Could two highway ramps and the same engineer doom the vaunted Willets Point redevelopment?
Striped bass and a dogged traffic engineer helped kill Westway, a massive West Side highway project, during the Koch administration. Could two highway ramps and the same engineer doom the mayor’s vaunted Willets Point redevelopment? Local property owners fighting it have been making that case for months—it’s a key element of their Article 78 lawsuit challenging the project’s environmental impact statement—and appear to have some momentum. Their traffic engineer, Westway nemesis Brian Ketcham, determined that the two proposed ramps would worsen traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway. The Bloomberg administration has argued that the ramps are necessary to prevent a traffic nightmare at the site. The EIS showed the massive Willets Point project would generate heavy traffic, but a recent report on the proposed ramps painted a much sunnier picture. The ramp report is being redone after Mr. Ketcham used traffic data from the EIS to highlight the discrepancy. Mr. Ketcham is being paid by project
