The city Department of Transportation will install a new traffic light at the Queens intersection where a 7-year-old girl was struck and killed by an SUV last month — answering her older brother’s desperate plea.
The decision announced Thursday is a tremendous victory for the family of little Dolma Naadhum, the second-grader at PS 85 in Astoria who was mowed down Feb. 17 by a driver who ran a stop sign at the corner of Newtown Road and 45th Street.
“It could have been prevented if there was a red light there,” her 11-year-old brother Tsering Tashi Takgye told The Post earlier this month.
The boy lobbied the city to put up a light at the perilous intersection in a heartbreaking change.org petition that garnered more than 32,000 signatures and caught the attention of local officials.
“My family is very happy after hearing the news,” dad Tsering Wangu told The Post on Thursday. “In the future, this type of incident will not happen. I don’t want any other parents to go through this.”
In an emailed statement, DOT commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said the traffic light will be in the ground by May.
“No loss of life on our streets is acceptable,” Rodriguez said. “We continue to keep Dolma Naadhum and her family in our hearts.”
The DOT had faced intense pressure not only from Dolma’s distraught family, but also public officials who had rallied to their cause.
At a vigil held after the girl’s death, State Sen. Michael Gianaris – the 12th District Democrat who is also the Senate’s deputy leader – pledged to “make sure we fix Newtown Road where this happened, and to honor her father’s request that there be traffic lights there.”
Kenneth Gorman, the NYPD’s Deputy Inspector of 114th Precinct, said he’d do everything he could to make sure a similar tragedy “never happens again in our neighborhood.”
Dolma had been walking back from the playground with her mother that Friday evening when she was struck by a 46-year-old woman in a Ford Explorer.
Police brought Dolma to Elmhurst Hospital. But she did not survive.
The DOT has said the woman ran a stop sign and wasn’t properly licensed – she had a learner’s permit, but did not have a licensed adult in the car like she was supposed to.
She also had a legal amount of alcohol in her system after the crash, the department said. She has not been charged.
The intersection where Dolma died had seen five recorded injuries since 2018 before the fatal crash, the department said.
In his change.org petition, Dolma’s brother asked for lights at three crossings: Newtown Road’s intersections with 44th, 45th and 46th streets.
The DOT said in its statement Thursday it will also install all-way stop signs where Newtown Road crosses 46th Street.
The department has already made moves to improve conditions at the site of the crash, such as fix crosswalk markings, extend the curb and bar parking near the intersection so drivers can see more clearly, the statement said.
The DOT said it’s still open to discussing further improvements on Newtown Road.
Neighbors complained frequently about drivers racing through the area and blowing stop signs. One relative said they’d already alerted the DOT about the crossing, but the department did nothing.
“I’d be walking home when people zoomed past me,” the relative told The Post in February. “I try to avoid that area.”
“They just speed through there because it’s a main street to a highway,” said another neighbor, Gladys Garcia.
“It’s very sad, heartbreaking. I feel for the family. It’s a great tragedy, especially a 7-year-old who was just beginning life.”
