It’s a communication gap so big you could park a truck in it.
The city decided to cut several parking spots along Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park in favor of truck loading zones, but never bothered to tell locals about the plan — and still won’t say which spots will get nixed, according to the leader of a business group.
The Department of Transportation say it will replace parking spaces with four new truck loading zones along a 10-block stretch of Fifth Avenue — the heart of the neighborhood’s commercial strip — by November. But the planners never checked with local business to ask where the loading zones should be — or even if they were really necessary, the head of the local business improvement district said.
“For us, this is really frustrating,” said Sunset Park Business Improvement District director Renee Giordano. “When it comes to working together, there’s no discussion. Us being at the location, we might have a different viewpoint and have a better idea of why one location would work better than another. We’re here all the time.”
The loading zones provide commercial trucks a place to sit so drivers don’t double-park while making deliveries.
Giordano can’t even say whether the city’s plan is a good one, because officials aren’t telling her where specifically they plan to put the zones — only that there will be four more between 45th and 55th streets by Oct. 31.
Existing zones along the avenue bar parking between 8:30 am and 7 pm every day but Sunday — making stores less accessible, Giordano said.
“Saturdays are a busy shopping time, and they took away all this space,” she said, gesturing to the several-car-length loading zone along the commercial strip.
The proposal apparently ballooned out of one local’s beef with truck traffic.
A constituent complained to the office of Assemblyman Felix Ortiz (D–Sunset Park), so the pol forwarded the complaint to the Department of Transportation, and the city ran with it, said a spokesman for the assemblyman.
“We simply passed along a constituent inquiry as we would with anybody,” said Ortiz spokesman Jeff Wice. “DOT took it to the next step and decided to rearrange traffic on those blocks. We were not advocating anything.”
The lack of community involvement is alarming, given that a plan to reactivate the nearby South Brooklyn Marine Terminal shipping hub could bring scores more trucks to Sunset Park’s streets, Wice said.
“We’re concerned that the city work with local organizations in dealing with the new traffic situation that the port might bring,” he said.
The Department of Transportation will review the results of the traffic study the agency conducted along the avenue, a spokeswoman said. Officials did not respond to requests for details about where the loading zones would be, or when they would be enforced.
It’s Giordano’s job to alert local businesses to any major changes the city implements, but she can’t do that without information from the city, and the communication breakdown threatens her ability to do her job, she said.
“If I get a phone call from a BID member about a new loading zone and I don’t know about it — that’s not good,” Giordano said.