Sunday morning was the Tour de Bronx. An estimated 5,000 riders took to the streets. The highlight of the ride was the trip along a car-free Sheridan Expressway.
The South Bronx River Watershed Alliance, a coalition of community groups and citywide organizations believes that the 1.25 mile stretch of road along the Bronx River can and should be car-free every day of the year. According to Transportation Alternatives:
This little used highway consumes more than 28 acres of prime land in the course of its redundant path from the Bruckner Expressway to the Cross Bronx Expressway (the Bruckner and Cross-Bronx are directly connected to the east and joined by the Deegan Expressway to the west). If SBRWA has its way, the Sheridan will be replaced with higher and better land uses, such as housing, commercial development, parks and greenways.
Though removing a highway sounds like a big project, there are many precedents for such a change from across the country and around the globe. In San Francisco, the Embarcadero Freeway and the Central Freeway have been razed and redesigned as vibrant public spaces. Portland blocked the Mt. Hood Freeway and instead opted for building mass transit and creating a city more livable for its residents. Even Milwaukee demolished its Park East Freeway to provide 26 acres for new development downtown. These examples and the groundwork laid by the SBRWA set the stage and now key decision-makers in New York are taking notice.
SWRBA's community plan to remove the roadway is in the State DOT's environmental study, which will decide the roadway's fate and is expected to come out in 2006 or 2007.
AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparsteks journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.