Talk Bronx New York

Bronx Residents Are Joining WHEDCo and The NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene In Stepping Up and “Taking the Stairs!”

Kick-Off Event at Urban Horizons Focuses on the Health and Environmental Benefits of Stair UsageThe Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDCo), a community based non-profit organization dedicated to building a more beautiful and prosperous Bronx, is partnering with the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to host a kick-off event at Urban Horizons today as part of a campaign to promote stair usage in buildings across the City. The NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene selected WHEDCo’s flagship building containing 132 affordable apartments, Urban Horizons, to implement and evaluate a program to encourage residents of multi-family apartments to “Take the Stairs!” in an effort to improve fitness levels and conserve energy.

“Taking the stairs is great example of how staying fit can be a simple part of your everyday life,” said Dr. Karen Lee, the Health Department’s Deputy Director for Chronic Disease Prevention and Control. “Based on their commitment to community health initiatives and environmentally-friendly housing development, WHEDCo emerged as an ideal partner for us to explore ways to encourage stair usage and promote physical activity among residents in multi-family buildings.”

Calling on residents to “Burn Calories, Not Electricity”, the campaign addresses the current obesity epidemic in NYC and promotes environmental conservation simultaneously. As part of the program, stair prompt signs have been posted throughout Urban Horizons encouraging tenants to utilize the stairs instead of energy-wasting elevators. At today’s kick-off event residents will receive information on the health benefits of stair usage and other health and fitness resources. Fun fitness giveaways, including pedometers, coupons for free food at local farmers markets, and children’s bike helmets courtesy of the New York City Department of Transportation, will be available.

“WHEDCo believes that all families deserve a healthy and prosperous future and that all New Yorkers should support cutting back consumption of both calories and electricity.” said Nancy Biberman, WHEDCo’s president and founder. “We are thrilled to collaborate with The NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to promote health and fitness initiatives throughout Urban Horizons.”

WHEDCo staffers are joining Urban Horizon tenants in taking the stairs.

The NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene will provide stair promotion signage, free-of-charge, to any NYC building willing to mount the signs. Signs can be ordered by calling 311.

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Project Description

The MTA New York City Transit (NYCT), the New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT), and New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) are planning to introduce Select Bus Service (SBS) to New York. SBS will utilize innovative bus rapid transit elements that will improve the speed and reliability of bus service on the implemented routes.

Goals and Objectives

SBS Benefits Include:

• A new high performance transit option for NYC.
• Improve the speed, reliability and appeal of the bus system, city-wide.
• Provide measurable benefits to current customers as well as attracting new riders and supporting growth and redevelopment.

The goals of the study are:

• Identify the opportunities for SBS in NYC with the greatest potential benefits and the highest probability of successful implementation.
• Move a comprehensive, cost-effective city-wide SBS demonstration program into implementation.
• Improve those corridors not selected for the SBS demonstration by using techniques identified by the study.

Project Phases and Schedule

The first SBS corridor, Fordham Rd-Pelham Parkway  is expected to be implemented in the summer of 2008.

Major Planning Activities Include:

1. Identify strategic issues relating to SBS implementation in NYC;
2. Based on U.S. and world-wide experience, identify the range of SBS improvements that might work well in NYC;
3. Identify and evaluate all candidate corridors with SBS potential in New York City;
4. Select the 15 corridors with the highest probability of success and potential benefit; Project Update
5. Develop a preliminary concept plan for each corridor tailored to the market and physical environment in that corridor;
6. Select the best corridors and develop more detailed plans while identifying improvements that can be implemented elsewhere.
7. Comprehensive Project Reassessment.
8. Preparation of detailed plans for Fordham Road-Pelham Parkway Corridor.
9. Implementation of Fordham Road-Pelham Parkway Corridor.

• NYCSBS Main Page
• What is BRT?
• Public Involvement Process
• Project Team
• Keeping in Touch
• Project Update
• FAQs

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A Community Plan for the ‘Highway to Nowhere’

North of Westchester Avenue, where the Sheridan now runs on grade, the Community Plan would create 1,200 new homes with retail and community space below. Open space would enable residents of Longwood and West Farms to easily reach the Bronx River and the new and redeveloped parkland of the Bronx River Greenway.

Sheridan ramp traffic menaces pedestrians and subway riders and interrupts the Westchester Avenue commercial strip

Removing the Sheridan would allow development of a retail and community hub at the intersection of Whitlock and Westchester Avenues, linking the Number 6 train stop with the station designed by Cass Gilbert for the New York and New Haven Railroad.

