Suffolk County on Long Island has become the first place in New York State where it's illegal to send text messages while operating a motor vehicle. Effective immediately, drivers spotted fiddling with their cell phones will face a $150 fine. Similar legislation has been passed in Nassau and Westchester counties but has not gone into effect, and a statewide law is still tied up in the legislature. In August, New York City Councilman David Weprin......

Northside Car Service, the dominant livery cab company in Williamsburg, has become the target of a boycott after an accident with a cyclist last week. In a widely circulated email, a friend of the unidentified cyclist—who himself called for a boycott in a Gothamist comment Friday—says that on September 10th the driver made an “irrationally fast turn” from Kent onto North Seventh, forcing the cyclist to "slam on the brakes, flip completely over the handlebars,......

The two carriage horses who ran amok through Bay Ridge Sunday are recovering nicely on a Connecticut farm, the Daily News reports. Stormy and Elvis, snow-colored, 2,000-pound Percherons who work pulling buggies for Valentine Carriage, survived with just scratched-up legs. However, driver Richie Valentine Jacobson fractured five ribs after being thrown from the carriage onto a town car's windshield. The buggy was about to pick up bride-to-be Nunzie Lumberto when a pole snapped, spooking the......

A horse-drawn buggy was totaled yesterday during a wild stampede through Borough Park in Brooklyn that left one car with a shattered windshield, the Post reports. The white buggy was a block away from picking up bride-to-be Nunzie Lumberto, who was waiting to be escorted to her wedding at Regina Hall of St. Rosalie's in Dyker Heights. But before she could get in, a wooden bar under the buggy snapped, striking one of the horses......

The state law banning hand-held cell phone use while driving doesn’t extend to text messaging, something Councilman David Weprin, father of 16-year-old twin girls, would like to change fast. Motivated by last summer’s fatal accident in the Finger Lakes region, in which five girls in a sport utility vehicle died when the text-messaging teenage driver swerved into oncoming traffic, Weprin will introduce a measure today that would ban the sending or reading of text messages......

According to reports, an accident has left 1 dead and 2 injured outside the Staten Island Ferry terminal in Lower Manhattan. Per WCBS 2, "a sedan that lost control went over the divider and struck [a motorcycle] before coming to a stop" at the terminal. WABC 7 says the fatality was from a motorcycle; it's possible there were two motorcycles involved. And a witness said, "I heard a loud explosion. I saw a car on......

Last month, there were a string of accidents that left over twenty people injured and one person dead after vehicles jumped the curb and hit pedestrians, seemingly making sidewalk the most dangerous place for pedestrians. Yesterday, an accident at Broadway and West 63rd Street, a taxi cab and car crashed into each other, sending one vehicle spinning into a Starbucks and hitting a pedestrian. As far as we could gather from some witnesses, the cab......

A bus crashed into a building, possibly a bank, near Canal and Bowery in Chinatown. Apparently a dump truck first hit the bus, which caused the bus driver to lose control and swerve into the building. Three people on the private bus were injured, as one person from the dump truck, and WNBC says a pedestrian was hit. One victim was reportedly in traumatic arrest. A reader points out that the Fung Wah bus......

Although no one was actually killed, Friday was a tough day for Manhattan pedestrians. Three separate cars careened onto sidewalks; and so many people were hit that it's unclear how many were run down. The mayhem began in Chinatown shortly after noon. A driver reportedly was attempting to back into a parking space when he accidentally jumped the curb and six hit people sitting on a park bench and passing by. The victims were hit......

A maximum $100 fine doesn't seem to be stemming the rising tide of self-absorbed assholes who drive cars while blathering on their cell phones. Though a state law prohibits the use of a hand-held mobile phone while operating a motor vehicle, the number of violations has jumped fivefold in New York City since 2002, according to amNY. Last year almost 200,000 violations were reported....

