Yankee Stadium parking in its natural state. Photo: Daily News

In today’s Daily News, Juan Gonzalez reports that Bronx Parking Development Company LLC is expected to default this year on the $200+ million in triple-tax-exempt bonds issued by the New York City Industrial Development Agency, the financing arm of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Since the threat of default has loomed for some time now, let’s look at the more recent developments cited by Gonzalez.

The promise of jobs to be created by the garages was never that grand to begin with — 12 full-time and 70 part-time positions, with an average wage of $11 an hour. But Bronx Parking LLC is so desperate for cash, writes Gonzalez, that “the company plans to slash the salaries of a handful of full-time garage employees and to reduce the number of game-day parking attendants from 76 to 57.”

“The people who continue to pay the price for this thing are the kids who lost their park space, and now the handful of people who got jobs and are going to lose them,” says Bettina Damiani, project director of Good Jobs New York, an NGO that has tracked the stadium project from its inception.

On top of that, a proposal to lure a hotel to complement or replace the garages has apparently cratered after four developers who expressed interest in the deal wanted “major city subsidies.” Gonzalez reports that Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., who inherited the stadium parking disaster from his predecessor Adolfo Carrion, “has been pressing City Hall to come up with an emergency plan to restructure the bonds, tear down some of the garages, and replace them with low-income housing.”

How bad is it for Bronx Parking LLC? According to Gonzalez its garages are 38 percent full on Yankee game days. When the stadium is idle, they have a total of 70 regular customers for 9,000 spaces.

On the other hand, from a neighborhood perspective about the only thing worse than a bunch of empty garages would be a bunch of full garages, a silver lining brought about by malfeasance on the part of the IDA, which approved the parking deal before conducting an economic feasibility study. Also, aides to Mayor Bloomberg tell Gonzalez that neither the city nor the IDA is responsible for backing the bonds.

The garages, however, were exempted from rent and taxes unless they turned a profit, so taxpayers probably shouldn’t expect a return on their investment. More than anything, Damiani sees those empty buildings as an ugly monument to the misplaced priorities of the Bloomberg administration, whose legacy of environmental stewardship and progressive transportation policies will be undercut by acres of new parking across the city.

“This community didn’t need thousands of parking spots,” says Damiani. “I have run out of adjectives to describe how bad this is.”

The transformations visible from the side of the highway also include shuttered factories that would be redeveloped as 1,200 units of new housing under a proposal by former City Council Speaker Gifford Miller. On a tour I took of the Sheridan and Hunts Point areas last night, the scent of hot dogs still hung over one former frankfurter factory that would be replaced with apartments and a new school.

The tour was part of the public process for a federally funded study currently being undertaken by the Department of City Planning. The study is meant to augment the state Department of Transportation’s analysis of a Sheridan teardown by comprehensively and holistically imagining the potential redevelopment, parkland, and street improvements should the highway be torn down. The City Planning officials leading the tour were clearly already immersed in those possibilities, pointing out the properties and intersections that would be most affected by a highway removal, usually highlighting the positive.

Below are some photos I took on the tour, running roughly from the northern end of the Sheridan to the southern end.

At the very northern end of the Sheridan, the highway turns into East 177th Street, a local road. Behind the chain link fence immediately to the left of the highway is a future entrance to the Bronx River Greenway, due to open in May. As long as the highway remains, pedestrians and cyclists using the greenway will have to navigate across the exiting traffic.

One block further north, the ongoing construction of the greenway is visible through a fence.

The Bronx River itself, seen here from East Tremont Street, is lush and green at this point in the summer. This location marks the southernmost sighting of José the Beaver, the first of his species seen in New York City in 200 years and a sign of the environmental rehabilitation of the river.

West Farms Road, which runs adjacent to the Sheridan, is largely developed with light manufacturing uses, along with a few small residences. Under a proposal by former City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, now a real estate developer, much of the road, including this site just across the street from the Sheridan, would be rezoned for larger-scale residential uses with ground-floor retail. Miller’s plans will be included in the city’s Sheridan study, said tour leader Vineeta Mathur, as the knowledge that someone already wants to redevelop the area is relevant to any plan for the neighborhood’s future.

Sheridan study project manager Tawkiyah Jordan told tour participants to imagine this building full of families who might want better air quality and more access for their children to the parkland across the highway.

A few blocks west of the Sheridan, large apartment buildings are the dominant building type. Next to the highway, it’s mostly one-story industrial uses.

Right now, the only connection to Starlight Park, which is currently being completely reconstructed, is across a single bridge over the Sheridan at 174th Street. When the new park opens, it will be a major amenity for the neighborhood, though one relatively hard to reach.

From the 174th Street Bridge, you can look directly down onto the Sheridan. This photo was taken at roughly 6:50 p.m. Traffic was still crushed on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, but light on the Sheridan.

This car parts salvage yard is surrounded by the Sheridan on one side and freight tracks on the other. Jordan noted that if the Sheridan were removed, it would suddenly be connected to the neighborhood, completely changing its development possibilities.

Here, an off-ramp from the Sheridan runs freely onto local streets, without a stop sign or traffic light to slow traffic. Two more one-way streets merge with the off-ramp to create what Mathur called extremely dangerous conditions for pedestrians. Half a block back from this intersection is a playground.

