In his state of the city speech this week, Mayor Bloomberg told Staten Island leaders he would organize the transportation task force they have clamored for as the most traffic-ridden borough has ground ever closer to a halt.

    Rapid growth, lack of planning and little investment in transportation infrastructure have made Staten Island the corner of New York City where traffic congestion is routinely a front-page item.

   It will be interesting to see what the task force yields. Some of Staten Island leaders’ demands will help. They include additional express bus service (and an additional bus depot to support it), new fast ferry services, new rail cars for the S.I. Railway and a bus route to better link the Island to the Hudson-Bergen light rail line in Bayonne.

   However, these measures alone do not constitute a comprehensive plan, and there are other impulses at work that will make Staten Island traffic worse before it gets better.

   Consider Bricktown Center, the 42-acre suburban style big box development in Charleston, on the South Shore, which is likely to be accompanied by other nearby large commercial and residential developments. Assemblyman Vincent Ignizio asked the State Department of Transportation in November to study solutions to the traffic nightmare the development will create, and DOT agreed to start the 9-month study in March. But Borough President Molinaro, a strong supporter of Bricktown, has more recently devised his own $100 million solution: build more roads to and from the site.

   Further north, other officials want to open the new Staten Island Expressway bus lanes to cars, effectively widening the highway and inviting more driving overall. 

   Tackling (or at least containing) traffic congestion on Staten Island is probably going to require a consensus around three main points:

1. Resisting the impulse to build or widen roads, which just extends today’s problem.

2. Planning some higher density areas to absorb growth in an efficient way, rather than plunking it down on available car-dependent land on the South Shore.  This can support the next point:

3. Developing a real mass transit system—bus rapid transit is likely the only way to do this anytime soon. BRT is a good choice because it has the flexibility to serve both on-Island and express-bus commuter markets, and is relatively inexpensive to implement. But it will require some tradeoff of street space between cars and room to allow the buses to move. Leaving the S.I.E. bus lanes intact would be a good first step in this direction.

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