More restrictions on Maspeth Bypass route

From the Times Newsweekly:

With the Maspeth truck bypass helping to reduce through truck traffic on local shopping strips, the city Department of Transportation (DOT) is gearing up to move even further by changing truck routes through the neighborhood a second time, representatives of the agency told members of Community Board 5’s Transportation and Public Transit committees last Tuesday night, Nov. 27.

Maura McCarthy, the DOT’s Queens borough commissioner, told the panels at the board’s Glendale office that, while implementing the truck bypass route through industrial portions of Maspeth was “a little painful at the beginning,” she believes the plan is “an improvement” for the entire neighborhood.

Enacted last year, the Maspeth truck bypass route—long campaigned for by civic leaders—diverts trucks traveling through Maspeth between Brooklyn and Long Island into industrial areas of the community via Page Place, Maspeth and Maurice avenues and 58th Street. This route was designed so trucks would avoid using Grand and Flushing avenues, which run through residential and retail areas, in order to travel to and from the Long Island Expressway.

With the plan in place and working, the DOT’s Stacey Hodge noted that the agency is moving forward with plans to take Grand and Flushing avenues between the Brooklyn/ Queens border and the Long Island Expressway completely off the city truck route network. Next year, the agency will hold public hearings about the idea to designate the Maspeth bypass route as the only truck route through the community.

Grand and Flushing avenues are currently listed as local truck routes, meaning that only trucks making deliveries in Queens can travel on each segment. If both segments of Grand and Flushing avenues are off the truck route network, only rigs making deliveries in the immediate area would be permitted to travel both roadways.

Additionally, Fresh Pond Road between Flushing and Metropolitan avenues would also need to be taken off the truck route network since Fresh Pond Road does not connect to the bypass route, Hodge added.