"Speedy," starring Harold Lloyd as a less-than-safe NYC driver, was released in 1928 and illustrates how New Yorkers gained their reputation as being somewhat reckless. The above clip features Babe Ruth himself requesting Lloyd the cabbie to get him to Yankee stadium in a hurry, and then soon regretting it as Speedy is more interested in chatting up his sports idol than keeping his eyes on the road. The film was Harold Lloyd's last......

A family walking along the side of the road in Queens was struck by a car that witnesses claimed was doing 90 m.p.h. After plowing into the family, which included an infant, the driver continued on, perhaps neglecting to notice the baby that was hurled into the air and a the male friend of the mother who was killed. Police were called to the scene of the family that was sundered along the Sunrise Highway.......

Around 5:45 a.m., a tractor-trailer crashed into a livery car on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at Morgan Avenue, near the Kosciusko Bridge. The vehicles were Brooklyn-bound, and the collision caused the tractor-trailer to jackknife across the divider and hit a Queens-bound car. One person is dead and two others are seriously injured. Traffic was initially closed in both directions, but now there's one lane open in each direction. There are still considerable delays. Officials are investigating......

Former Talking Head David Byrne had a crosseyed and painful bike ride home the other evening – and briefly ended up in the hospital. According to Byrne’s own blog, he’d spent the night drinking and dining with his special lady friend and artist David Shrigley. While cycling home, the Grammy-winning artist’s bike tire “slipped on the cobblestones of West 14th St.” Even sober, that uneven surface can be treacherous, and the tipsy Byrne went down......

A performer in The Little Mermaid musical on Broadway broke both wrists after falling at least 20 feet through a trap door. Adrian Bailey, an ensemble performer who is also the understudy for King Triton, was taken to Bellevue Hospital and is in stable condition. The accident occurred before the 2 p.m. matinee performance. At the beginning of the show, the NY Times explains a boat "starts out high above the stage and descends," with......

A 5-year-old boy was ejected from a Ford Escape when a BMW crashed into it around 1a.m. this morning. According to police, the accident occurred at 109th Avenue and 164th Place. The little boy, Jordan McLean, was "reportedly tossed into a brick wall and sustained serious head injuries"; he was pronounced dead at the hospital. His mother and another relative were also injured. The BMW's occupants abandoned the car and fled. The police are......

5 borough bike tour 13, by i'mjustsayin at flickr With approximately 30,000 participants, it's not unexpected that a few cyclists might get in an accident during the 5 Boro Bike Tour. Still, it's alarming to read emergency wire updates like the report that there was an accident on the Queens side of the upper level of the Queensboro Bridge. Multiple cyclists are down and the extent of injuries is still unkown.......

Image from WABC 7 YIKES! A fire truck responding to a call collided with a car at 111th Avenue and 155th Street in South Jamaica. The male driver is in serious condition--some reports say he is in traumatic cardiac arrest--while two firefighters have minor injuries. WABC 7 says it's "unclear if the fire truck ran a red light." UPDATE: WNBC News is now reporting that the driver was not a male, but 27-year-old female......

The Turtle Bay crane collapse took 7 lives, flattened a townhouse, and battered three other buildings, but the calamity’s toll doesn’t stop there: Two tenants returned “home” to find their roofless 19th floor penthouse looted of jewelry and electronics worth $30,000 or $80,000, depending on whether you believe the Post or the News. Jennifer Battistello, 26, and Eileen Hayes, 25, were lucky they were away when the crane's boom fell onto their penthouse. But after......

The sports trainer who claimed he gave steroids to Roger Clemens, Andy Pettite and other baseball players hit two vehicles, including a city bus, yesterday. McNamee apparently blacked out. The Daily News reports that around 12:30 p.m., McNamee was on Central Avenue, near Beach 11th in Far Rockaway, "when he rear-ended another car and careened into the bus head-on." McNamee told police his diabetes caused him to faint and next thing he knew he "woke......

