Chock the Deegan!

Cram This-

Next To This!
without leaving room for wider ramps
while adding perhaps 10,000 new residents

NYSDOT sought to spend $240-340 million to reconstruct the elevated I-87 Major Deegan Expressway segment --- widening its ramps to and from the north to 138th Street

Let’s continue to ignore the broadest segments of society:

- continue to settle for maintaining the wall of the elevated freeway, regardless of # of lanes
remains an elevated wall separating people from the waterfront
- continue to neglect motorists, particularly bus drivers and truckers by not bringing the lane widths
up to standard when we have the chance

Let’s make more of a traffic mess:

- don’t expand the 138th Street ramps
- then add 10,000 new residents and consequently many more vehicles there

Let’s hurt the South Bronx’s economic competitiveness

- chock Hunts Point by constraining the Deegan Expressway and its ramp capacity, especially while calling for eliminating the largely parallel Sheridan Expressway

All by allowing organizations which dogmatically oppose any highway expansion, and which almost always neglect calling for more advanced types of highway design for better harmonizing highways into the areas they pass through.

Manhattan’s East Side has its East River Drive beneath parkland
Manhattan’s West Side has its Miller Highway Tunnels beneath Riverside South boulevard
South Bronx’s Mott Haven gets to maintain its Elevated Deegan Expressway segment wall off its waterfront

Let’s treat the South Bronx like a series of afterthoughts

- first construct new high value waterfront real estate development bringing in 10,000 new residents
- leave precious little space for more capacious ramps, nor for lowering the wall, aka depressing and covering this segment of I-87 making such way more expensive then doing in coordination, such as done with Manhattan’s Riverside South

Don’t even dare consider an I-87 Deegan tunnel for Mott Haven

- that would be significantly easier and less expensive to coordinate rather then construct as an afterthought later
- that would eliminate the wall, allowing greatest local access to the waterfront
that would facilitate pollution reduction with the tunnel trapping emissions and equipped with filtration as done overseas
- that would reconcile industrial trucking access needs with more capacity and local waterfront neighborhood environments and with extra capacity serve to relieve the highly congested western Cross Bronx Expressway
- that could be funded with lobbying for future economic stimulus funds- in the spirit of the slogan ‘yes we can!’

but that would take months if not a few years more to plan out, hence delaying the new real estate development projects

Just continue to defer to organizations as the "Tri State Transportation Campaign" and Streetsblog, and the calaphony of lock-step march organizations so disdainful of highways they can’t suggest better designs, and that have steered the ‘debate’ along with a not very imaginative nor necessarily forthcoming NYSDOT hierarchy.

Illustrations: TSTC logo, Mark Gorton on bike and closeup

Rather its about some powerful entity wanting to build something and perhaps do so quickly perhaps before some pivotal figure’s death