After crossing over the Sheridan, we walked through Concrete Plant Park, a major piece of the Bronx River Greenway. An active concrete production facility until 1987 and a brownfield afterwards, the site was transformed into a beautiful park, complete with salt marshes at the riverside and a boat launch. The state DOT is currently trying to connect Concrete Plant Park and Starlight Park with another stretch of greenway using eminent domain and bridges over train tracks. At the southern end of Concrete Plant Park, however, the greenway dead-ends directly into Bruckner Boulevard and the Bruckner Expressway.

The interchange between the Sheridan and Bruckner Expressways is at the heart of the state DOT’s plans for the area. Whether or not the Sheridan remains, the state DOT is planning a series of improvements to the Bruckner at this location to allow traffic to move more smoothly. A new off-ramp from the Bruckner will allow trucks to exit directly to the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, which handles 60 percent of all New York City’s food, potentially providing truckers an alternate route instead of using the Sheridan and then local streets.

To cross onto the Hunts Point peninsula from the nearest subway station requires crossing six lanes of traffic in each direction. These cars are about to enter the on-ramp for both the Bruckner and the Sheridan. Drivers, ready for the highway, floor it. The pedestrian crossing time appeared to be about thirty seconds long. Long-time Hunts Point residents and workers on the tour said this crossing was a consistently terrifying scramble.

Along Hunts Point Avenue, construction is underway for a planted median that will be part of the South Bronx Greenway. The median will add greenery to the neighborhood and have a traffic calming effect. Some hope that it will dissuade trucks from using this street, which is not a truck route, to get to the market.

Trucks at the Food Distribution Center are visible behind Hunts Point Riverside Park, illustrating the central challenge of the Sheridan area. The city does not want to reduce truck access to the food market, which employs 10,000 people directly, tens of thousands more indirectly, and feeds the city. Many of those trucks currently use the Sheridan. The city hopes that the needs of the market and of the neighborhoods can both be met, as at this park.

All photos: Noah Kazis

New York City agencies will study a much broader area when evaluating the potential removal of the Sheridan Expressway. The city's study will also go far beyond a transportation analysis to include a more holistic look at the benefits of new development for the area. Image: NYC DCP

When the state Department of Transportation studied removing the lightly-used Sheridan Expressway, it considered two scenarios. One predicted conditions with the Sheridan kept as is. The other imagined closing the highway to traffic without making any other changes — simply fencing off the 1.25 mile structure.

Making a decision about the Sheridan’s future by comparing a traffic-carrying highway to an empty-but-still-standing highway was clearly inadequate, so with the help of a federal TIGER grant, New York City has launched a comprehensive and holistic study of the area. The new study includes not only an expanded transportation analysis looking at the area’s broader highway system, but also issues like access to the Bronx River, which is cut off from neighborhoods by the Sheridan, and the development of housing and jobs. That study is now well underway, and after some initial bumps, advocates for replacing the highway with new development are feeling encouraged.

So far, the city has already hosted an introductory meeting of the large working group set up to bring together stakeholders like elected officials, local activists and residents, businesses and city agencies. Walking tours of the neighborhood are being next Thursday and on August 20 (you can register by e-mailing sheridan_hp@planning.nyc.gov). The Department of City Planning has also set up a website to provide updates on the study and put information about the project in one location.

Ashwin Balakrishnan, the coordinator of the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance, acknowledged the broad scope of the study so far. “If you’re just looking at it from a transportation perspective, as the state DOT was, you’re not going to have any benchmarks or expertise for how it’s going to be benefited by other land uses,” he said. Including agencies like the Department of Parks and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which are both now part of the working group, provides “more expertise and more breadth,” he said.

Even the city’s transportation analysis, said Balakrishnan, should improve on the state’s efforts. Whereas the state studied only the Sheridan itself and two interchanges on the Bruckner Expressway, the city is studying a number of other highway exchanges as well as local roads near the Sheridan and the Hunts Point market. That means the city can study, among other alternatives, whether trucks headed to the market from New Jersey could take the Major Deegan to the Bruckner and then use new off-ramps headed directly to the market — planned whether the Sheridan is removed or not — rather than the Sheridan. Moreover, the state’s data are eight years old, while the city is collecting new data now.

Perhaps most encouragingly, the DCP website promises that the city’s plan will include “a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of different options incorporating traditional and sustainable measures.” So the high cost of maintaining a highway will figure into the city’s calculations, with the social and economic benefits of new housing, jobs or parks figuring into the other side of the ledger.

That said, Balakrishnan also worried that the un-quantifiable benefits of replacing the Sheridan with development — things like better walking access to the river, which one might lump together under “quality of life” improvements — could still get short shrift. “The things that are harder to study are often devalued,” he said.

When the study and community outreach were just beginning a few months ago, advocates were less impressed with the city’s approach. As reported on Mobilizing the Region yesterday, early outreach efforts gave little emphasis to features like the new off-ramps to the Hunts Point market. Those off-ramps and other highway improvements, which are part of all remaining options for the area, are essential to maintaining business support; the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center directly employs 10,000 people and the cluster of food businesses surrounding it tens of thousands more.

The DCP website also originally claimed that 160,000 vehicles used the Sheridan each day; the correct count, now displayed, is only 35,000. Those kinds of errors have been corrected, however, in response to feedback from the SBRWA. Now, said Balakrishnan, the city’s “general tone seems very open.”

