I've been thinking about this a bunch while driving and walking in the Heights the last few months (I walk it daily, drive a in and out a couple times a week, and ride a Citibike every once in awhile, so I feel I've been able to see things from a few different perspectives). What, exactly, is the issue? Yes, sometimes it's people doing crazy things like running reds. Those stick out in the mind though honestly when I try to think about how often I see that, it's definitely more than in most cities but still fairly rare.

What seems to create the senes of hazard for me as a pedestrian, sometimes-cyclist, and driver are:

• the tight streets with poor delineation between "zones" of parking, walking, driving; the amount of constant double-parking on streets that have no room for them (Central, Palisade, Newark, etc.) which requires streams of drivers to snake around quickly;

• poor and inconsistent lighting which is combined with the modern trend of inappropriately bright headlights make for totally shit visibility at night;

• intersections that seem built for a lot less traffic than they usually have (the turn from New York Ave onto Ravine, for example, is ridiculous: it is nearly blind for the turner, competing against three different streams of traffic);

• crossings that seem inherently anti-pedestrian (trying to cross from the 100 steps area into Hoboken, for example, is almost entirely done by people sprinting across the street at a different place than the actual crosswalk, because the visibility at the crosswalk is total shit and the traffic lights are hard to see and will sometimes not give a "walk" signal for several cycles);

• unprotected left turns (a huge issue in Hoboken, too) that cause both big back-ups and drivers trying to "sprint" across between gaps in traffic or on the yellows;

• pedestrian crossings that are inherently in competition with cars (people are trying to turn left into you, etc., and they have a small window with which to do it);

• overly-narrow intersections that require very careful navigation and have too much going on (Central and Manhattan, Central and Franklin jump out to me — you have to just sort of hold your breath and lurch through them if you are trying to turn);

• a general shittiness of the quality of the pavement which lends to a sense of it being a no-man's land (too many asphalt patches, too many repair areas, too many painted lines never used — I get that resurfacing is expensive and street maintenance is never-ending, but pretty much all of the street surfaces look like garbage, and that adds to a sense of disorder);

...and probably more. Anyway, the above is what I notice most of all. Every once in awhile you see someone do something totally absurd with impunity (I saw someone drive around someone else who was stopped at a red light in order to run the red — who does this?), to be sure. But I suspect that's as much of a symptom of everything else (and lack of any apparent interest in traffic enforcement by JCPD).

(Re: JCPD, I openly laughed at the Fullop "look how great everything has been in 2022" flier that came last week, when it bragged that JCPD was the largest it has ever been or whatever. I thought, you'd think this massive, expensive police force could clear the double parking at the very least.)