As safety conditions on the Tappan Zee worsen, the environmental review of replacement options for the bridge remains stalled.

Frustrated with the sluggishness, Rockland and Westchester County leaders have formed a coalition to speed up the project. The Journal News reported last week that the coalition has 17 members, including business, labor and environmental interests, along with planning agencies and elected officials.

Bridge safety ratings should pressure agencies to get moving with the study. One measure of bridge conditions is a “sufficiency” rating, which assesses the safety, service and general reliability of bridges to see if they should stay in service. A rating of 100 means a fully operational bridge, while a score of zero means the bridge should be shut down. According to national data obtained by the Journal News, the sufficiency rating of the Tappan Zee declined from 48.1 in 2001 to 31.1 in 2004. 2004 numbers were slightly better than 2003’s 30.1 rating. The agency has put upwards of $300 million into keeping the bridge safe in recent years, yet big holes in the bridge roadway still appear once a month, causing congestion and slowing commutes.

 According to documents on the Tappan Zee corridor study website (www.tzbsite.com), the environmental review for replacing the bridge and developing some sort of corridor transit system is two years behind schedule. A stalemate between the project’s two original sponsors, the NYS Thruway and Metro-North, led Governor Pataki to put the NY State Department of Transportation in charge of the project earlier this year. But little progress has been made since then. Apparently there is disagreement on how to narrow down the long list of alternatives a shorter list to be studied in the EIS.

Some transit advocates believe that as the study moves forward, a rapid bus system will reveal itself as the most suitable alternative for linking Rockland and Westchester by mass transit. This type of planning, which lays out roadways to move buses faster than surrounding traffic, is flexible to suburban situations, since it can travel off of dedicated alignments and into office parks and residential neighborhoods. A recent study by Columbia graduate students also recommended rapid buses as the best transit alternative in the corridor. 

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