Is it really more important to keep this empty highway -- shown at rush hour -- than to build much-needed housing and parks? Photo: TSTC

The fight over the future of the Sheridan Expressway, a stub of a highway that Robert Moses built but never finished, heated up this week. The construction industry announced its opposition to any Sheridan teardown in a Crain’s op-ed this Sunday, days before experts at a Municipal Art Society panel forcefully made the case for replacing the underused roadway with housing and park space.

“I don’t think that grade-separated highways really have a place in the city,” said John Norquist, the former mayor of Milwaukee and president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, at the MAS panel.

Norquist pointed to the revitalization of his city when it tore down the 0.8 mile Park East Freeway — Fortune 500 company now has its headquarters one block from the former elevated highway — and recounted how the predicted traffic woes never materialized. In neighboring Madison, he noted, the major job centers of the state capital and the University of Wisconsin both sit on a narrow isthmus. “There’s no freeway there, and somehow they get home,” said Norquist. “They make it.”

Joan Byron, who has worked with the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance on its plans for the Sheridan for years, offered some local context. Right now, the Sheridan is so lightly used that you can safely stand in its middle lane during the evening rush hour. State DOT plans to build new ramps connecting the Bruckner Expressway directly to the busy Hunts Point market — which has 11,000 truck trips in and out each day — will happen regardless of whether the Sheridan is torn down or remains, she pointed out, making the Sheridan that much more superfluous.

Instead of searching for ways to get more value out of the land that the little-used highway occupies, those who are fighting to keep it in place “are determined to make the Sheridan useful, come what may,” Byron said.

The opposition to the teardown added to their ranks this week, however, as Denise Richardson, the head of the powerful General Contractors Association, took to the pages of Crain’s to press her case for keeping the Sheridan. Richardson’s column assumed that the Sheridan is essential the keeping Hunts Point market, an important job center, in New York City. “The Bronx and the city cannot afford to lose more blue-collar jobs,” she wrote. “Instead of spending limited capital dollars to tear down the Sheridan, let’s allocate adequate resources to maintain the state’s transportation network and the jobs it supports.”

Curiously, Richardson did not mention construction spending or construction jobs — the top issues for her members — in either her column or in an interview with Streetsblog.

Richardson’s argument is based on the presumption that without the Sheridan, increased congestion will make trucking through the Bronx unaffordable. “There’s a very significant concern that the truck traffic that will be created will make the costs significant,” said Richardson.

However, there is no reason to think that such congestion fears would actually materialize. First of all, previous highway removals simply haven’t had that effect. When New York’s West Side Highway or San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway were removed, for example, there weren’t any long-term negative traffic impacts.

In the case of the Sheridan, a State DOT analysis did find that removing the Sheridan would snarl traffic in the area. But subsequent analysis showed that the study was riddled with errors. Half of the alleged benefit of keeping the Sheridan, it turned out, was due to mistakes in entering the data.

To really have a sense of what effect tearing down the Sheridan will have, we’ll have to wait for New York City’s study of the area to be complete, which should happen around February 2012, according to Byron. That study, a holistic look at both transportation and land use funded by a federal TIGER grant, will gather new traffic data and hopefully provide a more reliable picture of how traffic moves through the area.

Byron also pointed out that the bulk of Hunts Point market truck traffic are smaller vehicles delivering food to bodegas or restaurants across the city. “They need to get to Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx,” said Byron. “The Sheridan doesn’t benefit them at all.”

A plan to put the Bronx's Macombs Road on a road diet won unanimous support from CB 4 last night. Image: NYCDOT

DOT’s plans to improve pedestrian safety along the length of the Bronx’s Macombs Road [PDF] received a unanimous vote of support from Bronx Community Board 4 last night, according to District Manager José Rodriguez. The plan puts Macombs on a road diet and reconfigures dangerous diagonal intersections that lead to drivers taking fast turns across the crosswalk.

Currently, Macombs is a wide road with low traffic volumes, a recipe for high speeds. To make matters worse, the curvy road is characterized by irregular intersections that allow turning drivers to remain at high speeds; at some, the gentle angle makes turns more like full-speed forks in the road.

The redesign will slow cars turning from Macombs onto Cromwell Avenue. Image: NYCDOT

As a result, 102 people were injured in traffic crashes along Macombs’ roughly ten blocks between 2005 and 2009: 69 motor vehicle occupants, 26 pedestrians, and 7 cyclists. One person was killed in 2008 at the intersection of Macombs and Goble Place.

DOT’s proposal would remove one lane of traffic from Macombs in each direction. That extra space would go toward a new median (sometimes a physical island, sometimes painted stripes), as well as wider parking lanes.

At certain intersections, DOT will add additional features. At Cromwell Avenue, for example, DOT will install a new pedestrian triangle to slow turning cars and shorten crossing distances. A neckdown will also force drivers traveling southbound on Macombs to actually make a turn onto Cromwell, rather than simply heading straight onto it at speed as Macombs turns left.

A new triangle will also be added at Featherbed Lane, where drivers have a similarly free right turn.

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz is hoping that a new hotel can replace excess parking near Yankee Stadium. Photo: Crain's.

