State defends omission of mass transit from TZ proposals

State officials and contractors assisting with the Tappan Zee Bridge project defended their decision not to include a bus rapid transit system in the final request for proposals for the construction of the $5 billion bridge.

The comments came at the first of four public meetings held July 25 and 26 in Westchester and Rockland counties in advance of the July 27 deadline for the four finalist bidders to submit their proposals.

At the July 25 meeting, which was held at Berkeley College in partnership with The Business Council of Westchester, New York State Thruway Authority Executive Director Thomas Madison said the construction of a new bridge would create 45,000 jobs, including those that are projected to be created indirectly in supporting industries.

The state expects to publish its final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) the week of July 29. The draft EIS, which was published in January, received more than 3,000 public comments.

Among the most-cited issues was the lack of a mass transit requirement.

As part of their proposals, the four finalist teams were asked by the state to provide designs that enable the future addition of mass transit, such as a commuter rail system or bus rapid transit system.

However, state officials have repeatedly said that including mass transit in the current designs would prove too costly and would stall the project.

“Bus rapid transit is not an expensive system if you have the lanes to put it in,” said Mark Roche, who is consulting on the project and is an engineer with Arup, a global engineering and consulting firm.

Here, though, “It”™s an expensive system and there”™s no place to put it,” Roche said.

Of the $88 million the state has spent on public meetings and studies related to the Tappan Zee Bridge and the surrounding transit corridor over the last decade, $20 million of that went toward studying bus rapid transit, Roche said.

Those studies have concluded that installing a bus rapid transit system running down the center of the 30-mile stretch from Suffern to Port Chester would cost $4.6 billion, while installing a bus rapid transit system on the side of the highway would cost $5.1 billion.

Even when the state looked at a system that only connected the Palisades Mall in West Nyack to the Metro-North station in Tarrytown, the cost was estimated at $1.9 billion, Roche said.

Robert Conway, senior vice president at New York City-based consultant AKRF Inc., said at the meeting that it would cost $300 million more to build a bridge that would allow for the addition of mass transit.