By JOHN JORDAN

NEW YORK – Apparently frustrated at being 20 minutes late for his scheduled address at a conference held last month at NYU aptly titled “The Challenge of Congestion in the New York Region,” Westchester County Executive Andy Spano publicly declared that he would prefer to close all Westchester exits to I-287 to relieve traffic problems in his county rather than build more roadways to address mounting traffic demands.

Blaming his tardiness on the traffic snarls he encountered while leaving his leafy Yorktown Heights community where he resides, he stood before a group of 250 transportation planners, DOT officials and highway design consultants assembled to address this core issue and floated the jaw-dropping idea.

“You have guys like me in Westchester County who understand that quality of life is our biggest asset,” Mr. Spano said, setting up the argument that improvements in transportation are a threat to lifestyle. “There is no way I get involved in lengthening, widening or doing anything to our roads. I will fight it (road construction) to the death because anything like that goes to affecting our quality of life.”

Mr. Spano’s comments, made prior to leading a panel discussion and Q&A on the costs and causes of congestion, included a swipe at the New York State Department of Transportation.

“You’ve got DOT and they are nice guys; they’re not evil. But they come with pictures and slides and they show me these ribbons of concrete and they say, ‘Look how beautiful this is.’ And we know that every time they build something like that more cars come and more congestion comes.”

Mr. Spano concluded his remarks by saying, “So I have taken the tact that I am going to shut down everything. In fact, if I could shut down the exits on I-287 and just let them go right through Westchester I would really do that, if I had the power to do that. And then let’s see what happens, because I think something has to happen that causes some thinking out of the box.”

One particular idea, suggested by some lawmakers and DOT officials in the late 1990s to relieve traffic and promote safety on Westchester’s highways was the high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane. HOVs are popular on Long Island and in other states throughout the Northeast corridor as well as throughout other parts of the country. Mr. Spano was lukewarm on the idea for I-287 during his election campaign in the late 1990s, and backed off the concept completely when his Republican challenger came out against the HOV.

Mr. Spano also theorized that, because the population of New York State has not significantly grown in the past three decades, then “simplistically, if you get the cars off the road, you get rid of a lot of the congestion.”

(To hear the full text of the County Executive’s remarks at the conference, go to www.cicnys.org.)

In other Congestion Conference news, the Nov. 16 symposium, sponsored by New York University’s Wagner Rudin Center for Transportation and Policy & Management and held at NYU’s Kimmel Center in the Eisner and Lubin Auditorium, attracted some of the keenest minds on transportation policy and planning in the nation. Other speakers offered a variety of more plausible remedies to shutting down major exit arteries into the county’s cities, towns and villages that ranged from major roadway reconstruction and lane pricing programs to expansion of mass transit options.

The consensus of most, however, was succinctly summarized by New York State Commissioner of Transportation Joseph Boardman in later remarks to CONSTRUCTION NEWS. He said it was clear that the problem of congestion will likely get worse in many areas of the nation due to the expected growth in the national economy, and that government policies that promote inadequate funding for transportation infrastructure are doomed.

Dozens of local political leaders and transportation officials from New York State, Westchester and Rockland counties participated in the panel discussions and the more than 250 attendees included those addressing the group, such as Tyler Duvall, assistant secretary for Transportation Policy for the U.S. DOT.

Robert Paswell, director of the University Transportation Center, City College of New York (CUNY) Institute for Transportation Systems, stressed the importance of reducing congestion to the New York economy. He said the critical issue in terms of traffic on the state’s roadways is the reliability for both personal trips and the movement of goods for the least amount of cost.

“We have not built new capacity in nearly 50 years, despite the enormous increase in economic activity in the region during that time,” Mr. Paswell noted, adding that he believed that the construction of new road and mass transit capacity has to be part of the solution to the congestion problem.

Another provocative point of view on congestion came from Anthony Downes, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. and author of the recently published “Still Stuck in Traffic.”

“Congestion is not the problem; it is the solution,” said Mr. Downes, adding that communities that suffer from congestion do so because their economies are prospering. “Congestion is an inescapable problem living in an urban area,” he asserted. For urban areas that are experiencing economic growth, he said, “Get used to it (congestion) because you are going to continue to be stuck in traffic and it is going to get worse.”

Mr. Downes stated realistically that the only way to significantly reduce congestion and get people out of their cars is “to hurt them with a huge recession.”

The conference’s luncheon speaker was Assistant Secretary for Transportation Policy for the U.S. DOT. Mr. Duvall, who defended President Bush’s proposal of $256 billion to fund federal transportation over the next six years. Construction industry advocates are supporting the U.S. Senate level calling for $318 billion. He said that the system must look at technology and privatization in helping solve transportation congestion issues, and that raising the gas tax will not solve the congestion problem in the U.S.

DOT Commissioner Mr. Boardman discussed the many large capital projects that are on the drawing boards such as the Second Avenue Subway, the Tappan Zee Bridge, Interstate 86 and expressed his concern that at the moment there is insufficient funding for many of these initiatives.

Commenting on the pending TEA-21 reauthorization, Commissioner Boardman said, “The domestic agenda of the Bush Administration needs to understand that we need to start with an adequate level of funding for transportation. I am alarmed that we don’t have a fire in our belly right now about what is going to happen for the future to deliver transportation services in New York State and throughout the nation.”

“We need a new program, we don’t need a repeat of the old program to achieve success,” he said.