Thursday evening, just four days before commuter buses were to begin laying over five days a week along a six block stretch of West Street inTribeca, the Department of Transportation suspended the widely opposed plan for at least two weeks, according to City Councilman Alan Gerson.

 

“This is a great, at least temporary, victory,” Gerson told the Trib after getting the news, “and now we’re going to use the time to make it a permanent victory.”

Twenty-five bus parking spaces must be removed from beneath the FDR Drive, between Wall Street and Maiden Lane, to make way for the first phase of work on the East River waterfront renewal project. Despite the protests of Community Board 1 and local elected officials, the DOT planned to relocate a majority of the displaced buses–about 15 of them,—to the east side of West Street, between Watts and Harrison Streets.

Gerson, who had convened a meeting on Wednesday with angry community members and a DOT representative, told the Trib he received a call from an EDC official Thursday evening informing him of the postponement. Earlier in the day, Gerson said, the DOT told him it would be willing to temporarily halt its plan if EDC, which oversees the East River waterfront project, could delay closing the bus parking beneath the FDR drive.

Now, said Gerson, “there will be an intense process of coming up with [bus parking alternatives], which will involve DOT meeting with the elected officials and the community.”

Though the DOT has admitted the plan has been in the works for months, it was only on April 15, at a meeting of Community Board 1’s Tribeca Committee, that residents and local officials found out about the plan. A week later, during the emergency meeting convened by Gerson, a DOT official had the task of informing the roomful of opponents—including representatives of Borough of Manhattan Community College and the developer of Truffles, a new 300-unit residential complex at West and Desbrosses Street—that the plan would take effect on Monday, April 15, a week sooner than expected.

“Admittedly, we’ve known about this for a while,” said Suchi Sanagavarapu, a senior project manager for the DOT. “It’s not ideal, we’re well aware of that.”

 

“There’s something very wrong with the process,” a stunned Gerson said after Sanagavarapu announced the new date.

 

That announcement came just hours after a mid-day rally, led by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, at the corner of Desbrosses and West Streets in protest of the plan.

"This is not a dictatorship," Stringer told the group. "You don’t bring 30 commuter buses into a neighborhood that is growing residential.”

The Tribeca Committee had unanimously passed a resolution that rejected the plan on many counts, citing the impact to air quality and traffic, the effect on businesses in the area, and a blight on what will soon be a newly developed Hudson River Park north of Chambers Street.

“The whole plan of the city and the state is to have this great park in relationship to the waterfront,” said CB1 member Marc Ameruso, who also co-chairs the Hudson River Park Advisory Council. “Now it’s just going to disappear when you have a whole wall of buses below Canal Street.”

CB1 chair Julie Menin wrote to DOT Commissioner Sadik-Khan to request a delay in carrying out the plan until alternatives can be assessed.

According to the DOT’s position,  “No Idling” regulations would prevent serious impact to air quality and traffic problems are not anticipated because the buses would depart before rush hour.

Michael Levine, CB1’s Director of Land Use and Planning, said it has been nearly two years since the DOT began talking about finding a new site for the buses, discussions he was in on. But it was just days before the DOT’s presentation to the community board that Sanagavarapu informed him of the decision. 

Paul Sipos, a member of the Tribeca Committee who has an art warehouse on West Street, just below Canal Street, said that buses parked outside his business could tie up deliveries, and other businesses in the area will be affected as well.

“There’s not one good thing about this,” said Sipos. “It’s a total disaster in every respect.”

In the last year CB1 members have complained about other DOT projects that have gone forward despite their serious objections, including a bike path through City Hall Park and the reconfiguration of Chatham Square in Chinatown.

“I’m outraged,” said Levine, “that they keep bringing these issues to us as faits accomplis.”