16 APRIL 18, 2019 RIDGEWOOD TIMES WWW.QNS.COM
MTA planning Qns. bus route shakeup
BY MARK HALLUM
MHALLUM@SCHNEPSMEDIA.COM
@RIDGEWOODTIMES
New York City Transit offi cials
addressed community board
chairs from across Queens
on Monday night about the eff ort to
revamp bus routes throughout the
borough in a modernization eff ort
designed to increase ridership
and reliability.
The officials called the effort a
“blank-slate approach” which will
fully assess all possible routes to meet
current and future travel patterns as
part of NYC Transit President Andy
Byford’s Fast Forward plan.
“It’s the largest bus network in
North America, we operate over
5,700 buses over 300 routes. The
problem is most of those routes
have devolved simply from the old
trolley network and as New York has
changed, as our world has changed,
we haven’t changed with it,” said
Darryl Irick, the president of MTA
Bus Operations. “We felt that this
was an appropriate time to hit the
reboot button, look at the entire
thing fresh.”
One example of this would be the
Q60 bus, which runs primarily along
Queens Boulevard from Jamaica to
midtown Manhattan. The route’s
southern terminus at Jamaica Avenue
once had a trolley barn where the bus
line now ends.
CB6 Chair Joe Hennessy, however,
was not enamored by the idea of
shaking up the bus network, claiming
the moving a bus stop even one block
could have profound impacts on the
lives of seniors with mobility issues.
Eugene Kelty, chair of CB7, said
he would like to see the concerns of
motorists included in the upcoming
process to re-organize the bus
network as opposed to only taking
into account the needs of riders.
But the agency does not plan to do
it without the help of communities,
according to the NYC Transit
representatives at the Monday
meeting at Borough Hall. there will be
a series of open house events where
they will hear recommendations
throughout May and June.
Six public workshops were held
in 2018 and surveys of 12 locations
have been completed; the MTA also
gathered data from more than 750
online surveys.
According to NYC Transit, as
the bus network has remained
unchanged for decades, Queens
continues to see sweeping changes
in Long Island City, Flushing and
Jamaica while congestion worsens.
The agency cited job growth
in Queens outside the range of
subway service as another reason
for an immediate need to take a
fresh approach.
The plan will also introduce more
comfortable and environmentally
friendly buses while increasing
bus priority for more efficient
commute times.
With Queens being the larges
borough by landmass, it also has 77
local and 30 express routes which
serve an average of 714,000 weekday
riders, according to the agency.
Local bus ridership alone declined
2.5 percent between 2016 and 2017
with speeds 3 percent lower than
they were in 2015 with an average of
8.9 miles per hour.
NYC Transit plans to have a
fi nalized plan of how the bus network
will look in the coming decades by
April 2020 with additional public
outreach planned.
Kew Gardens rallies against proposed jail
BY MARK HALLUM
MHALLUM@SCHNEPSMEDIA.COM
@RIDGEWOODTIMES
Kew Gardens residents doubled
down at an April 13 rally on
their opposition toward Mayor
Bill de Blasio’s plan to develop a new
jail in the community as part of a
criminal justice reform plan to close
Rikers Island in the next decade.
Hundreds gathered on the steps
of Queens Borough Hall to express
their objection to the proposal which
through the ULURP process will
build a 26-story jail facility behind
the Queens Supreme Court building
in Kew Gardens, on the site of the
Queens Detention Complex.
Dominick Pistone from the
Community Preservation Coalition
and a member of the Neighborhood
Advisory Committee was just one of
the speakers who lashed out against
the administration for restricting
meeting attendance and barring
journalists.
“For those of you who thought there
was supposed to be some community
input on this, you’re wrong,” Pistone
said. “From the beginning, Mayor
de Blasio’s plan was to site the jails in
places that had a courthouse and an
existing jail. It was never his intention
to seek input from the community
about the sites. In fact, the mayor
went so far as to say that since it’s
a representative democracy, the
representative can site the jail. Who’s
that representative? The mayor.”
Pistone was referring to a March
27 meeting which was closed to the
public but for several community
leaders in which de Blasio defended
himself against claims that he was
being “dictatorial” in his approach to
including communities.
At Saturday’s rally, Pistone pointed
out that the mayor had wanted the jail
to be seen as a community asset rather
than a burden, which the civic leader
believed to be a quizzical notion.
Andrea Crawford, an outspoken
member of the NAC, rejected the idea
that criminal justice reform should
include borough-based jails and
insisted that the bail system should be
abolished while more judges should
be hired so more defendants receive
speedier trials.
Candidate for Queens district
attorney Gregory Lasak was just one
of the speakers who opposed closing
Rikers and cited an incident where
convicted murderers were able to
escape from the Queens Detention
Center during its time in use.
“I dealt with the worst of the worst
for the last 39 years, I mostly dealt
with murderers. Back in the ’80s there
were two murderers that escaped
from the facility behind me. I was
in charge of investigating how they
escaped,” Lasak said. “They came out
of the sixth-fl oor dormitory, they had
fi re hoses and bedsheets and they
came down in the middle of the night
… These are not escape-proof jails.”
Lasak is a retired supreme court
judge who served in the Queens
district attorney’s office under
outgoing DA Richard Brown, who is
stepping down in June due to health
complications.
The facility at 126-02 82nd
Ave. would detain the majority of
incarcerated women in the city and
include a maternity ward. It will be
about 1.3 million square feet according
to the draft environmental review.
Tyler Nims, executive director of
the Lippman Commission convened
by former Council Speaker Melissa
Mark-Viverito to advise on the closing
of Rikers, told QNS in an interview that
the purpose of moving the jails to the
boroughs was to keep detainees not
only close to courthouses and reduce
travel time from the island, but also to
make family visitations easier.
A little-known organization
called Neighbors Against White
Supremacy made an appearance at
the rally handing out letters calling
opposition to the jail plan racist. An
individual who went by the name
Alexa Weitzman led the small counterprotest
of four people.
The NAC dismissed the group’s
accusation of bias.
Community Board 9 will host a
public hearing on the Kew Gardens
Jail plan at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April
24, at the Helen Marshall Cultural
Center in Queens Borough Hall, 120-55
Queens Blvd., Kew Gardens.
Dominick Pistone. Photo: Mark Hallum/RIDGEWOOD TIMES
/WWW.QNS.COM
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