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May 23, 2011
The Tappan Zee Is Falling Down
Why is New York taking so long to replace a vital bridge?
City Limits
by Nicole Gelinas
Bruce Ratner's Brooklyn mega-project makes a cameo appearance in this in-depth look at the Tappan Zee Bridge's interesting past and perilous future.
The deeper problem behind all the delays, however, is not regulatory but political. When New York officials want to do something quickly, they don’t worry overmuch about legal niceties, public input, or possible court challenges. It took politicians little more than a year to comply with NEPA’s (National Environmental Protection Act) requirements for the Fulton Street transit center in lower Manhattan, for example—a project favored by Sheldon Silver, the powerful Speaker of the state assembly. It also took little more than a year to secure NEPA approval of extending the Number 7 subway line to the Far West Side of Manhattan, a project that Mayor Michael Bloomberg threw his political weight—and the city’s money—behind. The Atlantic Yards basketball stadium and housing project in Brooklyn doesn’t involve federal money, so officials didn’t need to deal with NEPA in that case, but they did steamroll over a similarly rigid state-environmental review process, inviting the state court cases that arose.
No politicians, though, have championed the Tappan Zee. That’s not surprising, since they wouldn’t get much out of it politically. It doesn’t offer affordable housing, as Atlantic Yards supposedly does. Nor does it open up vast new tracts of land to development and tax revenues, as the West Side extension is supposed to. And it isn’t a project funded by a pot of 9/11 money, as the Fulton Street project was (at least until costs exceeded those funds). All the pols will get for building a new Tappan Zee is complaints for years on end about construction and money—so that some future politician won’t have to watch a bridge collapse.
NoLandGrab: Unmentioned by Gelinas is the fact that we might have more dollars for bridges if we didn't squander boatloads of them on unnecessary arena boondoggles.
Posted by eric at May 23, 2011 10:15 AM