The plan to charge drivers on Manhattan’s busiest streets is to free New York City’s central business district from pollution and congestion while raising money for public transit.
But while some of the city’s wealthiest areas will enjoy the biggest benefits, one of the poorest and most polluted areas – the South Bronx – could end up with dirtier air due to traffic. navigation.
The proposal, known as congestion pricing, would use tolls to discourage motorists from squeezing into Midtown and Lower Manhattan, where heavy traffic often clogs roads and contributes to traffic congestion. contributing to poor air quality in the city’s iconic financial, tourist and theater districts.
The plan seeks to reduce the number of vehicles on the road and increase public transport at a time when cities around the globe are looking for ways to limit harmful emissions from cars, buildings and power plants to reduce the number of vehicles on the road. against climate change.
But according to an environmental assessment released by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, motorists driving around new tollgates could cause extra traffic and soot to parts of the Bronx, Staten Island, County Nassau on Long Island and Bergen County in New Jersey.
Among the highways that can see lots of cars, trucks and exhausts is the Cross Bronx Expressway, a lifeline for commercial traffic that runs through some of America’s poorest neighborhoods. Generally 220,000 Bronx residents live along the curb – mostly people of color – with hundreds of thousands of others nearby, breathing the city’s most polluted air.
By far, the biggest concerns about congestion pricing have focused on possible toll costs, some as high as $23. Taxi drivers, Lyft and Uber drivers, and vehicle owners across New York and its suburbs have united in protest. Less public outcry has focused on how the proposal could reshape the repressed traffic flows the city has to deal with on a daily basis.
“Why does the Bronx have less breathable air than the rest of the city?” Ritchie Torres, a Democratic congressman represents an area that is among the nation’s poorest counties, including parts of the western Bronx, South Bronx and freeways.
The MTA is exploring a number of fee options for car and truck drivers; In general, the higher the tolls, the more vehicles are expected to avoid them. Of those scenarios, the one with the biggest impact on the Cross Bronx would send an additional 704 trucks per day (it currently scores over 27,000). According to a New York Times analysis of MTA data, it would increase soot from truck traffic by about 5% and overall soot – also coming from factories, construction boilers and other sources. – up 1%, according to a New York Times analysis of MTA data.
The MTA board has yet to approve the congestion pricing, although it is expected to pass the program in some form and Governor Kathy Hochul, who controls the council, supports it. A representative for the MTA said that no decision on pricing and other key details had been made yet and that authorities were still studying the environmental report and gathering input from the public.
Concerns about the impact on the Bronx are big enough for the MTA to begin with a plan to consider a flat toll for all vehicles instead of a higher toll for heavy trucks, in the hope of diverting fewer trucks. than – the main source of air pollution – through the county. However, this strategy could also reduce the benefits in congested Manhattan.
Advocates of congestion pricing say it will be an important tool in the city’s fight against climate change. They note that the MTA study found a significant reduction in pollution in a crowded area – which has the worst air quality in the region – would outweigh a smaller increase in pollution around the Cross Bronx. and other hotspots. Now, they fear that such sensitization around outcomes could lead to a diluted version of the program, which mutes the potential benefits that the entire region – including the Bronx – would see.
Congestion pricing is expected to encourage more drivers to switch to public transit. And the tolls will provide about $1 billion annually in much-needed funding to improve the transit infrastructure that many residents of the Bronx and other counties rely on.
“To the extent there are any real-world, localization issues, they will be addressed with solutions,” said Danny Pearlstein, a spokesman for Riders Alliance, a grassroots organization of motorcyclists. additional policy. “I don’t see this as an obvious trade-off.”
The Environmental Protection Agency’s standard for long-term exposure to air pollutants is called PM2.5, or particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less, not exceeding 12 micrograms per cubic meter. In the worst-case scenario presented in the MTA study, the total concentration around the Cross Bronx would increase to 11 from 10.9. Microscopic PM2.5 pollution, such as soot, can enter the lungs on its own and cause breathing problems.
