State And Feds Are Dumping Yet Another Giant Highway on The Bronx
More highways in the Bronx? No thonx!
Gov. Hochul plans to use federal money to build a mile-long, four-lane highway alongside the Cross Bronx Expressway — selling it as a "community connector" despite its environmental negatives for neighborhoods long plagued by the deleterious effect of putting cars over people.
Backed by a $150-million U.S. Department of Transportation Mega grant from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a billion-dollar highway reconstruction project in the South Bronx will expand the notorious Cross Bronx Expressway via the addition of a proposed bypass between Boston Road and Rosedale Avenue. The state is selling the proposed bypass, which is as big as a highway and meant to carry highway traffic while the state does repairs on the expressway for four years, as a "multimodal community connector" because diagrams show it with a bike- and bus lane — even though the MTA doesn't currently run any buses on the route.
"This is for drivers," said Nilka Martell, the founder of Loving The Bronx, a community organization devoted to environmental issues in the Boogie Down. "They're pulling the wool over the community's eyes. 'Hey bicyclists, we're going to give you lanes. Hey, pedestrians, hey folks in a wheelchair, look what we're doing.' It's disgusting that they're doing this. At the end of the day, this is not going to be friendly to the environment, and it's going to increase the air and the noise pollution. None of this is going to be beneficial to the community."