A commercial street in Staten Island will be widened under a city plan to gobble up pedestrian space in the borough's already car-dominated South Shore next year, but officials' hopes of easing congestion on Amboy Road could backfire when the larger roadway ends up attracting even more drivers.
The $24-million reconstruction of Amboy Road, covering less than a half-mile between Richmond and Armstrong avenues in Eltingville, will double the street's width from 40 feet to 80 feet to expand it from one lane each way to two, according to Department of Transportation plans dating back a decade.
Officials are dusting off those early de Blasio-era blueprints and have begun re-marking the street and sidewalks for the new outlines, the Staten Island Advance reported last week.
Local street safety advocates said the revamp pours public funds into an outdated plan that will just fuel more traffic on the island, as widened roads have done for decades.
"When we’re trying to be more responsible about the greenhouse gases that New York City produces, we’re investing in roadway widening. I think it sends a backwards message," said Rose Uscianowski, Staten Island organizer with Transportation Alternatives.
Long and winding road
Amboy Road is a windy nine-mile corridor between Richmond Town in the middle of the borough and its southern tip at Tottenville, and most people in the area commute by car. But some locals nevertheless accused the city of giving in to auto-centrism rather than offering better transportation options, including walking, biking and mass transit.
"It’s really antiquated planning," said Paul Medvetsky, a resident of nearby Great Kills and an incoming urban planning graduate student at NYU. "I don’t believe that they’re offering any sort of reconfiguration of bus service to take advantage of this widening."
The Department of Transportation started working on the design to broaden the 0.4-mile stretch even before the launch of Vision Zero in 2014, and unveiled its proposal later that year, before amending it in 2021 to include a couple of offshoots of the street.
The strip is largely commercial, lined with parking lots for stores and auto body shops that dump cars on the crumbling sidewalk.
The plans would not only widen Amboy Road, but also also install a raised median and enhanced pedestrian crossings at intersections, which officials say would create a "Town Center" environment.
"The primary objective of this capital project is to address traffic congestion and safety issues along the corridor while improving vehicular and pedestrian access to commercial and community facility uses and to enhance the corridor as a commercial destination," reads the most recent available version of the plan from 2021.
That plan also mentions making Amboy Road more attractive as a "transit center," but makes no reference to enhancing transit.
The city's discussions to expand the Rock road go back to at least 2008, when DOT blamed its single-lane configuration for congesting the corridor with motorists who "frequently queue behind slow moving vehicles, turning vehicles, and buses."
One local pol said the changes were long overdue, saying they would allow for "smoother traffic."
"It has long been a clusterfudge of decades of sporadic planning and paving approvals," local Council Member Joe Borelli told Streetsblog. "This is allow for smoother traffic and safer intersections.
"I would have went for six lanes," Borelli added.
Research has shown that building out car infrastructure only triggers more driving, a phenomenon planners call induced demand. DOT did analyze the effects of its widening in 2014, but declined to share its findings with Streetsblog.
Sidewalk incursion
A wider road for drivers will cut into existing pedestrian space, as the recent white paint markings on the future construction corridor make clear. People passing through Amboy told Streetsblog Tuesday they were incensed about the impending revamp.
"It’s crazy. As a guy in a wheelchair, it’s nerve-wracking to cross the street," said a man who just gave his name as Joe. "Now that they’re expanding the road, I’m more in danger to get hit by a car with more car traffic coming this way."
"There are so many cars here in Amboy Road and it’s a bit of a concern to see the city’s plan to widen the street," added Melanie Castillo. "I see how it can bring more cars and even cause accidents."
The plan is part of DOT's "Citywide Congested Corridors Project" (see a list of those initiatives in the agency's library), where the agency studied ways to reduce congestion and improve air quality at trouble spots in all five boroughs during the early to mid-2010s.
The projects got funding support from the U.S. Department of Transportation's Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program, which supposedly funds public works "that reduce emissions from transportation-related sources," although the Staten Island changes will likely spur more gas guzzlers.
The feds bizarrely seem to advocate for more road building, noting on their program's website that "[l]ane mileage has increased slowly while highway travel has increased rapidly, resulting in a relatively static surface transportation system which is causing increased congestion."
Nearly two-thirds of commuters in the southern section of Staten Island already drive, according to data crunched by Transportation Alternatives and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The project doubles down on that trend rather than improve public transportation along Amboy, as the city has admitted that it will grow the number of cars, writing the overhaul will "enhance both [the roadway's] capacity to handle current and projected traffic," according to a 2022 eminent domain filing [PDF].
That's without any benefit to mass transit riders, who rely on the Staten Island Railway, which runs within blocks of Amboy for most of its length, or the nearest bus lines traveling east to west nearly a mile away over on Hylan Boulevard.
DOT noted that it analyzed the traffic effects of the widening in its initial plans, (see page 138) but did not include any findings of said analysis in that report.
It's not the first time officials leaned into more roadways for the Rock in the hopes of cutting congestion.
The Port Authority, at the behest of local lawmakers, last year launched an $8.3-million study whether to widen the Outerbridge Crossing to New Jersey.
The project is being undertaken by DOT and the Department of Design and Construction, and it is set to start construction next spring. The DOT declined to respond to repeated questions about this project, but DDC spokesperson Ian Michaels said the project is still undergoing a final design. He did not address further questions as to why the agency thought it was a good idea to widen the road.
Additional reporting by Gersh Kuntzman and Jackie Zamora