Southbridge Residents Ride Bus Official at CB1 Meeting by Barry Owens Ted Orosz is the man who oversees planning and operations of the 4,600 buses that rumble through Manhattan and the Bronx each day. And on July 13, he looked as if he stepped in front of one. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority official had been called in by a committee of Community Board 1 to explain why his agency had pulled M15, M22 and B51 stops from the corner of Frankfort and Pearl Streets. There to greet him were a room full of angry senior citizens from Southbridge Towers, many of them claiming the move had cut off their connection to the rest of the city. Members of the South Street Seaport/Civic Center committee of the board were none-too-pleased either. "This theory you're giving as about why you moved the stops is bullshit," said board member Joe Morrone. Orosz' explanation was this: Drivers who made the corner stop complained of the difficulty of swinging back into traffic on Gold to make the immediate left turn onto Pearl Street. Often, he said, the drivers were forced to make an "unsafe" left turn from the right-hand lane. "That doesn't seem like a valid excuse to me," said District Manager Paul Goldstein. Nor did it satisfy Morrone, who testily noted that express buses continue to stop there. And to make the turn. The MTA's solution, which it implemented in June, was to move the local bus pick-up and drop-off stops onto Pearl Street, two and a half blocks north of Frankfort Street. That location, critics said, forces Southbridge residents to cross a busy Pearl Street and traverse the shadowy underpass of the Brooklyn Bridge -not a welcome option for the more elderly and infirm residents of Southbridge Towers. "My mother is 90-years-old and she recently had a friend struck by a car crossing that street," said an emotional Gail Leventhal. "Now she is afraid cross it. This has just taken away her independence, changed her lifestyle. She's trapped in Lower Manhattan." "Do you need to hear any more?" asked committee vice-chair Victor Pappa. "Put it back." Orosz said there was no chance of that. "We'll look into it, but it will not go back to the corner. It's not going to happen," he said. Orosz said the hazard remained too great to have that many buses stopping there every 10 minutes, making the illegal turn. He said he would consider moving the stop 20 feet to the west on Frankfort, but not without studying the traffic and accident reports. The committee asked that he return before the full board on July 27. "We're not coming back," said Orosz. "We'll just call [Goldstein]." "Yes, you are coming back," said Pappa. "And we want to see those accident reports."