DOT Woes
Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill Courier

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There's dot.com, on which downtown Brooklyn is doing very welt by attracting new high-tech companies, but there's also the DOT that stands for Department of Transportation, where things are in more of a mess. It may or may not be symptomatic that New York City's commissioner of DOT, Wilbur L. Chapman, was reported last week as leaving his job to become police commissioner of Bridgeport, CT. Since Mayor Giuliani will be out of office at the end of next" year, a parade of staff departures is to be expected. Still; the indications are that Chapman felt stymied in his job. "He came into an agency in flux and he is leaving an agency in flux," a leader of Transportation Alternatives was quoted as saying. 

In earlier years, when there was a federal Bureau of Highways, and there were city departments of highways and streets, and New York City had a department head known more modestly as the traffic commissioner, the people dealing with roads and traffic generally enjoyed the public's respect and approbation. But as highways multiplied and congestion nevertheless got worse, the new and more inflated DOTs at federal, state and city levels met growing resistance and criticism. President Elsenhower's 1956 initiative for the Interstate Highway System - which he thought of basically in military terms, having at the behest of General Jack Pershing directed a post-World War I survey of the nation's inadequate highway connections - won almost unanimous approval in its beginning stages, until the destructive impact of expressways on cities provoked reaction. The biggest public works undertaking in the history of the United States, the Interstate System is only now concluding its final act with the horrendously expensive "Big Dig" in Boston that has cost at least $7.8 billion more than its original $5.8- billion cost estimate. A project of its scale, which included replacing an elevated urban expressway with a tunnel as well as building two new harbor tunnels, seems unlikely to be repeated. 

But something needs to be done with deteriorating highways like the Gowanus Expressway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, as well as with moving traffic through clogged streets. Here, our DOTs seem generally stuck in a rut, wanting only to rebuild and expand old expressways while still hoping to speed a growing number of vehicles through non-expandable street grids. The DOTs are not enthused about the tunneling alternatives to elevated highways that have been pursued in some other countries, and they are reluctant to acknowledge that city residents don't want more cars and trucks traveling fast through their streets. They give lip service to traffic calming and alternate transportation modes, but their heart is still with the automobile. They don't want to face up to what a noted Australian traffic engineer concluded a couple of decades ago, that the bigger the city the worse the inevitable congestion, and a price has to be paid in speed: i.e. the best you can hope for is to achieve a reasonably smooth flow of traffic at very low speeds. 

Unfortunately for the DOTs highways are no longer a growth business, and theirs is no longer a glamour field but rather one facing a lot of painful choices amidst increasing complaints from all sides.

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