Some scientists say that any deterioration in air quality around the Cross Bronx, no matter how small, would be significant.
“Considering that the South Bronx is an area with high rates of asthma and other pre-existing health conditions, even a small increase in access to Long-term exposure to particulate matter will also exacerbate these health outcomes.” at Harvard University.
Air quality experts are also increasingly concerned that federal safety standards are being too permissive.
EPA says it is reviewing current soot standards because they “May not be enough to protect public health and welfare. The agency has not suggested new levels, but the World Health Organization’s guidance for long-term exposure to PM2.5 is no more than 5 micrograms/cubic meter.
The congested price zone will run from Battery to 60th Street and is expected to reduce traffic throughout the entire New York City area. But there are counties, counties and neighborhoods that are likely to increase.
Some car and truck drivers traveling between New Jersey and Long Island are expected to circumnavigate the new routes by going through Staten Island or the Bronx instead. These detours will be most pronounced at the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge in Queens, across the South Bronx and George Washington Bridge, and south across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and Staten Island.
The lower third of Manhattan will get the biggest relief from traffic and pollution. At a minimum, under the conditions considered in the MTA report, that area could have 12% less traffic and 11% less PM2.5 within just one year. Pollution increases in outlying areas are likely to be smaller, but officials from those areas, already annoyed by the financial impact of the toll on their residents, are also capture environmental impact.
“I don’t see why we would want to embrace this,” said Staten Island county president Vito J. Fossella. “I’ve had a hard time with congested pricing since the beginning.”
In the Bronx, where many communities have a bitter history with harmful public policies, studies have linked truck smoke to high rates of asthma. Based on The most recent statistics from New York’s health departmentPeople of all ages in the Bronx were hospitalized for asthma at rates far higher than city and state rates from 2017 to 2019. The worst rates were for children. under 5 years old.
Janno Lieber, president of the MTA, said in an interview with WNYC last month that he shares the goal of “minimizing and minimizing any impact on a neighborhood like the South Bronx, which has had to historical environmental justice impacts”.
For residents along the Cross Bronx, one of the busiest streets in New York, just one more truck is too much. “I can’t deal with it. I went crazy,” said Valerie Medina, a longtime Mount Hope resident. Ms Medina, 47, complains that car horns, rumbling truck engines and other noises from the street wake her up at night while dirty air wets her clothes.
The South Bronx has no official boundaries. But many see the Cross Bronx Freeway as the region’s northern border and a leading cause of urban decay and poverty that has long been synonymous with the South Bronx.
The Cross Bronx was built between 1948 and 1963 to make it easier for motorists to cross the city. As part of Interstate 95, it connects motorists to New Jersey along the George Washington Bridge. More than 187,000 vehicles move on the road every day.
It took 15 years to build, partly because engineers blasted through the hard rock beneath densely populated areas. Some urban planning experts blame road for driving away thousands of families, weighing down property values and poisoning the air.
It was a scar on the Bronx, littered with garbage and crammed with traffic so slow that amazed street vendors selling bottled water, chips, and sweets walked up to the windows of cars while others The driver is sitting stuck.
According to Census Bureau data, nearly a quarter of a million people live in poverty in the congressional district that includes most of the South Bronx. That’s 34 percent of the county’s population – the highest percentage of any county except Puerto Rico’s major congressional district.
Earlene Wilkerson, 63, said she has asthma with her children and grandchildren, having lived in the High Bridge neighborhood near the Cross Bronx intersection with Major Deegan Freeway for more than 40 years. She has vivid memories of her eldest daughter spending a year in the hospital because she couldn’t breathe properly.
“They miss school a lot,” said Ms. Wilkerson as she rested on a bench at the bus stop, too short of breath to walk back to her fifth-floor apartment. “Now, the grandchildren are going through the same thing.”
