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February 23, 2010
Willets Point owners ramp up attack on city plan
Foes of the big redevelopment project have an interesting weapon on their side: the traffic engineer who helped derail the old Westway plan.
Crain's NY Business
by Erik Engquist
The traffic engineer who helped kill Westway, the massive West Side highway project proposed during the Koch administration, now has his sights set on derailing the city’s redevelopment of Willets Point.
Local property owners fighting the project are banking on traffic engineer Brian Ketcham’s study that shows two proposed ramps would increase traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway and have made it a key element of their lawsuit challenging the project’s environmental impact statement.
The Bloomberg administration has argued that the ramps are necessary to prevent a traffic nightmare at the site.
The original environmental impact statement, or EIS, showed the massive Willets Point project would generate heavy traffic, but a recent report on the proposed ramps showed a much sunnier picture. The ramp study—an “access modification report,” or AMR, which is technical documentation to support federal and state decisions on whether to approve the ramps—is being redone after Mr. Ketcham used traffic data from the environmental impact statement to demonstrate that the ramps would make a bad situation worse.
Posted by eric at February 23, 2010 11:22 PM