As the operator of the taxpayer-financed Yankee Stadium parking garages heads toward default, there’s no longer any question that providing so much parking in such a transit-rich location was a mistake on the scale of Carl Pavano’s contract. The decision to give up $2.5 million in city taxes and $5 million in state revenue has proven a poor investment indeed. The question, at this point, is what comes next.

One idea, from Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., is to convert one of the garages into a hotel. “One of the older garages is perfect for hotel development,” said John DeSio, a spokesperson for Diaz. Diaz advocated for a new Bronx hotel in his State of the Borough address two weeks ago, saying that “a new hotel would create hundreds of good-paying jobs offering health benefits, pension plans, and a chance for its workers to have a better life.”

While the garages were built on what used to be public parks, the South Bronx is unlikely to see that parkland return. “We have to come up with a plan that not only benefits the neighborhood but is palatable for the bondholders,” explained DeSio. The bondholders will have to okay any new use for the garages, so it will have to be a revenue-generator.

In terms of parking policy more broadly, DeSio said that while there aren’t any major developments where parking is an issue currently being considered by the borough president’s office, “I’m sure that we’d have to take to heart what happened here in the future.” (Plans for a new East Bronx mall anchored by a Target are too preliminary to comment on for now, he said.) DeSio also suggested that the private sector will notice this high-profile case of wasting resources on providing an excessive supply of parking.

Photo: Crain's

Anyone could have seen the deal was a loser from the start — that a sports stadium served by subways, buses and a new commuter rail station, a stadium that would have fewer seats for fans, would have no need to increase parking stock by 55 percent. Then there was the dirty business of seizing public parks, and counting on the fact that the garages would attract drivers year-round — drivers who would be willing to pay more to park at the stadium than at the nearby Gateway Center mega-mall — to an area that neither wanted nor needed more car traffic. It was a scheme so predictably wrong that no private developer wanted any part of it.

Among those privy to the nuts and bolts of the deal, it seemed the only ones oblivious to the fact of its eminent failure were former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion and the folks at the New York City Industrial Development Agency, the financing arm of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. In an act of blind faith or incestuous backroom dealing — take your pick — the IDA issued well over $200 million in triple tax-exempt bonds to the non-profit (ha ha) Bronx Parking Development Corporation to build and operate the garages.

Four years later, as Crain’s reports, the garages are a bust — with “more competition than any party involved anticipated,” they “were never more than 60 [percent] full on game days.” Bronx Parking is expected to default on the bonds, and the neighborhood has thousands of unused parking spaces where there was once public parkland.

The potential irony has some in the community seething.

“Our community loves its parks, and we could always use more,” said Pastor Wenzell Jackson, chairman of Bronx Community Board 4, which includes the stadium and the surrounding area. “Now there’s just empty parking garages that are not benefiting the community.”

Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. and others are hoping to draw a hotel to the area, which would presumably make use of some of the excess stadium parking. Bronx Parking officials, meanwhile, blame cheaper rates at Gateway Center, and “Metro-North and its new train station … which the company said is reducing the number of cars — the very purpose for building the station (with public money).” But not everyone considers more traffic a solution.

“The first step should be to reconsider how they’re using these parking lots,” said Lourdes Zapata, senior vice president of SoBro, the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corp. “Looking at them exclusively for parking is a shortsighted way of looking at development in this area.”

“Shortsighted” — a generous word for a billion-dollar subsidy based on a foundation of extortion and cronyism, rather than sound economics and community interest.

SBRWA will make a presentation about the state DOT’s two plans for the Sheridan and Hunts Point area, one of which would tear down the Sheridan and one of which would keep it in place. Afterward, participants will break into groups to discuss the details of each proposal.

The federal government gave the teardown option some momentum when it provided a $1.5 million TIGER II grant for the city to create an official land use plan for the area, something that could help make the state DOT realize the potential benefits of redeveloping the land now occupied by the Sheridan. Now local activists need to organize to push the teardown option over the finish line.

Tonight’s town hall will be held at 6:00 p.m. at the East Bronx Academy for the Future, 1716 Southern Blvd. Food and childcare will be available.

City Planning will decide whether to let this 44th Street parking garage buck the Clean Air Act and store 90 more cars than currently allowed by law. Image: Google Street View.

With two days until the City Planning Commission votes on the parking-heavy Riverside Center mega-project, the commissioners had a chance yesterday to ask any final questions about the project before the vote. As it happened, they didn’t bring up parking at that section of the meeting, but parking was a hot topic elsewhere on the commission’s agenda, including a pair of requests for special permits to build more parking below 60th Street.

First up, though, was an example of more enlightened planning: Courtlandt Crescent, slated to be the next development in the South Bronx’s much-heralded Melrose Commons revitalization project. This 217-apartment project, which will also house a 10,000 square foot child-care center, will include 29 spaces for cars, according to Department of City Planning staffer Vineeta Mathur. Courtlandt Crescent will also have parking for 110 bicycles.

When planning commission member Angela Battaglia wondered why there was so little car parking included, chair Amanda Burden responded, “It’s expensive. As you know, it would affect the affordability.” Battaglia then agreed that the affordability levels were indeed admirable.

Next was a request for a special permit to build a 42-space garage on the ground floor of a downtown office building. The building, located at the corner of Water and Broad Streets, is going to be the new home of the New York Daily News, and the News is requesting the garage so that its reporters and photographers can quickly get in a car and drive off to cover a story, according to DCP’s Grace Han. The garage would convert an existing loading bay and an under-used mailroom.

