Commuting from Nyack Across The Tappan Zee Bridge? Would You Take a Bus?

Next City, a non-profit organization with a mission to inspire social, economic and environmental change in cities, has published an article in its online newsletter about the new bridge across the Tappan Zee between Nyack and Tarrytown.

The question in its title, “Will New York’s New Bridge Spur Development?” is a little bit misleading.

The development that residents of Nyack, New City, Pearl River and Nanuet fear is rapid population growth in expanding swaths of residential housing, with a resultant burden on property-tax-funded public services.

After all, that’s been their experience so far. The current, 50-year-old Tappan Zee Bridge is carrying 40 percent more traffic than it was designed for.

In fact, the new bridge’s Mass Transit Task Force estimated in a February 2014 report that more commuters travel within or between Rockland and Westchester counties, which the bridge connects, than from those counties to nearby New York City, said the article’s author, Greg Scruggs.

However, the development that Scruggs is discussing is the development of public transit service across the bridge between Rockland and Westchester counties.

Right now, 98 percent of the traffic over the Tappan Zee bridge is in single-occupant vehicles.

To accommodate all those people traveling between Rockland and Westchester, many of them daily commuters, the idea of a bus rapid transit network using the new bridge has been floated by the Mass Transit Task Force.

It suggested transit hubs could possibly be put in Tarrytown, White Plains and Port Chester.

But urban planners at Columbia University disagree. “In most cases, transit supporting densities are non-existent in the primarily low-density Hudson Valley environment,” the studio’s teacher, Floyd Lapp, told Scruggs.

“Some serious transit-oriented development (TOD) would have to take place in order for BRT to provide a meaningful alternative to driving and paying the toll, even if almost certainly cheaper,” Scruggs concluded.

Plus, he questioned whether mass transit development would be welcomed, specially by residents directly affected—citing the people of South Nyack, who have questioned the bridge designers’ plan to anchor a bike path certain to draw thousands in the center of their village, or the people of Port Chester, who have protested recycling as housing the same shuttered hospital that the Mass Transit Task Force would turn into a bus depot.

Read his entire article here on Next City.

Read the New New York Bridge Mass Transit Task Force report here.

Read the Columbia University response here.

PHOTO: Rockland Temporary Trestle in South Nyack, NY. Photo Credit: New York State Thruway Authority.