Video: NYC City Council Member Dodges Infrastructure Questions

Like much of America, highways in New York City need a lot of help.

byThe Drive Staff|
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America's traffic infrastructure has fallen into a multi-trillion-dollar state of disrepair. This summer, The Drive investigates how America's crumbling roads, bridges, and tunnels were allowed to decay, and how we can begin fixing them. Last time, we looked at the Gowanus Expressway. In this installment, we move a few miles north, to the Kosciuszko Bridge.

To learn more about how New York City is approaching refurbishments and improvements to its sizable highway network, we turned to Ydanis Rodriguez, a city council member who represents northern Manhattan and serves as chair of the city's transportation committee. After waiting outside Mr. Rodriguez's office for two hours after a scheduled interview timeslot, the honorable council member proceeded to dodge our questions with the dexterity of a character from "The Matrix."

Here's an excerpt from an article we published in June:

 After speaking for a time about his office's efforts to support Car Free NYC, an Earth Day program designed to inspire discussion about re-thinking street use, Rodriguez did offer that the Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive, a notoriously bumpy stretch of highway running along Manhattan's east side, was on the city's radar. Rodriguez said that he drives to work on that pockmarked roadway about four times per week, and knows firsthand that improvements are needed. He also pointed us, in our search for a systemic view of highway system improvements, to Vision Zero, a city program aimed at reducing vehicle-caused pedestrian fatalities; this was an answer, of sorts, but not to the questions we were asking.

Luckily, the state government had much more to say about infrastructure projects in the Big Apple.

Stay tuned as we turn our focus beyond the reach of America's most populous city and take a look at other problem areas in the country's highway system.

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