N.Y. parade of garbage trucks ripped
The growing number of New York City garbage trucks chugging through the Holland and Lincoln tunnels has the Hudson Alliance for Rational Transportation fuming.The citizens group, formed to oppose the proposed construction of a Downtown highway through the old Bergen Arches rail line, has now broadened its agenda to evaluating other transportation decisions it believes have a negative impact on Hudson County's air quality.
With New York City sending more and more garbage trucks through the Hudson River crossings to export the city's residential waste, HART is trying to raise public awareness about the air pollution being generated by the estimated 400 additional truck trips a day recently added to the already traffic-choked Hudson River bridge and tunnels.
HART sponsored a lightly attended community forum last week that focused on the growing problem.
"It doesn't seem as if anyone cares that we are breathing more air with diesel pollutants in it and that the Newark incinerator is burning more and more New York waste," said HART leader and Downtown businesswoman Mia Scanga.
"The kind of policies our government officials keep pushing - be it the Bergen Arches, New York's garbage export or the dedicated truck route for the Port of Newark - always seem to center on more cars and trucks; it's maddening," said Scanga.
New York has been forced to export more and more of its 13,000 tons a day of residential waste as its only landfill, Fresh Kills in Staten Island, is phased out of operation prior to its final closing on Dec. 31, 2001.
Under a so-called interim "plan" employed by the New York Department of Sanitation, white New York garbage trucks, each carrying about 31 tons of garbage, drive to either landfills in Union County, transfer stations in Bergen County or to Essex County incinerator in Newark.
According to the New York Garbage Sentinel, an online newsletter chronicling New York City's garbage export crisis, the current 400 garbage truck trips will more than double to over 1,000 trips a day by 2001 as Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island send their residential garbage west.
Truck traffic, according to the Sentinel's calculations, has increased by 15.5 percent at the Lincoln Tunnel and by 5.8 percent at the Holland Tunnel. Therese Langer, an urban policy professor at Rutgers and a leader of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a non-profit organization focused on encouraging mass transit, offered a grim assessment of the truck traffic increase at HART's forum last week.