“The governor should finally reorient the state’s transportation policy around reducing vehicle miles traveled and giving all New Yorkers better, safer, more affordable options to get around and get ahead.”
Last century, Robert Moses rammed the Cross Bronx Expressway through East Tremont, destroying homes, dividing neighborhoods, and saddling the Bronx with some of the worst air pollution in the country. But Moses didn’t act alone. The expressway reflected a broader political consensus that treated Bronx communities as expendable in service of regional highway traffic.
Now, New York bureaucrats are preparing to repeat the same mistake. State transportation officials are preparing to widen America’s most notorious highway. What would be terrible transportation policy on its own is made worse by the simple fact that the Bronx, then as now, is overwhelmingly a community of public transit riders.
In the west Bronx, barely one-third of households have cars. As a whole, the Bronx depends more on bus service than any other borough, in a city with the nation’s largest bus ridership and slowest service. The subways run south to Manhattan; traveling east and west requires boarding a slow, unreliable bus to climb hills and cross rivers. The need for better transit could not be clearer…