Regional Plan Association: Brooklyn needs more housing, transit projects like BQX
“We’re going to need to be smarter about the way we do things,” Regional Plan Association (RPA) President Tom Wright announced at the beginning of RPA’s “Streetcar Success: What New York Can Learn from Other Cities” at Brooklyn Law School’s Feil Hall. Using graphs projected on a screen, Wright warned the assembly of transportation managers, community activists and business leaders that the tristate region’s previous 25 years of economic growth would slow to a trickle in the next quarter century without significant investment in housing, infrastructure and especially transportation.
RPA’s pitch in favor of the proposed Brooklyn-Queens Connector (BQX) — a 16-mile streetcar line to run along the banks of the East River from Astoria to Sunset Park — took place just a few blocks from the previous week’s Brooklyn Heights Association meeting where the BQX proposal took a pounding from an entirely different panel of experts, and which drew scathing criticism from BQX proponents as having been deliberately one-sided.