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Freeway Removal Hits a Roadblock in the Bronx


Jun 20, 2012

By Sarah Goodyear

Read More: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/com...ck-bronx/2327/

Reports of the death of the Sheridan Expressway have been greatly exaggerated. For years, neighborhood advocates have been pushing for the removal of this elevated freeway in New York City’s South Bronx, and it looked like they had a decent chance of winning their fight to replace the aging structure with parks, housing, shopping, and reconnected streets. The Sheridan has been something of a poster child for the increasingly popular concept of urban freeway demolition. It was number two on the Congress for the New Urbanism’s list of “Freeways Without Futures,” and it made the Urban Land Institute’s short list of potential teardown projects as well, in part because of a federal TIGER grant that was awarded to New York to study options for the future of the 1.2-mile strip of asphalt, options that explicitly included removal.

But the city announced this month that it will no longer consider tearing down the road, which carries only about 30,000 vehicles per day (surrounding roads see as many as 127,000 vehicles per day). Instead, the focus will be on rehabilitating the highway. Responding to questions from WNYC’s Transportation Nation, a city official cited concerns about truck traffic headed for the nearby Hunts Point Produce Market, the city’s main wholesale outlet for fruits and vegetables, as well as other potential traffic problems. Veronica Vanterpool of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign says that the coalition of advocates for removal, the South Bronx River Watershed Alliance, will push to get the city to reconsider. "All of us in the larger South Bronx community are very disappointed," she says. "We thought it was very shortsighted. It’s really incongruent with many of the progressive transportation policies that Mayor Bloomberg has been promoting." Vanterpool points out that the administration is subsidizing the relocation of the grocery delivery service FreshDirect to the Bronx, even though that will mean increased truck traffic for the borough.

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