South Bronx

In the wake of the city's refusal to consider removing the Sheridan Expressway, advocates from the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance gathered last night at a town hall meeting to revise their game plan. Although the long-term vision of removing the highway lives on, the discussion focused on other potential improvements along the Sheridan corridor.

Last month, the Bloomberg administration unexpectedly ruled out the option of removing the Sheridan Expressway and replacing it with housing and parks, telling South Bronx advocates that added truck traffic projected for local streets was a "fatal flaw" in the highway teardown. After a closer look at that truck traffic analysis, however, the coalition calling for the highway removal says the city overlooked some obvious options to keep trucks off neighborhood streets.

The Bloomberg administration has abruptly ruled out the possibility of tearing down the lightly-trafficked Sheridan Expressway and replacing it with mixed-use development, jobs, and parks. Neighborhood advocates and electeds are vowing to fight the decision, which they say fails to follow through on the comprehensive analysis the city promised to conduct as part of a $1.5 million federal grant.

In case you're just tuning in, all that taxpayer-subsidized parking built for the new Yankee Stadium has failed beyond anyone's wildest expectations.

When taking a tour of the Sheridan Expressway, the first thing you realize is that you're also taking a tour of the Bronx River Greenway. The two pieces of infrastructure -- one a 1.25-mile stub of highway, the other a still-piecemeal bike and pedestrian path reconnecting Bronx neighborhoods to the water -- both run through the low river valley. The greenway and the cleaned-up river, products of decades of community activism, are signs of the incredible revitalization of the South Bronx.

The fight over the future of the Sheridan Expressway, a stub of a highway that Robert Moses built but never finished, heated up this week. The construction industry announced its opposition to any Sheridan teardown in a Crain's op-ed this Sunday, days before experts at a Municipal Art Society panel forcefully made the case for replacing the underused roadway with housing and park space.

DOT's plans to improve pedestrian safety along the length of the Bronx's Macombs Road [PDF] received a unanimous vote of support from Bronx Community Board 4 last night, according to District Manager José Rodriguez. The plan puts Macombs on a road diet and reconfigures dangerous diagonal intersections that lead to drivers taking fast turns across the crosswalk.

As the operator of the taxpayer-financed Yankee Stadium parking garages heads toward default, there's no longer any question that providing so much parking in such a transit-rich location was a mistake on the scale of Carl Pavano's contract. The decision to give up $2.5 million in city taxes and $5 million in state revenue has proven a poor investment indeed. The question, at this point, is what comes next.

In news that should surprise no one, the taxpayer-financed Yankee Stadium parking garages have been declared an unmitigated disaster.