The desire to use ground floor space for a parking garage stands in sharp contrast to the Downtown Alliance’s new vision for Water Street, which calls for remaking the entire length of the corridor to put pedestrians first and revitalize street life. That vision has started to take shape with a DOT pedestrian plaza at Water and Whitehall Streets [PDF].

The final item was another special permit for a parking garage, this time a public garage on West 44th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. The garage currently is allowed to hold 260 cars but often stores more and has been cited for doing so by the Department of Buildings, according to DCP’s Erike Sellke. The garage, which exits onto 43rd Street across the street from an elementary school, is applying for permission to hold up to 350 cars.

Both Manhattan lots require a special permit because no new off-street parking is allowed in Manhattan south of 60th Street without one, in order for the city to comply with the federal Clean Air Act. But special permits are nearly always granted, weakening the effectiveness of the regulation. Things got so bad that a lawsuit recently forced the city to crack down on special permits and put a hard cap on the number of off-street spaces in the Hudson Yards area on Manhattan’s Far West Side. As part of the settlement, the City Planning Commission stated in city law that limiting the amount of off-street parking is an important component of “creating an area with a transit-and pedestrian-oriented neighborhood character.”

The West 44th Street lot is just one block away from the Hudson Yards area. Will the same logic apply?

The Sheridan Expressway runs only 1.25 miles between the Cross-Bronx and Bruckner Expressways. This option, one of two remaining alternatives, would remove it entirely. Image: NYSDOT

At a public meeting last night, the state Department of Transportation released a traffic analysis of the proposal to tear down the Sheridan Expressway, the Moses-era "highway to nowhere" that separates Bronx residents from the Bronx River waterfront. The main conclusion appeared to bode poorly for the plan to replace the highway with housing and parks: According to the state DOT, removing the Sheridan would force traffic onto local streets.

In response, advocates for transportation reform and environmental justice warned about potential flaws in the methodology behind DOT's traffic analysis. They also questioned the assumptions behind the agency's impending environmental review, which won't take into account any of the benefits of what will replace the Sheridan. The Tri-State Transportation Campaign's Kyle Wiswall called the DOT's environmental analysis "an exercise in futility" that "seems to be engineered to reach a preconceived result" -- keeping the highway in place.

For years, the state DOT has been studying ways to improve the highway system near Hunts Point, a regional food distribution center that's a hub for truck traffic. Currently, trucks travel onto the peninsula via local roads, destroying the quality of life for area residents even as the many highway interchanges in the South Bronx -- the Sheridan, the Major Deegan, and Bronx River Parkway all run between the Cross Bronx and Bruckner Expressways -- snarl highway traffic.

Thanks in large part to a sustained advocacy campaign, under the umbrella of Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance, the teardown option has gradually gained momentum and entered the official discussion of what to do with the Sheridan.

The DOT has now narrowed their proposal down to two possibilities. In some ways, they are identical. Both would add an exit on the Bruckner that could connect more directly to Hunts Point, intended to keep truck traffic off local streets. Near where the Bruckner meets the Sheridan, it briefly narrows from three lanes to two, before widening again; both plans would add a lane on that segment to eliminate the bottleneck.

But the difference between the two plans is a big one.

One would keep the Sheridan Expressway in place; the other would remove the highway altogether. That would be the first highway teardown in New York since the West Side Highway was removed in the 1970s and 80s. The state DOT will make a final choice in early 2012, according to Gill Mosseri, the project manager with the consulting engineering team. 

The Sheridan is only 1.25 miles long and serves as a redundant connection between the Cross-Bronx and the Bruckner. The Major Deegan connects the two only four miles west of the Sheridan, while the Bronx River Parkway connects them less than a mile east of the Sheridan. The Cross-Bronx and Bruckner merge directly only two miles east of the Sheridan. The Sheridan is so underutilized that on some days you can safely stand in the middle of the highway at rush hour. 

With the highway gone, 28 acres of newly available space could be put to use as badly needed affordable housing or parkland. The Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance's community-based plan would replace the highway with 1,000 units of housing and a greenway along the river, creating an estimated 700 jobs.

The Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance plan to replace the Sheridan with housing, retail, and open space.

That analysis may not stand, however. "We're going to get the underlying data and pick it apart," said Kyle Wiswall. "The last time we did that, we found errors in both the inputs and the outputs." Coding errors and faulty assumptions about how traffic would grow marred earlier traffic predictions, he said.

Though activists haven't yet had a chance to look at the DOT's model, Joan Byron of the Pratt Center for Community Development pressed DOT representatives last night about "the meta-assumption that traffic will increase no matter what."

Mosseri responded that the department was using the model recommended by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (the region's federally designated planning body), which assumes that traffic will increase with population. 

The DOT now begins preparing an environmental impact statement for each proposal, with drafts expected to be released in early 2011. Because the EIS includes categories like "visual resources," "land-use and social conditions," and "environmental justice," you might expect that document to look more favorably on park space and housing than on a highway. That's not what the EIS is likely to do, however.

Claiming that there isn't any official plan for what would replace the Sheridan, the DOT and their environmental consultant argued that they can't factor in any benefits of what would replace the highway. "You just lose the Sheridan," said Guy Lamonaca, the project engineer with DOT. "Maybe you put up a barrier, you put up a fence."

