White Plains will become even more pedestrian hostile as it adds thousands of new private parking spaces in new apartment developments that the house dwelling Common Council members have and are approving.
55 Bank Street and 60 South Broadway are huge residential rental apartment building projects that will have about 550 and 700 apartments respectively. That means at least that number of new parking spaces.
The Council is in favor of a new retail shopping project at Post RD and Maple Avenue with, now get this, 700 new parking spaces.
The 60 South Broadway project will supposedly add many restaurants. When the Galleria mall was planned it was supposed to have 30 restaurants. It wound up with two restaurants and 28 fast foods joints.
Apparently the senior living building at 20 South Broadway will also be converted into over priced rentals, no doubt with many more drivers.
That's roughly 2,000 more parking spaces in downtown with more to come. Such development in New York City is sustainable because New York has mass transit. White Plains only has a sliver of the county bus system, the Bee Line, which is totally inadequate for moving people around White Plains even if they were inclined to consider using it.
So, have you ridden a Bee Line bus this millennium? If not, why would you expect people moving into these thousands of new apartments to use it? How will they get to the train station each morning to commute to New York for work? And where will they park?
Do the traffic engineers have models for this? Common Council meetings look like they could be from the 1970s. Presenters still use artist renderings on an easel. Not a computer is sight. No screen for some dynamic 3D fly through of the project seeking approval.
The tradition of White Plains apartment residents being too dumb and lazy to engage continues with the people who live in the houses away from downtown continuing to make the decisions that increasingly seem impractical without some form of transportation other than cars.
Does the City require that these new mega residential projects provide private transportation to/from the train station? Around downtown, too? And what happens on weekends when everyone wants to hop in their cars and go? December holiday shopping like traffic gridlock will become the natural state.
And the City extorts money for parks from the developers. It's a municipal shakedown. Payoffs to the municipality, not individuals. Millions of dollars for public parks. Where? Where's the open space near the many land locked apartment buildings on Old Mamaroneck Road, to select one example? The closer you get to the train station the more valuable the land becomes and even the few million that the City has extorted for the explicit purpose of buying park space may not be enough.
When the
TransCenter revitalization task force has its first public meeting in the library on the evening of Feb. 11, ask whether anyone in the room has ridden a Bee Line bus this millennium. If the answer is close to none, then the nature of the problems will be apparent. The next question is whether the City will do anything differently or will it continue to expand the use of personal cars until their movement has everyone going nowhere.
