BY DUSICA SUE MALESEVIC | The tour bus congestion conundrum at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum has been a topic of discussion for years, but no one even seems to know how many tour buses are actually frequenting the site.
What is clear though, is the frustration of the some residents who live near the World Trade Center and the fear that it might worsen when the campus security plan calls for buses to line up on Trinity Place.
As of now, the plan is for buses to queue there in order to get searched before they are allowed to make a left onto Liberty St. and park at the trade center’s Vehicle Security Center.
“We’ve already got a lot of congestion as it is,” said Mary Perillo. “There’s really no reason for tour buses to come right here let alone idle in front of two high schools all day long. It’s just not necessary. It’s really unnecessary to bring tour buses into the Vehicle Security parking garage.”
World Trade Center tour buses on Trinity Pl.
The Vehicle Security Center is expected to be fully open spring 2015, with 71 total spots for buses, according to a Port Authority spokesperson. Out of those spots, 62 full-size and nine small-size buses will be accommodated.
Perillo, who has lived for 31 years in a building which faces the W.T.C., said she has seen buses blocking crosswalks and streets, snarling traffic, idling, parking in the middle of the street, and taking longer than three minutes to load and unload.
“It’s nuts,” she said.
But when asked about bus congestion at the site, a city Dept. of Transportation spokesperson, who answered questions on the condition of anonymity, said in an email that her office had not received any complaints.
“That is a lie. I have sat next to [D.O.T. Lower Manhattan] Commissioner [Luis] Sanchez at meetings in front of [Assembly] Speaker Silver, [State] Sen. [Daniel] Squadron where we have in fact complained about the bus congestion,” said Perillo. “And it was not the first time [Sanchez] has heard from my mouth the problem of the buses.”
Personal vehicles are often parked on West St. in spots designated for World Trade Center tour buses.
The D.O.T. spokesperson did say the agency makes a point to reach out to tour bus companies to remind them of the rules pertaining to the W.T.C. area. She said that six to eights spaces on Barclay and West Sts. were reserved for 9/11 Museum buses.
On several recent visits to the site, instead of tour buses, it was mostly personal cars and mail trucks using those designated spots. The spots cost $20 an hour, require a permit, and there is a three-hour maximum, but it was unclear if the other vehicles were paying.
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver started a task force with residents and representatives from the D.O.T., N.Y.P.D. and the mayor’s office, and held a meeting in December.
At the meeting, the community “raised serious concerns about tour buses idling, blocking intersections and causing traffic back-ups on Trinity Place,” according to Silver’s Dec. 15 press release.
He “asked the city to come up with a new plan for the buses that identifies additional drop off/pick up locations and better disperses traffic,” and “to install air monitors to measure pollution from buses and to make other quality of life improvements for those living around the site.”
Perillo said, “We’re just asking for more pollution by planning to have those buses checked there.”
Community Board 1 asked last year that more research on air quality around the site be conducted and for the continued use of air monitoring stations.
Steven Abramson, who also lives across the street, said, “There’s already too much traffic there. Why do we have to these tour buses there? That’s the question that I keep coming back to: Why?
“It is going to contribute to traffic backup,” he said. “It’s going to severely impact the dignity and the quality of the site visit. In some ways, it’s our overriding concern: It’s going to give it a Disneyland-like quality.”
The Transportation Dept. referred questions on the estimated number of W.T.C. tour buses to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. A museum spokesperson, speaking on background, said the community was raising “valid issues,” but he did not offer detailed information about the buses. In 2012, about 5 percent of the memorial visitors came by tour bus, he said, and this year, during peak summer season, less than one percent visited the museum by bus. He did not provide memorial visitor info for this year, which is now harder to track because there isn’t a ticketing system anymore.
C.B. 1 member Tammy Meltzer, said, “There needs to be a recognition by all involved at the campus site that the hundreds of buses per week come Downtown — not to go to go to the museum necessarily, but to drop off for the Memorial Plaza.”
Meltzer, who lives in Battery Park City, said that the buses are driving around residential neighborhoods and parking in front of schools, which is not safe, and that her family’s school crossing guard spends a lot of time waiving tour buses from parking in front of the school.
“Like any other fantastic tourist location, they need to consider the broader aspect of what’s going on, not everyone can afford to go to the museum itself but everyone can afford to go to the amazingly beautiful park and have reference and meaning and understand it,” she said.
Meltzer said that there has been an increase in tour buses and even more so since the fencing has been brought down with the opening of the museum in May.
“A multi-level approach for accommodating everyone in the neighborhood and all the tourists would be the best thought,” she said.
Perillo and Abramson both suggested that tourists use mass transit, an idea that C.B. 1 has also encouraged.
“We do get complaints but what we’re looking for is solutions,” C.B. 1 Chairperson Catherine McVay Hughes said in a phone interview.
She said improving the E train World Trade Center station would encourage more tourists to use it.
While he was waiting on Trinity Place on a recent weekday morning, Academy Bus driver Ernest Tomas said that the tour buses used to drop off near Cedar St., but now do so a block further away on Thames St.
“We stay back here now out of everybody’s way,” said Tomas, who lives in the Bronx and has driven buses for many years.
“In a way you don’t have the choice,” he said. “As far as I know, New York is number one in tourism and they do want to come down and see these sites. You have to unload and pick up somewhere within walking distance. We have a lot of older people come down, and they can’t walk so far.”