In other words, said Wiswall, in the analysis, "the removal isn't a removal. It's a highway left to rot." 

By not assessing any benefits of highway removal, DOT is putting a finger on the scales, argued Byron. She worried that keeping the Sheridan will end up the department's preferred alternative because DOT's assumptions will lead to the conclusion that "having a highway is better than not having a highway."

Byron called on the New York City agencies which would have authority over the freed-up land if the Sheridan is torn down -- City Planning, Parks, DOT, and the Economic Development Corporation -- to intercede with the state DOT and assure them that the land wouldn't be allowed to lie fallow. "It's their prerogative to insert themselves into this debate," she said.

A rendering of plans for Lafayette Avenue, with a planted median, standard painted bike lanes, and amenities along an expanded sidewalk. Image: NYCEDC

The redesigns of Lafayette Avenue and Hunts Point Avenue, as well as new waterfront park space at Hunts Point Landing, will all begin construction this summer, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Those streets will receive landscaped medians, expanded sidewalks, and new bike lanes. Work on Food Center Drive, which will include the first physically protected bike lane in the Bronx, is scheduled to begin this fall.

Implementation is close enough that people are getting excited about each construction truck that comes to the area, even though so far the crews are just doing regular road maintenance, said Miquela Craytor, the executive director of Sustainable South Bronx and a longstanding advocate for the greenway. 

Construction of the Randall's Island connector, which will eventually tie the South Bronx Greenway into the Manhattan bike network, is scheduled to begin in fall 2011, according to EDC. Adding a biking and walking path from the South Bronx to Randall's Island will give residents better access to the island's recreational facilities and provide a safe route to the new bike lanes planned for First and Second Avenue in Manhattan. When the connector is finished, said Craytor, the greenway will be between a quarter and a third complete.

What's about to be built differs somewhat from the original plans for the greenway, first put forward in 2006. In particular, plans to place pedestrian and bike paths along a median on Lafayette Avenue have been revised, with space for biking and walking shifted to the side of the street at the request of the Fire Department and the Department of Environmental Protection.

"We ended up putting quite a bit of that streetscaping to the sidewalk and expanding the sidewalk," said Craytor, noting that the center median will remain planted with trees and shrubs. She isn't particularly disappointed. "We successfully pushed back and ensured that the concept of slowing down traffic and narrowing the street was increased," said Craytor. "This will be an area for people, not vehicles."

More pictures below the fold:

The Randall's Island Connector, running underneath an AMTRAK trestle, will create a new link to bike or walk between the South Bronx and Manhattan. Image: NYCEDC

New public space at Hunts Point Landing, at the southern end of the Hunts Point peninsula. Image: NYCEDC

Opposition to expanding the highway was widespread. Community activists, city officials, and electeds -- including Congressman Jose Serrano -- condemned the proposal as a threat to redevelopment planned for the Harlem River waterfront. Transportation advocates warned that the project would attract more traffic, negating the promised reductions in congestion.

By choosing the rehab-only option, the agency will save somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million. NYSDOT had previously set aside $266 million for the expansion option in its five-year capital plan. And the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, which collected dozens of public comments opposing the proposed ramps and lanes, reported yesterday that NYSDOT had pegged the full cost of the expansion project at $343 million. The rehab-only project, by comparison, will cost an estimated $170 to $200 million, said Levine.

Here's one suggestion for where to invest some of that savings: Tear down the Sheridan.

More lanes, or more housing and parks? Image of proposed Deegan Expressway widening: NYSDOT. Image of the community plan for a de-commissioned Sheridan Expressway: SBRWA.

The DOT is considering tearing down the little-used Sheridan, a decision that would clear trucks off local streets and make room for housing, shops, and parks by the Bronx River. But the capital plan sets aside just $2 million for the project. As advocates said in testimony today, that's only enough cash to muddle through the studies already underway.

To repeat: The capital plan includes $266 million to widen a highway in an asthma-choked area of the Bronx, and $2 million for a project that could dramatically improve neighborhoods pummeled by truck traffic. Addressing a State Senate committee today, advocates made the case for a different approach.

"We call on the NYS DOT to reinstate funding for the Sheridan project by reducing the size and scope of the Major Deegan Expressway project," said the South Bronx River Watershed Alliance in a written statement. "With scarce resources, the agency must do a better job of prioritizing transportation investments that promote the safety, health and well-being of New York City residents."

The Tri-State Transportation Campaign submitted detailed commentary on the full capital plan, which you can read here. Here Tri-State explains why the New York State DOT, which doesn't expand highways to the same degree as other DOTs, still has a weakness for widening certain types of roads.

NYS DOT often plans large or over built rehabilitation projects under the guise of "bringing the roadway up to modern design standards." While certain modern design changes can help improve safety, spending millions of dollars, in some cases hundreds of millions, to simply widen interchanges, intersections, or build additional lanes does not make sense. Such projects often do little to solve congestion in the long-run, and come with very high price tags at a time when we have no money to waste.

Mr. Bloomberg, tear down this highway. A vision of West Farms Road with housing and shops instead of the Sheridan Expressway. Image: South Bronx River Watershed Alliance.

