After years of wrangling, advocates, businesses, and elected officials have gotten behind a city plan to convert the Sheridan Expressway into a boulevard and take trucks off local streets by building direct ramps from the Bruckner Expressway to Hunts Point. Now it's up to the state to turn the plan into reality, and the first step is funding an environmental impact statement for the new ramps. For help, Bronx advocates are looking to similar projects across the state.
Earlier this year, the State Senate included $3 million in its budget proposal for the study, but it did not survive budget negotiations. Advocates are hoping the ramp project will be included in state DOT's next five-year capital plan, due to be released in October at the same time as the MTA's own capital plan. Inclusion in DOT's document would help line up funding for the environmental study.
If Bronx advocates are successful in securing funding for the EIS, it would build upon the city's analysis last year, which estimated the cost of ramps connecting the Bruckner with Oak Point Avenue at $72 million. The city's study included only two ramps, for traffic going to and from the east, but advocates want the state to study four ramps, for access to both eastbound and westbound Bruckner.
For that study to happen, advocates have to convince the Cuomo administration's DOT of the importance of the Sheridan project. In 2010, DOT rejected a complete teardown of the Sheridan. The city's own study last year came to a compromise position that advocates have embraced. To build support for the new vision and spur action from the state, Bronx-based advocates are turning to highway teardown efforts in New York's other major cities to build a statewide coalition.
Last month in Albany, the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance and Assembly Member Marcos Crespo hosted a forum with invited speakers from Albany, Buffalo, New York City, Rochester, and Syracuse, where highway teardown projects are either being implemented or studied.
“It helps us elevate what’s going on in the Bronx," said David Shuffler, executive director of SBRWA member Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice. "It’s not just one neighborhood.”
The coalition is now looking to engage with the state DOT to develop standards and a process for how highway removal could work across New York state. Veronica Vanterpool, executive director of SBRWA member Tri-State Transportation Campaign, said the groups are looking to host a larger forum this fall in Rochester. That city is represented by both the Senate and Assembly transportation committee chairs and has a federally-funded highway teardown in progress.
"One of the things we need to do is create the political will at the state to make action," said Bronx Council Member Maria del Carmen Arroyo. “It’s important for us to... work with community advocates in other areas of the state that are facing similar challenges.”
