Council Members Call for Reduction Of Truck Traffic
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Community advocates and City Council members yesterday called on the city’s Department of Transportation to speed up its effort to relieve residential neighborhoods of heavy truck traffic.
Citing everything from polluted air, dangers to the public health, excessive noise, and deteriorating streets, the chairman of the council’s Transportation Committee, John Liu, said the department was years overdue in making changes.
“The truck routes of New York City have not been changed since the 1970s,” he said at a hearing. “Residents are complaining in their neighborhoods … the traffic has become a hazard to residents, children, and seniors.”
With freight traffic through the city projected to increase by more than 50% by 2020, the head of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, Teresa Toro, said the problem is rapidly becoming a “crisis.”
The city’s Department of Transportation has nearly completed a comprehensive report – the first since 1982 – analyzing truck traffic and making recommendations to mitigate its impact on communities, the commissioner, Iris Weinshall, said. Solutions include increasing the number of signs directing trucks to 10,000 from 4,000, new education initiatives for drivers and police officers, and making some route changes for commercial traffic.
Ms. Weinshall emphasized that commercial trucking is “vital to this city’s economic fabric.” Ninety-nine percent of goods delivered to the city are brought by truck, she said.
She cautioned that even after the report is finished in early April, major changes will take several years to implement. A round of public meetings will follow the release of the report, after which the department plans to implement some of the changes by the end of the summer.
One of the main initiatives by the department and the New York Police Department will be educating police officers and truck drivers about truck routes. The NYPD has 17 officers devoted specifically to enforcing truck traffic laws. The head of the Police Department’s Traffic Management Center, Inspector Patrick McCarthy, said a new laminated placard is being designed for each precinct with an easy-to-read list of truck traffic laws and truck routes highlighted in red. With better information, all of the city’s 40,000 officers will be better qualified to stop illegal truck traffic, he said.
