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After another horrific fatal crash on Canal Street and the Bowery Thursday that left one man dead and his daughter hospitalized with a fractured spine, advocates are again demanding that the City and State work together to slow cars coming off the Manhattan Bridge into bustling Chinatown.
At 10:20 a.m. on a busy morning last week, a flatbed truck, precariously stacked with towers of wooden pallets about one story high, came flying off the Manhattan Bridge down its northeast exit lane and jumped the curb outside a Buddhist temple on Canal Street.
As it sped down the sidewalk, a moving stack of pallets struck pedestrians Tin Jung Ye, 77, and his daughter Yong Wong, 52, sending them flying into another pedestrian, 71. Without stopping, the Chevrolet truck then dropped back onto Canal and into the Bowery, where it continued a block up the road, sideswiping a van and glancing off a box truck before rolling to a stop by Hester Street. Ye, a retired bank cleaner, died, leaving his wife a widow after 50 years of marriage. Their daughter, Wong, was hospitalized in critical condition. The truck driver passed a breathalyzer test at the scene and told cops his brakes had failed coming off the bridge, the NYPD said. An investigation found the truck had barely any brake fluid due to a leak, and he's been given summonses for the issues with his truck, but not hit with criminal charges.
In its wake, the out-of-control truck left a grieving family and a trail of destruction that street safety advocates say was preventable. In fact, the very same morning of the fatal crash, street safety nonprofit Transportation Alternatives published a report naming Canal Street as the 10th most dangerous major street in New York City, based on traffic fatalities and serious injuries mapped between 2022 and 2025, with a rate of 18.3 fatalities or serious injuries per mile.
"Canal was on that list as a 'Boulevard of Death' in Manhattan, and then of course this crash happened that same morning," Alexa Sledge, Transportation Alternatives' senior director of strategy and communications, told Hell Gate.
"There's been one person killed on Canal every year for the last seven years, and of course, there were two New Yorkers killed at this exact intersection last year," Sledge added. "I was absolutely horrified to learn this happened again, but also angry that this is happening year after year after year, and we really haven't seen the changes that we need to prevent it from happening again next year."
The New York City Department of Transportation does have a major safety redesign planned for the deadly artery (with the Mamdani administration copping heat for opting to first fix Canal Street west of Broadway before tackling the significantly more dangerous—and more populated—eastern end, as there was apparently less pushback in the west). Chinatown residents have called the DOT's decision to kick the eastern safety improvements down the road "a failure of our government." For now, the redesign plans "still don't include this part of Canal that goes into the Manhattan Bridge, which is incredibly dangerous," Sledge said.