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Imagine...

((Parks Department/Department of City Planning illustration))

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - The Parks Department wants our input on designs for Freshkills Park.

Here's our two cents: Make sure that opening the road network inside the former landfill is part of the story.

Freshills is one of five city parks that will receive $30 million for improvements through the Anchor Parks initiative. That's a new city program that gives funding for parks that serve as a center of activity for the surrounding community.

There's already been plenty of progress at Freshkills, even if the park won't be fully open until 2036. Schmul Park has seen improvements. The Owl Hollow Fields area is open. So is the New Springville Greenway bikepath.

The park will be a place for horseback riding, mountain biking, kayaking and public art installations. According to the Parks Department, 200 species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians have been spotted in the park since the landfill closed in 2001.

Truth be told, there was nowhere to go but up for the formal environmental nightmare that Staten Islanders lived with without recourse for half a century.

It will be amazing for those of us who remember the old landfill - the unavoidable smell, the flying debris, the mounds of trash you could see from outer space, the predatory seagulls - to walk those fields, to kayak in those formerly polluted waters.

But about those roads.

There's an existing road system already in place inside the park, a remnant of the old landfill. Sanitation Department vehicles used to use them.

Freshkills gives us a rare opportunity to attack the Island's chronic traffic problems. After all, we're not building any more roads around here. And we're not going to have fewer vehicles on the Island any time soon.

It's not like we're looking to take swaths and swaths of parkland for roads in Freshkills. The roads already exist. At 2,200 acres, three times larger than Central Park, there's plenty of room for both roads and recreation in Freshkills.

A plan from the city Department of Design and Construction calls for a four-lane road that would stem from the Yukon Avenue intersection at Richmond Avenue and traverse the former landfill site's East Park.

At the heart of the park, northbound and southbound traffic would spit onto two bridges over the site's main creeks that would connect to each direction of traffic on the West Shore Expressway.

It's estimated that the project will cost around $120 million. In other words, money well spent. In addition to easing traffic in the surrounding community, it would also help those who actually want to use the park.

The DDC also plan includes roadside greenery flanked by a bike path on one side and a pedestrian pathway on the other. That should make the Vision Zero people happy. We can all co-exist.

It's not exactly a new idea. In 2009, the city applied for $50 million in federal grant money aimed at opening the roads.

As then-Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said, "We are committed to building these roads through and getting these communities connected."

The sooner the better.

Those who didn't live through those landfill days will have a hard time understanding the true blot that the dump was on us for half a century. There were two things that everybody knew about Staten Island: The ferry and the dump. That smell as you drove by the landfill on the West Shore Expressway was one of the things that people mentioned most about their visit to the borough.

It's no wonder that we had an inferiority complex all these years. No wonder we felt dumped on. We were dumped on, to the tune of 15,000 tons of trash from the other boroughs every day.

Having the landfill roads help mitigate one of our most chronic problems, traffic, would be an amazing legacy for the former dump. It's the least the city can do for Staten Island.