Community Board 10 and the East Bronx Traffic Coalition will hold a meeting in Ferry Point to discuss traffic concerns with its residents.
CB 10’s Municipal Services Committee will be joined by leaders of the coalition, a consortium of civic groups concerned about traffic, in hosting the meeting at Monsignor Scanlan High School on Tuesday, June 9 at 7:30 p.m.
The discussion will center on Department of City Planning proposals for roads in Ferry Point that were released in a memorandum in August, said one of the event’s participatipants.
The goal is to engage the local community, said CB 10 vice-chairman John Marano.
“We don’t usually hear too much from the majority of the Ferry Point area, so we want to get everyone’s input,” said Marano.
CB 10 district manager Kenneth Kearns said that Marano and the committee chairman, Joseph Russo, spearheaded the meeting at the request of EBTC.
“The community board is trying to get (a reaction) to DCP’s suggestions, and then based on what happens at the public meeting, the coalition could then advocate as a group for what is in the best interests of the community,” said John Doyle of the EBTC.
“We helped the community board because we went out and we leafleted every house in Ferry Point to try to get the word out,” added Doyle.
Doyle said that he believes that this is the first public meeting in Ferry Point in four years.
Marano said that at the meeting the public would learn about DCP’s reactions to several suggestions that the board first suggested as part of its own Traffic Management Plan completed in 2013.
One of the those recommendations from 2013 was a slip ramp onto I-95 at St. Joseph’s Way that could allow trucks coming from Ferry Point’s industrial facilities to leave the community without going through residential areas.
“Right now they are going up Lafayette Avenue and making a left (I-695/Throgs Neck Expressway into I-95,” said Marano.
Even though large 18-wheelers are prohibited from most local streets, unless they are making deliveries, lack of police manpower leads to scant enforcement in practice, said the vice-chairman.
According to a draft of DCP’s findings obtained from a source, the proposal for a slip ramp onto I-95 may not work because of the presence of columns, grading and insufficient distance for accelerating onto the highway, but could work as a ramp or lane from the “Hutchinson River Parkway northbound service road at Lafayette Avenue leading motorists to the Bruckner Expressway lanes.”
Also on the agenda will be a recommendation to create a new access point for trucks into the Pepsi plant from the Hutchinson River Parkway Service Road to divert the facility’s truck traffic from Brush Avenue and local streets, according to Marano and the DCP memorandum proposed recommendations.
Other topics that could be discussed, which were part of the DCP memorandum, include:
•a recommendation to create another access point over Westchester Creek besides the Unionport Bridge
•maintenance and amenities for the triangular space under the Bruckner Interchange
•new “wayfinding” signage on roads around the approach to the Whitestone Bridge
