‘Hear Us,’ The Community Said, BUS TERMINAL continued from p. 1
ment in the project. The determination by members of Community Board 4 (CB4), along with local and state elected officials, has reshaped what began as a contentious conflict. Chelsea Now sat down with Betty Mackintosh, who is heading up CB4’s PA Working Group, and Christine Berthet, co-chair, CB4 Transportation Planning Committee, to gain an understanding of the current status of the PA terminal expansion, and to learn what the future may hold. To recap, the Hell’s Kitchen community was rocked back on its heels this past spring when the PA announced the planned expansion of its bus terminal, now located between Eighth and Ninth Aves., from W. 40th to W. 42nd Sts. Without seeking input from elected officials or CB4, the PA proposed using eminent domain — the process by which the government takes control of private property for public works — to seize blocks of buildings, which would upend lives and destroy neighborhoods. CB4 mobilized into a force that included local and state elected officials. They held a Town Hall meeting attended by the PA, which then withdrew its initially released designs and presented a new competition for architectural ideas. Only one of the five winners of the PA’s next design competition included eminent domain in its concept, but the community was still not invited to participate in the process. The cost would be anywhere from $3 billion to $15 billion. Community leaders and elected officials boycotted a September meeting to review the five competition winners, citing continued lack of community involvement on the PA’s part. That’s when change happened. With representatives from each state, the PA New York/New Jersey Working Group was formed by the PA following the boycott. The eight New York members of the PA’s NY/NJ Working Group are: US Congressmember Jerrold Nadler, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, NY State Senator Brad Hoylman, NY State Assemblymembers Richard Gottfried and Linda Rosenthal, City Councilmember Corey Johnson, Community Board 5 Chair Vikki Barbero, and CB4 Chair Delores Rubin. Those five winning designs are now being used for the information they provide, but none of them are likely to be built as presented.
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November 17 - 23, 2016
Image by Patty Gouris, courtesy CB4 Hell’s Kitchen Working Group
Hell’s Kitchen South (area outlined in red) is being assessed by CB4 in order to identify land owned by the PA, community facilities, affordable housing, and historic properties to highlight what’s at stake regarding PA’s bus terminal expansion.
Fast forward to the present and our sit-down with CB4’s Mackintosh and Berthet. (Chelsea Now emailed the PA’s Government and Community Relations representative, Michael Lavery, to request an interview; a press representative replied, stating Lavery was not available to speak on the topic of the PA’s Working Group and the planned bus expansion.)
WHAT’S AT STAKE
According to the PA’s website, on any given weekday 220,000 passengers pass through the PA bus terminal, during 7,000 bus movements. By 2040 the number of passengers is estimated to increase by 35-51%, to about 337,000 passengers each weekday. The West Side bus terminal, built 65 years ago, will not be able to handle this increased capacity. It can barely manage the hundreds of thousands of people it has passing through today, and an increasing number of buses are overflowing onto the streets, parked in lines along the curbs of Hell’s Kitchen. As Betty Mackintosh stated, “The CB4 district, which is larger than our study area, has the third worst pollution in
the city according to the New York City Department of Health.” All agree that something has to be done to deal with the increased population density, a greater number of daily commuters and buses, and more travelers using more long-distance buses. “The congestion in this neighborhood is double what the average is in the city,” Berthet said. The fact that representatives of New Jersey will now sit at the same table with representatives of New York to resolve the two states’ transportation problems together is a major breakthrough. Busrelated facilities could be in NJ as well as NY; the staging of buses that travel into the city could be resolved together. It has also become clear that what’s at stake is greater than the expansion of one bus terminal. The PA released its own Trans-Hudson Commuting Capacity Study in September and noted that the demand placed on the PA bus terminal could be reduced by the implementation of other transportation initiatives. Among these initiatives are the Gateway Program that would increase track, tunnel, bridge, and station capacity — eventually creating four
mainline tracks between Newark, NJ and Penn Station, NY, with a new two-track Hudson River tunnel. Expanded TransHudson Ferry Services and a Number 7 subway line extension to Secaucus, NJ are also under consideration. “The study depicts a system where the bus terminal is just one piece,” Berthet noted. “The system goes into the Lincoln Tunnel, all the way to 495, where the buses are lining up and coming in. If you are going to double the size of the bus terminal, if you don’t double the size of the Lincoln Tunnel, what are you going to do? The whole system needs to be scaled up at the same time. From the community’s standpoint, it’s very important where the terminal is — but then from a transportation point of view, let’s not build an enormous terminal if the structure is not scaled appropriately. The PA is starting to understand that it needs to think as a system. I think this is a very big step in the right direction.”
CB4’S FOCUS ON THE NEIGHBORHOOD The PA owns the bus terminal’s land, .com