. “I have kids walking around the city, so, yes, I am all for it.”
The Bowery, Third Avenue, Park Avenue and Houston Street will drop their speed limits in November. Sixth Avenue will drop to 25 mph in December.
A staggering 33 people died in crashes on those Manhattan roads between 2008 and 2012 — including elderly Upper East Side man Rubin Baum, who earned two Purple Hearts in the Korean War and was killed in 2012 by a car on Park Avenue and East 59th Street after he pushed his wife out of the way.
“We are glad to work closely with local communities in bringing these life-saving measures to corridors across the city,” said DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg.
Other roads that will slow down include Utica Avenue in Brooklyn, where 12 people were killed in just four years.
All the streets will get signs telling drivers they’re traveling through a slow zone.
Police say 71 pedestrians have been struck and killed in 2014, a 20 percent drop from 2013. Overall traffic fatalities are down just 1.3 percent, from 145 to 143 as of July 30.
“People don’t need to be zipping through the city,” said Brooklyn lawyer Daniel Dingerson, 34. “There’s pedestrians, there’s bikes, there’s kids.”
Additional reporting by Aaron Feis