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BROOKLYN WEEKLY, FEBRUARY 23, 2020
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
The city should not waste
$2.73 billion on Mayor Bill de
Blasio’s recently-revived Brooklyn
Queens Connector trolley —
also known as the BQX— and instead
spend the city’s resources
to improve the buses of transitstarved
Red Hook, residents
said at a local outreach meeting
on Feb. 13.
“I think it’s a fi asco, a monumental
potential waste of money
when in fact there are far more
effi cient modes of transportation,”
said John McGettrick, a
co-chair of the Red Hook Civic
Association. “We currently
have inadequate bus service
with the B61, putting this there
would be more of an impediment
and make that bus service
even worse.”
The city’s Department of
Transportation and Economic
Development Corporations —
the agencies partnering on the
project — held a workshop featuring
maps of the proposed
trolly route from Red Hook to
Queens, along with reps who
took questions and feedback
from locals, ostensibly to help
improve the city’s designs for
the controversial transit project.
But one common piece of advice
locals offered the city was
to abandon the scheme in favor
of a more cost-effi cient transit
system, although advocates are
skeptical that offi cials will heed
their suggestions.
“At all of these meetings
we’ve said, ‘We don’t want this
and why are you doing this,’ and
they just said, ‘Oh we’re doing
this we’re moving forward, help
us make it better,’”said Alyce
Erdekian, who’s attended numerous
meetings regarding the
BQX since it was announced in
2016.
Civic gurus offered similar
critiques at a Community Board
2 meeting held in Downtown
Brooklyn last month, where locals
pleaded with offi cials to
build some form of Bus Rapid
Transit in lieu of the trolly,
which EDC’s own head said
would cost $800 million less at a
Council hearing last summer.
Some Red Hook residents
voiced their support for the project,
saying it’s a long walk to the
nearest subway station at Smith
and Ninth streets, which is only
accessible via set of long stairs.
“You have to walk all those
stairs, most of the time the escalator’s
broke. How does that
help seniors? With the BQX, the
seniors can step right on,” said
Frances Brown, head of the tenants
association for Red Hook
East, a NYCHA housing complex.
Brown is on the board of directors
of the BQX’s advocacy
group, Friends of the BQX,
which also boasts a host of business
and real estate bigwigs,
such as developer Jed Walentas
of Two Trees, who is in the
process of erecting skyscraper’s
near the proposed route along
A rendering shows what the BQX could look like. NYC EDC
the Williamsburg waterfront.
Red Hook marks a special
case because DOT offi cials previously
studied a streetcar from
there to Borough Hall, funded
by a $300,000 federal grant secured
by local Congresswoman
Nydia Velázquez in 2010.
Offi cials concluded that the
shorter trolley wouldn’t make
sense because it would be too expensive
to build and operate, not
draw enough riders, struggle to
fi t through Red Hook’s narrow
streets in certain areas, and because
of the city’s complex zoning
laws.
DOT’s press offi ce did not respond
to a request for comment
as to how it plans to overcome
the challenges presented by the
last Red Hook trolley study.
The city will hold one more
Brooklyn workshop in Williamsburg’s
Bushwick Inlet
Park on March 3, and plans to
complete an environmental impact
study on the project by fall
of 2021, but they don’t expect to
start building until 2024 and fi nish
by 2029 — eight years after
de Blasio leaves offi ce.
‘We don’t want this’
Red Hookers demand better buses instead of BQX
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