Editorial comment: Crossroads for a crossing

Building a new bridge across the Hudson could have disastrous consequences - for the river, for the Hudson Valley and for our city.

For most of us, crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge is routine. For half a century, it's been the way upstate from Riverdale, just another part of the route up the Thruway on business or to the discount stores at Woodbury or a second home in the Hudson Valley.

But the Tappan Zee is not just another road: think of it as a gigantic bulldozer, gouging and gobbling and reshaping the earth for hundreds of square miles.

Its presence has transformed Rockland and Putnam counties from farm country to suburb. As a result, the air we breathe is tainted by the fumes of commuters' cars; the watershed on which the city depends for 10 percent of its drinking water has been fouled; and the food we eat comes from farther away.

So the decision state highway engineers are due to make soon about whether to expand the capacity of the Tappan Zee Bridge will have major consequences on both sides of the span.

The Department of Transportation appears to be leaning toward building a new, wider bridge. Proponents say that one of a variety of mass transit options will curb the well-known tendency of new road capacity to attract ever-higher volumes of traffic.

The environmental organization Riverkeeper has sounded the alarm, contending that a wider bridge will spur the migration of city residents to rural communities. The construction of a new railroad tunnel due to be built 20 miles south of the bridge is a better mass transit alternative, it notes, offering those who live west of the Hudson a one-seat ride to Penn Station.

Alarmingly, the DOT has "streamlined" the process for reviewing its decisions and studying their consequences, raising the prospect that citizens will be cut out and reviews will be less than thorough.

Coupled with the expansion of Stewart Airport in Newburgh - now touted as New York's "fourth airport," the expansion of the Tappan Zee threatens to create a landscape of subdivisions sprawling into the Catskills and the Hudson Valley as far away as New Paltz and Poughkeepsie, and bringing with them all the problems of sustainability and pollution that accompanies reliance on the automobile.

Riverkeeper warns not only of sprawl, but of the danger that construction of a new Tappan Zee will pollute the Hudson River and destroy important fish habitat, "reversing much of the progress that has been made in the last forty years to protect the Hudson River environment."

What's more, the cost of building a new bridge is estimated at $14.5 billion, $12.5 billion more than the estimated cost of repairs to the existing bridge, and anyone who has watched the cost overruns at the new Bronx Courthouse, the water filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park and even the new Kingsbridge Library, knows that the final figure is likely to be much higher.

Westchester's state legislators, along with town and village officials, have joined to ask Gov. David Paterson to countermand the DOT's decision to take shortcuts in the environmental review process. A click on Riverkeeper's Web site at http://ga1.org/ campaign/paterson_letter will enable you to write to the governor and add your voice to theirs.

While you're at it, you might want to wake up our own local officials, who have been silent. Let them know that the future of the Tappan Zee Bridge will have a major impact on the future of our community.

This is part of the April 10, 2008 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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