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Merchants and pedestrians on Myrtle Avenue are calling for the city to fix a hazardous stretch that forces straphangers to straddle a narrow median between two lanes of traffic while they wait for buses.
Four blocks of the bustling Clinton Hill thoroughfare, from Hall Street to Emerson Place, has a service road alongside it which leaves commuters waiting for the B54 stranded on a patch of sidewalk about three feet wide with speeding traffic on one side that forces them up against parked vehicles on the other side.
“If they don’t do something, it’s going to be dangerous,” said Virgil Chance, who works in a Blockbuster Video near the no-man’s land. “There’s traffic on both sides.”
The Department of Transportation has developed a design that would reduce the threat to commuters and create a public plaza, but would eliminate about 20 parking spots. It would also change the remaining spaces, which are free now, to metered parking.
But the proposal is tentative. There is no cost estimate and it is not yet on the agency’s schedule for construction — even though local business owners support it.
“There are four lanes of parking there, and it’s un-metered parking which means there’s not a lot of turnover,” said Meredith Phillips-Almeida of the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership, a local business group.
Phillips-Almeida knows that the war for control of Brooklyn’s streets will not be swiftly won, even when neighborhood groups and the city appear to be working jointly.
“We’ve been working on this for three years,” she told The Brooklyn Paper, adding, “Realistically, the changes could be three or five years down the road.”
Community Board 2, following the recommendation of its Transportation Committee, voted on Tuesday night without so much as a word of dissent to support the proposal.
©2008 Community Newspaper Group
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