For 10 years, South Bronx residents have been fighting to get the state to tear down an old expressway so that a greener and more sustainable mixed-use neighborhood can take its place. The community’s vision fits nicely with the goals of the city’s long-term sustainability plan, PlaNYC2030. But will the city embrace this precocious community-based effort?

The Highway to Nowhere

South Bronx residents have fought for a decade to cast off the shadow of Robert Moses’ Sheridan expressway — a 1.25-mile, little-used stretch of highway locally known as “the highway to nowhere.” In its place they aim to build more than 1,000 sustainable and affordable apartments, greenways, parks, resident services and progressive businesses that will offer living-wage, long-term jobs to Bronx residents in the city’s burgeoning “green industry” to Bronx residents.

One of Moses’ few projects that never reached full fruition, the Sheridan Expressway carries an average of 37,000 cars a day (to compare, on any given day, approximately five times as many cars traverse the nearby Cross Bronx Expressway). Construction on the Sheridan began in 1958, and Moses named the road for his good friend, the Bronx commissioner of public works, Arthur V. Sheridan, who died in a car accident in 1952.

Determined to provide yet another option for drivers traveling between New York City and New England, Moses originally envisioned the Sheridan to continue four miles north from the Cross Bronx Expressway through the New York Botanical Gardens and the Bronx Zoo, to the New England Thruway. In one of the first of several defeats that eventually ended Moses’ reign, advocates for the gardens and the zoo blocked his plan. This was good news for the city, but the South Bronx was left with the redundant stub of an expressway that connects the Cross Bronx to the Bruckner — a purpose already served by parallel stretches of the Major Deegan Expressway and the Bronx River Parkways.

Stunted or not, South Bronx residents say that the road does its share of damage. Not only does it cut them off from access to the Bronx River, but the Sheridan also separates Bronx Community Districts 2, 3 and 9 from one another. Home mostly to African American and Latino families with significantly lower than average household incomes, these districts also suffer from some of the highest asthma rates in the entire state.

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Mayor & MTA Announce New Express Bus Routes .. IF…

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Metropolitan Transportation Authority Executive Director and CEO, Elliot G. Sander today announced what could be a new express bus route from the Throggs Neck Section of the Bronx to Lower Manhattan, if - and only if - the congestion pricing plan is approved by the State Legislature and the City Council.

One of the new proposed routes, the BXM-19, would run from Throggs Neck down to Battery Place, serving as an extension to the existing BXM-9 which currently terminates at Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street. Currently, passengers of the BXM-9 who work in Lower Manhattan must transfer to a different bus or subway to continue below 23rd Street.

The BMX-19 would provide Bronx residents with a one-seat ride to Lower Manhattan. Taking place at a bus stop at the intersection of Layton and Vincent Avenues, the Mayor noted that he can not yet cut the ribbon on a service that would benefit thousands of Bronx residents because funding does not exist without congestion pricing.

The new express route, along with 44 other new and enhanced routes and over 300 new buses, would be funded under the Urban Partnership Agreement, which would award $354.5 million in federal funds to the City if the Mayor’s congestion pricing plan is adopted.

The Mayor was also joined by Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Assemblyman Michael Benedetto, City Councilman James Vacca, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, Gene Russianoff, Senior Attorney for the NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign and local resident Audrey Izzard.

“Legislators in every community must keep in mind the benefits congestion pricing will bring and what we give up if they fail to act,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “We face a real need for mass transit improvements, and congestion pricing offers the rare opportunity to fund them.

Without that funding, the MTA will not be able to make these projects happen.

The new BXM-19 bus route is one of hundreds of improvements that depend on the federal funding we will be given if we enact a congestion pricing plan.”

“If we’re serious about encouraging people to use public transportation, we must increase travel options for underserved areas,” said MTA Executive Director and CEO Sander. “This route, for example, would speed Bronx residents from Throggs Neck to jobs in Manhattan.”

“Congestion Pricing is critical to the future of New York City,” said Commissioner Sadik-Khan. “That is why we are traveling to many neighborhoods around the city to demonstrate just what kind of mass transit improvements, like new express bus routes, they could expect to see with this new source of funding.”

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New Refuge Islands for Bronx Pedestrians & Bus Riders

Streetsblog reader Ed Ravin sends along a photo of a new pedestrian refuge island that has recently emerged beneath an elevated subway platform in the Bronx. While the new sidewalks make bus riders’ lives a bit easier (and, perhaps, longer-lasting), Ed also has some ideas for additional improvements. He writes:

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