BAY RIDGE — More than one-third of all working residents in Bay Ridge drive to their jobs.

This and dozens of other bits of information have been made available by the Bloomberg Administration as part of its massive sustainability plan to prepare the city for 2030, when it’s predicted that more than a million more people will be living here. In particular, a key element of that plan is to charge drivers $8 to enter Manhattan south of 86th Street, known as congestion pricing.

What would this mean to Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights and Fort Hamilton? That can’t be answered specifically because it depends on so many different things.

For one, only about 3,200 Community Board 10 residents drive to work in Manhattan, but a full 17,100 people take the R train to Manhattan, and 1,963 people take one of the four express buses across the East River.

Those who drive to Manhattan tend to go to Lower Manhattan rather than Midtown, which doesn’t take as long by car — 39 to 43 minutes. But the reverse is true of subway riders — almost twice as many take the train to Midtown rather than Lower Manhattan.

There is not much, at least being admitted, than can make the subway trip quicker, but the city has come up with some thoughts about bus service.

One is to reroute the X27 and X37 to serve more commuters. Another is to employ “bus prioritization� along that new route. And another step is to use what is called “skip stops� within Bay Ridge to reduce loading and idle times by about 50 percent.

Whether these changes will work as hoped, and whether charging $8 a day or $40 a week to enter Manhattan will keep people from driving, is not known, of course, and won’t be until the whole thing is tried out.

One of the forecasts Bloomberg keeps making is the expected population increase of about one million people. What has happened, and what will happen in Bay Ridge?

It is easy to know the past. From 1970 to 1980, the population of Community Board 10 decreased — from 129,822 to 110,612. But in 2000, it bolted up to 122,542. The city predicts that the population will inch up to 125,300 by 2010 and reach 130,700 by 2030.

It should be noted, for whatever it is worth, that if the long-range forecasts prove out, the population of Bay Ridge by 2030 will roughly match the number of residents found there 60 years ago.

— Dennis Holt
Brooklyn Eagle

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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