The headlines after last week's mayoral contest weren't kind to the winner. "NY Voters Seen Wanting More Humble Bloomberg," proclaimed Reuters. "Bloomberg Sweats Out Third Term," wrote the Post. The incumbent's slim margin of victory points to two major takeaways from campaign season in New York City: 1) Mayor Bloomberg is seen as out of touch with everyday New Yorkers, yet 2) was reelected, grudgingly, because the electorate thinks he is doing a decent job.

First up: Publicly support the removal of the Sheridan Expressway as a green jobs program.

First up: Publicly support the removal of the Sheridan Expressway as a green jobs program. This highway is a redundant, little used stub running through the Hunts Point community of the South Bronx. For nearly a decade, advocates in the South Bronx River Watershed Alliance (including the Pratt Center, Nos Quedamos, Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, The Point, Sustainable South Bronx, and my organization, Tri-State Transportation Campaign) have called on the New York State DOT to remove the highway. Doing so would create 700 permanent jobs and hundreds of construction jobs, improve access to the Bronx River, and open up 28 acres for parks and affordable housing.

Bulldozing acres of parks for the new Yankee Stadium gave the impression that the mayor was more willing to help out developers than the average Bronx resident. Removing the Sheridan would help pay back that debt, and fit naturally with the Mayor's long-term sustainability agenda, PlaNYC 2030.

Next, the Mayor should commit to boosting New York City's funding for public transit.

During his campaign, Bloomberg announced an ambitious mass transit proposal. Like any good campaign document, the plan would improve the quality of life in all five boroughs, especially neighborhoods underserved by transit, like eastern Queens. But few of the proposals are under the mayor's control and all of them require money. At a press conference last week, Bloomberg indicated that he doesn't intend to boost city funding for MTA operations. He should reconsider. If the mayor wants support from the MTA, he must increase support to the MTA.

Third is to prioritize space for buses on city streets. The mayor should do all he can to ensure timely implementation of bold Bus Rapid Transit projects, as called for in PlaNYC, and help the Port Authority deal with the rogue buses that are increasingly affecting communities like Chinatown and Hell's Kitchen. Better management will unclog the streets and improve the customer experience. (Believe it or not, those people lined up with their luggage on the sidewalks waiting for the Megabus are voters, too.)

Existing efforts to use city highways in a way that benefits working people in the outer boroughs should be preserved and expanded. Last year, the state DOT caved to politicians and started allowing cars with two or more passengers in the Staten Island Expressway bus lane. This is not only illegal (the lane was approved for buses only, not cars), but also hurt bus riders who are now slowed by greater congestion in the lane. Similar bus lanes should be put in place on highways throughout the city, a boon for New York's car-free households, which make, on average, less than half as much as households with cars.

And finally, the mayor should recognize the work of NYCDOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan by ensuring that she continues in her post for four more years. Sadik-Khan has become one of Bloomberg's key spokespeople for PlaNYC. Her message about greening the planet with small changes to city streets resonates with the young, diverse population struggling to afford life in New York. In two-and-a-half years, Sadik-Khan and her staff have transformed a frustrating city agency whose biggest victory was speeding cars through Midtown into an international model for results-based sustainable transportation policy.

Mayor Bloomberg is already known as a skilled manager who gets things done. With a little effort, he can use transportation to expand his legacy as a leader in sustainability who stood up for the working people of New York.

When it opened its doors this spring, the Gateway Center mall was plugged as a boon to the South Bronx. So invested was the Bloomberg administration -- along with city taxpayers, thanks to subsidies granted by the NYC Economic Development Corporation -- that the mayor himself participated in the grand opening of the center's Home Depot store.

In modeling the sprawling complex on the typical suburban big box slum, developer Related Companies seems to have made a tactical error. From a Times piece featuring Related honcho Glenn Goldstein:

Mr. Goldstein said that Related originally expected about 40 percent of the mall’s customers to arrive by public transportation, but so far a majority of customers had been traveling this way. Livery cab service is available for shoppers who make bulky purchases, and some stores, like Best Buy and Home Depot, provide delivery for a fee.

Who would have thought that a shopping center served by subway lines and city buses would attract so many transit-riding customers? Not Goldstein and company, whose 2,800 parking spots are proving to this point to be a lot of wasted space (likely in part because parking isn't free). Unfortunately, Related went all in with its auto-driven design by making entrance points unwelcoming to shoppers arriving on foot, as shown in these Streetsblog photo pool contributions from Jacob-uptown. Imagine how many more people would walk here if they had actually made this a walkable environment.

More pics, with commentary from the photographer, after the jump.

"The walkway is pitiful. Barely wide enough for two people standing still, much less walking past each other. It's sad how much space is dedicated to the horribly underused car entrance and how little space is given to pedestrians."

"Ped route to the big box stores through the parking garage."

"The awful mall actually has some nice wide sidewalks, perfect for vendors, street performers and all sorts of activity. Too bad they're under a highway."

Here's a scenic shot of the Sheridan Expressway in the South Bronx during the evening "rush," courtesy of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and the advocates behind the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance. Even in the peak direction, reports Tri-State's Steven Higashide, the Moses-era relic is barely used at all:

The gaps in the traffic weren’t quite long enough for a sit-down picnic, which is too bad because the South Bronx is sorely lacking parks and other places for families to recreate and relax. The needs of the area and the light traffic are just two of the many reasons why the Alliance is calling for a teardown of the 1.2-mile Sheridan, and why NYSDOT is studying it. A demapped Sheridan could be replaced not only with open space, but also affordable housing and mixed-use development.

