Queens truly needs better "Waste Management"

From the Queens Gazette:

Waste Management (WM), a compacted waste disposal service, is seeking a permit from the city to build a solid waste transfer station in Long Island City on Review Avenue, near Newtown Creek.

The proposal for the Review Avenue facility would effect a switch from truck to rail for solid waste that is to be transported from Queens to landfill in Virginia. The plan is that within a couple of years, instead of having waste hauled out of Queens by trucks, WM could send it by rail, six trains per week. Each train car could carry enough solid waste that would take more than 50 trucks to carry thereby increasing efficiency and helping reduce the volume of truck traffic in the city. The Long Island facility would take in solid waste from the districts covered by Community Boards 1 through 6, an area covering Astoria to Forest Hills and Kew Gardens to Maspeth, Glendale and Ridgewood.

...while the transfer station is planned for Long Island City, the origin of rail service would be in Maspeth, not on the tracks situated between Review Avenue and Newtown Creek. The solid waste processed on Review Avenue would be loaded onto trucks, which would then be transported to the Fresh Pond rail yard in Maspeth, about a mile and a half away, and then put onto train cars.

Since there is time to revise the plan, the railroad tracks in Long Island City could be used as the point of origin and solid waste should be loaded directly from the transfer station to rail cars thus eliminating the need for trucks.

...the waste transfer plan would entail loading some 65 trucks daily in Long Island City and driving all of them over to the rail point in Maspeth. Those 65 trucks being driven into Maspeth every day and then back out would increase noise, damage roadways and leave enough pollution in their wake to raise the local asthma rate.

Great. More trucks for Maspeth! Let's not forget that the Grand Avenue Truck Bypass plan has also still not gone into effect (because DOT is still doing more "studies") meaning that the trucks going to the transfer station will likely be driving right through the heart of Maspeth.

But there is another aspect of this plan that is totally avoidable. The spot on the map above is Waste Management's current address, near Railroad Avenue. I guess you get more money for using trucks to bring it to a railyard a mile and a half down the road just to load it onto trains that will use the same track that runs right by your transfer station...

Spending the taxpayers' money needlessly certainly makes Mayor Bloomberg more "green" - just not in the environmental sense. Anyway, the site they are hauling the garbage to is actually the Maspeth Railyard on Rust Street, not the Fresh Pond Railyard. (Fresh Pond will get Brooklyn's garbage via rail from the Varick Avenue Railyard.) The Maspeth Railyard's truck depot area is accessed via Maspeth Avenue to the northwest of the former site of St. Saviour's.

From the Glendale Register:

The LIRR tracks pass within roughly 20 feet of the Review Avenue station's property line. This makes the construction of a spur to the facility for the loading of waste - as opponents of WM's plan have suggested - appear feasible, if appropriate infrastructure work was done.

There will be a rally on Saturday, July 18 at 11am at 57th Road and Rust Street to protest this nonsense and call for a park at the St. Saviour's site.