STREETS WEEK! New Truck Management Report is Heavy on Historic Details; Light on Future Plans
By Julianne Cuba
The Department of Transportation says it has a plan to mitigate congestion and reduce the number of crashes on city streets caused by the commercial trucks that deliver 90 percent of our goods, but the 104-page proposal falls short of actual details needed to solve the problem, advocates say.
The new report, “Delivering New York: A Smart Truck Management Plan for New York City” (released on Thursday, Day Four of the mayor’s Streets Week!), is heavy on fascinating details about the simply massive system that delivers everything from everywhere to every location, thanks, mostly to 120,000 trucks entering or leaving the five boroughs every day. The report even explains how a banana gets from Central or South America to your door. It’s a good read.
But the report offered few hard details on how the city intends to actually improve the streetscape. Words like “encourage” (or “encouraging”), “promote,” “support” and other phrases such as “the city must do…” suggest city action, but those terms vastly outnumber words of actual action, such as “the city will…” or “the city has…”
That said, the report is “a step in this direction,” said Kate Slevin of the Regional Plan Association.
“The New York metro region must have a comprehensive plan for goods movement in order to continue reducing emissions and repurposing street space,” she said. “The plan has great components — like encouraging more cargo bikes for last mile deliveries and increasing the number of truck loading zones – but how effective it ultimately is will be determined by the details of the implementation process.”
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