The State DOT is scheduled to decide the fate of this huge piece of riverfront real estate by 2012. Acting Commissioner Stanley Gee was in the news this week for agreeing to expand 1.2 miles of the Staten Island Expressway, under pressure from borough politicians. It's hard to see where any pressure to preserve the Sheridan would come from.

Photo: Getty via Daily Intel

Among the outcomes so far: The conversion of 15 percent of the taxi fleet to clean-fuel vehicles, the construction of 79 new playgrounds, $100 million a year to increase the energy efficiency of government buildings, 20 pilot projects to clean up city waterways, hundreds of miles of new bike lanes. Ninety-three percent of the 127 initiatives are under way, Mr. Doctoroff said.

"The biggest achievement of them all," he said, is a greenhouse-gas inventory showing a 2.5 percent reduction in citywide carbon emissions, "at a time when greenhouse gases in cities around the nation continue to increase."

There is little doubt that PlaNYC is an ambitious and noble undertaking, despite the failure of congestion pricing -- which Doctoroff rightly cites as a direct cause of the current MTA funding crisis. But it seems a little specious to brag about reductions in greenhouse gas emissions when the Bloomberg administration has continued to vigorously promote VMT-inducing suburban-style parking, a contradiction not lost on City Room commenters like Chris, who writes:

What’s most frustrating is how Bloomberg and his advisors fail to make some very basic connections between their policies, for example working for modest transit improvements while promoting development that is very parking-intensive. Bronx Terminal Market is a prime example of this. Big box development with considerable parking availability which will do exactly what it is designed for- bring more cars, congestion, and pollution into the city.

So give credit where credit is due, but so many people wish Bloomberg would connect the dots.

Indeed. Even as he lobbied for PlaNYC and congestion pricing, Doctoroff himself was a prime mover behind the Yankee Stadium parking deal and greenhouse gas catastrophes like the Gateway Center. There's the legal battle waged by the administration to bring some 20,000 parking spots to Hell's Kitchen. And just last week Bloomberg celebrated the opening of driving-intensive commercial development at the Gateway project -- one day after announcing a new "green" buildings initiative. In fact, when asked point blank by Streetsblog about the connection between more parking and more driving, the mayor either didn't understand the question or chose not to address it.

Chris believes there's something "far more complex than just ignorance" at work here. We agree. The question is, will the Bloomberg administration safeguard the progress of PlaNYC by reversing its disastrous parking policies?

We've got a few more details about another local ped-bike project getting a lift from stimulus cash. The street improvements announced for Hunts Point and Port Morris in the Bronx will fund the first three sections of the South Bronx Greenway. This project has been years in the works. When complete, it will bring 11 miles of pedestrian and bicycle paths to neighborhoods where places to play and bike are scarce, and where childhood asthma and obesity rates run high.

"This is extremely helpful moving these projects forward in a time of fiscal crisis," said Miquela Craytor, director of Sustainable South Bronx, which has been instrumental in shaping the project and shepherding its progress. "It's a big win for South Bronx communities that have been underserved for so long."

The three segments include Lafayette Avenue, a connection to Randall's Island, and access to Hunts Point Landing. The Sustainable South Bronx web site has a handy map of the full project [PDF].

Westbound exits at the Sheridan Expressway rank third worst, White Plains Road, fourth, and Westchester Avenue, 11th among all the awful choke points in America.

Decommissioning the Sheridan happens to be one of two options being considered by New York State DOT to improve truck access to Hunts Point and its huge wholesale food markets (currently, trucks exit the Sheridan and make the last leg of their trips on local streets). Without the Sheridan, trucks would get to the markets via a new exit off the Bruckner Expressway. The other option also entails constructing the Bruckner exit, but would preserve the Sheridan as a truck route.

NYSDOT is in the traffic analysis phase of evaluating each alternative. If traffic flow is the name of the game, then chalk up another reason to tear down the Sheridan: It would ease congestion on the country's most clogged-up highway. Of course, there's also the 28 acres of land for riverfront public space, housing, and commercial development that a teardown would free up.

The Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance is the leading advocate for the teardown option, called the "New Community on the Sheridan Plan." Getting NYSDOT to consider highway removal in its EIS has taken some serious advocacy, said SBRWA's Melanie Bin Jung, and there's more to come. NYSDOT is expected to release its final EIS for the project next year, and select the final option by 2012.

Image via Crain's

The garden started the project over the summer, paying $13 million to design the facility and acquire the site at the intersection of Webster Avenue and Bedford Park Blvd. in the Bronx. Since then, everything was put on hold, leaving a big hole in the ground.

To complete the parking garage, executives at the garden have set their hopes on the stimulus plan expected soon from Washington. They are asking for $20 million—the remaining amount needed—and have been put on Mayor Bloomberg’s list for federal stimulus money. 

Though more people are visiting the garden, revenues are down. Apparently management believes more parking will bring more money. So why not take that $20 mil and instead use it to improve the streetscape from nearby bus and subway hubs, making for a more pleasant walking experience?

Instead of taking a transit-oriented approach to boosting the garden's bottom line, the new garage will bring more cars, which will lead to more air pollution and other attendant dangers for the people of the South Bronx. And once again, if the mayor has his way, taxpayers will help foot the bill.