The Department of Transportation says they may have a plan to quell the traffic bedlam on the east side of the $1.9 billion Essex Crossing development in the Lower East Side, but that it will be at least two years before they can make it happen.
Sean Quinn, the DOT’s assistant commissioner for street improvement projects, told the audience at a Community Board 3 meeting on Tuesday night that banning right turns onto Clinton Street from Grand Street, and opening up a second lane on Norfolk Street feeding onto Delancey Street, would “remove half the traffic from Clinton Street now.”
Quinn described Clinton and Grand as “a very busy intersection which is getting busier by the day,” and that much of the congestion that backs up onto Grand is caused by drivers who wait for people to cross Clinton. Banning right turns there “eliminates the conflict for pedestrians,” Quinn said. “We feel that the second lane [on Norfolk] plus these other mitigations could have a real benefit to the whole issue.”
A slide from a DOT presentation showing a plan that could cut traffic onto Clinton Street in half.
But opening up a second lane on Norfolk requires the DOT to wait for nearby Essex Crossing construction to be finished, which Quinn estimated would take at least two years.
“We can’t wait this long, it’s gotta be done sooner!” resident Linda Ruggiero shouted. “Are you waiting for someone to get killed?”
Many attendees pointed to the chaotic and unsafe conditions on Clinton between Delancey and Grand: cars that speed toward the bridge, pedestrians walking in the two-way bike lane due to the lack of a sidewalk on Broome because of construction, and massive trucks making deliveries that block the entire road and both sidewalks.
Harriet Cohen noted that people who use the east sidewalk on Clinton Street can’t cross the street because of the steady stream of cars.
“People are held hostage to all the traffic,” Cohen said. “The elderly people can’t go across.”
Quinn pledged that the DOT would push the developer of The Artisan, the 26-story luxury residential/commercial building that has taken over the west sidewalk between Broome and Delancey for years, to finish work by the spring, instead of the summer. He added that the city was involved in getting Trader Joe’s, Target, and Rite Aid, which all have tractor trailers delivering to their respective loading docks on Clinton Street, to share a “dockmaster” to coordinate delivery times (currently deliveries are prohibited between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m.). A digital “No Honking” sign, which sat on Grand Street for months before it was removed, will be put back.
“It sucks, it all sucks. This whole thing sucks,” Leah Strock, who said she lives on the 13th floor of a building at Grand and Clinton, told Quinn. “The horns are honking all night long. I would invite you to come over and sleep at my apartment. The only time it’s ever quiet is Sunday morning, for about two hours.”
Currently around 600 vehicles an hour pass through Clinton Street to get onto the Williamsburg Bridge, a number that would have been slashed by a third if the DOT’s HOV-3 restrictions had gone into place for a full L train shutdown.
“We had a very strong proposal to go with the L train mitigation, and when that was scrapped, we had to start over,” Quinn said. Congestion pricing, which is supposed to start in 2021, will in theory help mitigate traffic, but Quinn added that there are still many aspects to the plan that have not been fleshed out by state lawmakers.
“Are people going to be shifting away from the Williamsburg Bridge? Are people going to be coming to the bridge because they’re not going to the Midtown tunnels?” Quinn said. “Hopefully people aren’t bridge shopping.”
The window of time to make tweaks to the roads around Essex Crossing is small, and Quinn estimated the agency could come up with a more detailed scheme in two months.
This tentative proposal from the DOT did not account for two massive buildings going up in the same footprint: two towers, one 13-story and another 30-story, going up on Norfolk between Grand and Broome, and two 15-story towers where a parking garage currently sits at Clinton and Broome. ("The east side of Norfolk will be utilized for construction purposes through Q1 2021, with all required safety measures and DOT permits in place throughout," a spokesperson for the Essex Crossing developers said in a statement.)
Rerouting traffic to Essex Street is not tenable, Quinn said, because it was already at capacity.
“Clinton and Grand are failing in the model right now, off the charts failing. Essex is failing way less but it’s still failing,” Quinn explained. “You can add more traffic there, it’s gonna fail worse that it already is.”
One attendee wondered, what if the DOT turned Grand Street into a bus and bikeway, similar to 14th Street?
Quinn nodded his head and took a note.
