Study Says City's Truck Routes ‘No Longer Make Sense'

While New York's neighborhoods and streets are in constant flux, the city's truck-route network, which determines where trucks are permitted and forbidden to drive, has not changed in a quarter of a century.

For the first time since 1982, the Department of Transportation earlier this month released what it has been touting as the first comprehensive study of the city's outmoded truck routes.

But several experts and elected officials now say they are shocked at what they call elementary recommendations for how to repair a dysfunctional truck network that is clogging residential streets with commercial congestion.

Of the city's estimated 1,000 miles of roadway, about 5% of the streets are designated arteries where vehicles with six wheels or more are permitted to drive. While the city has seen a 35% increase in truck volume over the past 20 years, and trucks themselves have grown in size, the truck-route network has not been changed.

Truck traffic in Manhattan could grow by another 80% by 2020, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Residents in neighborhoods from Park Slope to Hunts Point have been complaining for years about trucks straining their streets and their nerves.

"Neighborhoods have changed, and some of the truck routes no longer make sense," Council Member John Liu said. Mr. Liu is chairman of the Council's Transportation Committee.

"Because they don't make sense, the truck routes are rarely enforced. Neighborhoods have suffered because of trucks barreling down residential streets and posing a real danger to residents, spewing air and noise pollution, and ripping up city streets that were never meant to accommodate truck traffic," Mr. Liu said in a recent telephone interview.

Commissioner Iris Weinshall will step down as transportation tsar on April 15, and her as-yetunnamed replacement could seek to change the way thousands of trucks navigate daily through a limited number of streets.

But the new study, which took eight years to complete, does little to change the truck-route network, according to officials from the city's Department of Transportation. The report recommends clearer street signs informing truckers where they may and may not drive, and calls for more police enforcement of truck routes.

"Eight years to come up with more and better signage?" the New York City coordinator at the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, Teresa Toro, said. "They're trying to shift responsibility for enforcement onto the NYPD instead of coming up with self-enforcing truck routes."

"The goal of the study was not to do a complete overhaul of the truck routes," a deputy commissioner at the Department of Transportation, David Woloch, said.

He said the study looks at ways to "add truck routes and take off truck routes, but the more important piece was to take the truck-route system and make it work better."

A Police Department spokesman, Paul Browne, said the police are stepping up efforts to work with the Department of Transportation on enforcing truck routes.

Mr. Liu also blames Mayor Bloomberg for holding up the construction of a cross-harbor freight tunnel, which would take millions of trucks off overcrowded city streets. The proposed tunnel would connect New Jersey to Long Island and bring freight beneath the New York Harbor, thus moving it off the crowded city streets. However, the tunnel has yet to move past the planning stages.

"Mayor Bloomberg supported it until one of his base neighborhoods in Queens didn't. He did an about-face as his election came near," Mr. Liu said.