Photograph from East 51st Street by gattogrosso212 at flickr Image from NY1 A huge crane toppled off of a high-rise building under construction around 2:15 p.m. this afternoon and crashed into another skyscraper. According to initial reports, the incident occurred near 2nd Ave. as the crane fell backward from 51st St. into another building at 305 East 50th St. in Manhattan. NY1 spoke to residents who could see the incident from their 80th floor......

Two separate incidents Brooklyn resulted in the death of a 27-year-old man on a Brownsville sidewalk, a nine-year-old girl wounded, and a 13-year-old boy clinging to life. Police are investigating whether the shot that struck the nine-year-old girl in the arm yesterday was related to the shooting that killed Robert Morgan two blocks away in Brownsville. The girl was apparently hit by an errant bullet that crashed through a window in a family's fifth-floor apartment.......

Patrick Venetek, the cop whose service weapon wound up shooting through the ceiling of his downstairs neighbors' apartment and striking an 18-month-old's arm, gave further details on how the incident occurred. Perhaps to the relief of Porcellini's six brothers and sisters, Venetek has been stripped of his badge and gun at this time and is on modified duty. Apparently, Ventek was going to start cleaning his 9 mm semi-automatic pistol in the dwindling natural light......

A family had been living in its Mill Basin, Brooklyn apartment for less than a week, when their 18-month-old toddler was struck by a bullet that passed through its ceiling from an upstairs apartment Thursday afternoon. Their upstairs neighbor is 24-year-old police officer, an Army veteran assigned to Manhattan's 1st Precinct, named Patrick Venetek. Venetek rushed downstairs to explain what had happened. Per WCBS News, he claims he had been cleaning his gun when it......

A day after a 13-year-old died when the forklift he was driving crushed him in a Queens building supply yard, a Daily News reporter that the keys to the very same forklift were "still dangling from the ignition." Kevin Hrcka had been visiting his father, who worked at the Miron Building Supply Company. While his dad was changing out of his work uniform, the teen found that the forklift's keys were in the ignition and......

A 13-year-old boy was killed after being trapped underneath an overturned forklift at a Brooklyn lumber yard yesterday. The young man was Kevin Hrcka, whose father worked at the Miron Building Supply company as a fork lift operator. The son of the business's owner and vice president, Derek Messing, said that Kevin was a frequent visitor to Miron, where he would meet his dad at the end of his workday. Messing said, “He was a......

A van carrying members of Stuyvesant High School's junior varsity girls' track team overturned on the way to a track meet in New Hampshire. The crash occurred last Saturday on I-91 in Vermont, when the van "veered into a median and rolled over," according to Vermont State Police. Other passers-by who stopped helped hold the van so it wouldn't roll over again. The AP reported that "four passengers crawled out, two were partially ejected, one......

Some disappointed Giants fans leaving the stadium in New Jersey last night were served an extra dose of indignity when the escalator from the top tier of Gate A malfunctioned and knocked people off their feet. The accounts seem as scrambled as the scrum of people sprawled at the foot of the escalator, but it seems that the bottom few steps of the stairway collapsed, with several people becoming trapped. The emergency stop button was......

Two hit and run drivers were arrested late this week; one through the actions of a horrified but brave bystander and the other through a successful effort by the Brooklyn Accident Investigation squad. Cops arrived at Sergey Satyr's Mill Basin home Thursday to arrest the 20-year-old for the hit-and-run death of 71-year-old Grace Smith of Sheepshead Bay. The Brooklyn Accident Investigation squad used debris from Satyr's Nissan and a partial license plate number to track......

Jim Leyritz, who played with the Yankees, from 1990-1996 and then again in 1999 and 2000, was arrested early Friday morning after getting in a car accident in Broward County, Florida. Thursday was Leyritz's 44th birthday and he was presumably driving his Ford Expedition home early Friday morning when witnesses said they saw him run a red light. His car hit a Mitsubishi Montero driven by 30-year-old Fredia Ann Veitch. The woman was ejected......