The new plan makes the BQE a little less visible.
Photo: Courtesy DOT
“It is safe,” Deputy Mayor Meera Joshi told the Daily News when discussing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway late last week. “It is the most highly monitored piece of bridge infrastructure we have in the city [and] we’ve done a lot of interim work on it.” That assertion itself tells you something about the dreary and fragile state of Brooklyn’s central elevated artery, worn out and carrying triple its design load, growing more expensive to maintain every year. The city knows this, of course, and has laid out an array of upgrade plans, including the new one that occasioned Joshi’s comments. It’s the fourth proposal in recent years, and just a preliminary one that might change or get scrapped altogether after the environmental review finally begins in 2025.
The renderings show the triple cantilever — the stacked section that wraps around the Brooklyn waterfront near the Brooklyn Bridge, above the park and below the Promenade — replaced and rearranged. The new structure replaces the old wedding-cake tiers, instead pushing the southbound lanes inward and stacking them on top of the other, taking over some space now used for MTA power cables. The replacement highway will have wider lanes (the federally mandated 12 feet instead of the unsettling ten-footers we have now) and large outrigger girders supporting a reconstructed Promenade. (They also hide the highway from the waterfront somewhat.)
These are incremental improvements, especially if the city can commit to not adding any more lanes (although DOT commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said the scheme could work with a three-lane design as well as the current two). Construction won’t begin for five years in any case, and it isn’t clear where the $5 billion needed to do the work would come from. As for the actual building of the thing, Joshi, if anything, understated the case to the News when she said “you’re doing construction in the eye of the needle because you’re sandwiched in between a beautiful promenade and a beautiful park.”
The current, triple-tier BQE.
Photo: Shutterstock/Shutterstock / rblfmr
What she’s conveying, it seems, is that this is all a dramatic demonstration of fine logistics and engineering amid the gridlocked, visionless politics that have accomplished almost nothing over the past 20 years, when the warnings about the precarious future of the BQE began sounding. In terms of long-term planning, we should be going with one of the many alternatives to reconstructing the BQE — including ripping it down or burying big portions of it — not tinkering with its triple-cantilever section and giving further concessions to the truck pollution and car congestion currently choking the roadway and harming the health of neighborhoods both north and south of Brooklyn Heights. These plans have been studied, they’re good ideas, and we’re not doing any of them. New Yorkers and their leaders have become so vision-averse, and headache-averse, and spending-averse (although this reconstruction will cost billions), and internal-combustion-engine-focused, that we can’t even get a funding stream in place that has been tested and proven in London for 20 years (and one that would have reduced the traffic on the BQE by as much as 13 percent). Digging up half of Brooklyn for the once-in-a-century chance to finally fix the BQE and, in turn, build a better city, would require a level of misery tolerance that has come to seem unimaginable. Even the most trivial change involved in taking down the highway — disrupting the Promenade, originally Robert Moses’s sneaky way of getting his highway through by topping it with a garnish that made it palatable to its affluent neighbors — brought out the howls. In the absence of true vision, what we do is simply reconstruct. Even though it’s anything but simple.
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