COURIER L 4 IFE, JANUARY 24-30, 2020
BQ-WHY?
Civic gurus cast doubt on mayor’s
revived streetcar proposal
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 so-called
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
renderings show the Brooklyn Queens Connector
on Berry Street. Illustration by NYCEDC
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 longsuffering
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.