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BROOKLYN WEEKLY, JANUARY 26, 2020
BQ-WHY? BQ-exciting
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
They’re BQ-exasperated!
Downtown civic gurus are questioning
the sanity of Mayor Bill de
Blasio’s recently-resurrected pet
project to build a $2.73 billion trolley
along the Brooklyn and Queens
waterfront, arguing that dedicated
bus lanes would be more effi cient
and cost about $800 million less.
“Why are we moving forward
with something like this when we
could cover the entire city with a
network of busways for roughly
the same amount of money or a lot
less,” said Brian Howald at Community
Board 2’s Transportation
committee meeting on Thursday.
If de Blasio has his way, the socalled
Brooklyn Queens Connector
— a joint project between the
Department of Transportation and
the Economic Development Corporation
also known as the BQX—
would run on a rail line above
ground from Red Hook to Queens.
But while bus lanes may be
cheaper, a senior city transit honcho
argued that bus lanes would
fail to qualify for the federal New
Starts grant — which offi cials
hope would could foot half the cost
of the scheme at $1.4 billion.
“We’re looking to get New
Starts funding, but we couldn’t
necessarily apply that to this sort
of smaller-scale bus priority,” said
Christopher Hrones, who heads
up the project for the city transit
agency.
The light rail project was originally
supposed to pay for itself
through tax revenue from an estimated
rise in property value along
the tram line, which offi cials euphemistically
called “value capture”
— but its projected costs later
grew, and planners shortened its
route from 16 to 11 miles, forcing de
Blasio to concede that his big idea
would need to go halfsies with Uncle
Sam.
Kings County Congress members
have previously warned that
the city shouldn’t hold its breath
for a federal windfall — and another
community board member
echoed similar sentiments at
Thursday’s meeting.
“I really doubt that the Federal
Transit Authority or the Trump
Administration is going to pay 50
percent of the course,” said Ernest
Augustus.
The project seemed to derail after
a contentious Council hearing
last May — but the tram reared its
head again with a snazzy new website
at the beginning of the year,
along with a new timeline.
The two agencies want to fi nish
an environmental impact study by
fall of 2021, but they don’t expect to
break ground until 2024 and wrap
the project by 2029 — eight years
after de Blasio leaves offi ce.
The project has been subject to
frequent criticism because large
parts of the proposed route are already
covered by the G train and
the B62 bus — although the subway
juts inland through Bedford-
Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill, and
the bus doesn’t extend beyond
Downtown to the south and not as
far north into Queens. The trolly
would, however, provide a crucial
link to long-suffering Red Hook
straphangers.
Transit reps repeatedly emphasized
that they will study alternatives,
such as expanding the city’s
Select Bus Service along the trolley
route, which they’re required
to analyze to be eligible for the federal
grant.
Preliminary fi gures by EDC
already said last may that a bus
would be far cheaper and carry the
same number of people.
“We found with an apples-to-apples
comparison that you only see
a capital costs saving of 30 percent
by doing bus rapid transit versus
light rail or streetcar,” said the
agency’s executive vice president
Seth Myers, casually downplaying
an estimated $800 million in taxpayer
savings at the May Council
hearing.
Although the tram would snake
its way through some of the wealthiest
neighborhoods in both boroughs,
city reps emphasized connecting
New York City Housing
Authority residents as a sweetener,
but one community board member
pushed back, saying the trolley
would just create another mode
of transport for mostly wealthy,
white New Yorkers, as has been
the case with the mayor’s other
major transportation project, the
heavily-taxpayer-subsidized ferry
system, the Post reported.
“We’ve had studies already
about the ferry system and they
say mostly white people take the
ferry, and black don’t,” said Ester
Blount.
The city released a cache of snazzy
renderings to drum up support for de
Blasio’s trolly scheme
Illustrations by NYCEDC
new details
on Blas’s
trolly
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
Offi cials with the Department
of Transportation
and the Economic
Development Corporation
presented new details regarding
the mayor’s $2.73
billion trolly project, the
Brooklyn Queens Connector,
at a meeting of Community
Board 2’s Transportation
Committee on
Jan. 16, including changes
to the proposed route and
how the city would rejigger
streets to accommodate
hizzoner’s widely criticized
transit scheme.
The BQX would have its
own tracks separate from
traffi c on 90 percent of its
11-mile route, running
in both directions on the
same streets.
Berry Street in Williamsburg
and Court
Street Downtown, would
share at least one of the
two tracks with regular
traffi c.
The tram will run along
the center of Atlantic Avenue,
taking over two driving
lanes between Columbia
and Court streets. To
compensate, the city would
eliminate metered parking
along the Atlantic Avenue
section of the route to
accommodate traffi c.
DOT would ban cars
from Willoughby Street between
Adams and Bridge
streets by converting it
into a “transit-only” thoroughfare
for the BQX.
A stretch of the route
along Flushing Avenue
from Navy Street through
to the Clinton Avenue gate
of the Navy Yard, including
the entrance to the recently
opened Wegmans
grocery emporium, will be
converted into a one-way
traffi c lane westbound.
The agency plans to install
substations about the
size of shipping containers
along approximately every
mile of the route, to convert
electricity from the
grid into the tram’s overhead
wires.
Civic gurus cast doubt on mayor’s revived streetcar proposal