Fourteen North Westchester Municipalities Join Tappan Zee Transit Coalition

11:42 AM EST on January 24, 2012

The 14 members of the North Westchester Energy Action Consortium called on Governor Cuomo to include transit in the plans for the Tappan Zee Bridge. Image: NWEAC

Governor Cuomo, your neighbors have something to tell you.

A consortium of 14 Westchester municipalities, including Cuomo's own village of Mt. Kisco, has passed a resolution calling on the governor to put public transportation back into the plans for a new Tappan Zee Bridge. As reported in Mobilizing the Region, the North Westchester Energy Action Consortium, which is made up of governments representing 230,000 residents, wants transit on the Tappan Zee from the start.

Joining a resolution first passed by the village of Hastings-on-Hudson, the 14 municipalities argue:

1) The State has data and feedback from over ten years of study and 280 public meetings that indicate that transit needs to be part of the Tappan Zee replacement project
2) Developing public transportation is vital to “relieving congestion in the Corridor and local arterials, improving air quality, achieving sustainability goals, reducing dependence on fossil fuels, improving pedestrian safety, and improving motorist travel time, in Westchester and New York State”
3) “Residents of Hastings-on-Hudson and other communities in the TZB service area would be burdened by many years of unnecessarily increasing traffic if transit infrastructure is not included in the TZB Replacement”
4) “Westchester County is planning its own Bus Rapid Transit (“BRT”) routes along Central Avenue which would benefit by and become more effective by eventually interconnecting to BRT or other public transportation on the TZB”

These 14 villages, towns and cites are just the latest to join the fight for transit across the Tappan Zee. Calls to include transit have already come from both the Westchester and Rockland county executives; the mayors of Nyack, Tarrytown and Elmsford; and Greenburgh's town supervisor. In the legislature, two local state senators and three assembly members have signed on to support transit on the Tappan Zee.

The newest official supporters of Tappan Zee transit are:

Bedford
Cortlandt
Lewisboro
New Castle
North Castle
North Salem
Ossining
Pound Ridge
Somers
Yorktown
City of Peekskill
Village of Croton-on-Hudson
Village of Mt. Kisco

Noah Kazis

Noah joined Streetsblog as a New York City reporter at the start of 2010. When he was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox. Before coming to Streetsblog, he blogged at TheCityFix DC and worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Toledo, Ohio. Noah graduated from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the class politics of transportation reform in New York City. He lives in Morningside Heights.