For several years now, the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) has actively worked against the best interests of our community.
Several years ago, the DOT implemented “road diets” on both East Tremont and Harding avenues. According to Harding Avenue residents, the road diet has done nothing to reduce speeding, especially including the drag racing that occurs in the evenings. This could be deterred by traffic controls, but the DOT has refused to approve these. East Tremont Avenue is still plagued by the same double-parking that existed before the road diet, and motorists and cyclists continue to fight for the little road space available.
On top that, the DOT has gone on a spree removing on-street parking spaces from our community. Just recently, the agency took six parking spaces away from our busiest commercial district: the tri-intersection of Crosby, Westchester and Buhre avenues. To make matters worse, in the name of “safety,” the DOT placed boulders on the roadway to discourage motorists from parking in the newly designated “extended sidewalk.” Dangerously, some of the boulders even found their way outside of the designated sidewalk, creating an increased hazard for both pedestrians and motorists. No presentation made to Community Board 10 included the boulders.
Now, the DOT has removed even more parking spaces from our communities of Pelham Bay and Westchester Square as part of its “ride-share” program. The agency sent our District Manager Matt Cruz a list of dozens of businesses that it claims to have contacted about having Zipcar lease off-street parking spaces from. Zipcar does this in every other city where it operates. In true DOT fashion, the list included dozens of businesses with no parking lots, including Lehman High School and several local barbershops (we were not aware that Lehman High School and that some of our local barbershops had off-street parking spaces for rent). Unsurprisingly, the businesses with parking lots that were named in the agency’s list advised our district manager that neither the DOT nor Zipcar called them to discuss renting their off-street spaces.
In our many years of serving our community, the DOT’s borough office has normally been difficult to work with, but we are dismayed by the agency’s dishonesty. As of the time of writing this letter, no one from the agency has contacted us to explain why this situation happened.
Nevertheless, we will always fight for our communities. We will never willingly surrender on-street parking spaces that we know our residents and small businesses need. The DOT should instead focus on the dozens of traffic control studies that every community board requests, which almost always end in denial because they say “there weren’t enough vehicular incidents.” The DOT has forced all of these ideas onto us. Even when we offer input — as we did for the ride-share program — it was largely ignored, but that will not stop us from advocating on your behalf.
Joseph Russo is the CB10 chairperson; Robert Bieder chairs the CB10 Municipal Services Committee member; and Matt Cruz is the CB10 district manager.
