A local pol wants to ban parking on a Bergen Beach street to in the latest effort to fight a controversial bus depot there.
Residents have complained for years that employees from First Dawn Transit on E. 69th Street have been harassing neighbors and leaving loud, smoky buses idling on local streets. Lately, Bergen Beachers have a new gripe — the depot’s drivers are parking their personal cars a block from the depot and trashing the street, one neighbor said.
“They just throw the garbage our of the car door, so it’s disgusting over here,” said E. 69th Street resident Rose Troman. “They leave their breakfast on the side of their cars when they park.”
So state Sen. Roxanne Persaud (D–Canarsie) is lobbying the Department of Transportation to ban parking on E. 69th Street between Avenues X and Y — but she’s still working out the legality, she said.
“I’m asking whether it can be done,” Persaud said. “I’m not asking them to do anything illegal just because we want to block the bus company from the street.”
Even if Persaud is successful in outlawing parking on that stretch of E. 69th Street, finding somewhere else for the bus drivers to park may not be easy. The senator wants drivers parking personal vehicles inside the depot, but it can’t hold buses and cars at once, necessitating a daily shuffle where workers would first park outside the depot, empty the depot of buses, and then move their cars inside the lot before driving their bus routes, she said, admitting a less convoluted scheme would be better.
“It will become a cumbersome process,” she said.
Persaud has explored other solutions in the past, including inviting officers from the local police precinct to come down and hand out tickets. But that didn’t exactly pan out as planned — more residents than bus drivers ended up in the precinct’s cross hairs.
“It’s not an easy fix,” Persaud said.
