[Update below] In April 2019, about seven months after the New York City Department of Transportation originally announced that a stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) was in dire need of repair, Mayor Bill de Blasio put together an "expert panel" to assess the situation. The 16-person panel was tasked with reworking the DOT's original proposal, which floated the controversial idea of creating a temporary roadway on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade while the two levels of highway below are rebuilt.
The expert panel has now released its report, with the main recommendation being to eliminate two lanes (from six to four) on this 1.5 mile stretch of the BQE, while also imposing weight limits and reducing the number of vehicles, specifically cutting down on truck traffic. Work will need to start this year -- the DOT says the rapidly deteriorating roadway was not originally built to handle the weight of the 153,000 cars and trucks it now supports on a daily basis.
The section of the roadway in need of work is a prominent one—a triple-cantilevered stretch that includes the Promenade on top, running from Atlantic Avenue to Sands Street in Brooklyn Heights. When the rehabilitation project was announced by the DOT in 2018, residents of the surrounding neighborhoods, as well as local politicians, were outraged by the idea of turning the Promenade into a temporary highway. The mayor's panel was formed to wade through a wide array of other proposals that had been brought forth independently, and offer a report with their own recommendation on how to move forward.
After some delay, that report was released on Thursday night following an invite-only preview at Brooklyn Borough Hall. The report notes that the panel aimed to "identify the steps necessary to keep the current roadway safe and extend its life span," as well as "lay out a vision." That vision expands beyond the 1.5-mile stretch in question, and they recommend that work "be undertaken to immediately devise a broader transformation of the entirety of the BQE corridor from Staten Island to Queens," ultimately moving beyond the Robert Moses-era highway traffic model.
The panel anticipates that narrowing this stretch of the BQE to two lanes in both directions will ultimately reduce traffic congestion overall. While that may seem counter-intuitive, some traffic analysts say widening highways only increases the number of drivers.
“We’ve gone through a 70-year period of adding and widening but this is a failing strategy," Sam Schwartz, a transportation expert who advised the panel, told the NY Times. "It’s like solving the obesity problem by loosening your belt.”
Reducing the number of lanes on this section of the BQE would also enable the DOT to add shoulders to a notoriously dangerous stretch of highway. The report asserts that:
When there is a crash, especially with injuries, multiple lanes are often blocked for extended periods of time. Without shoulders, there is no place to move vehicles off to the side. This triggers huge diversions to local streets. To minimize these “worst cases,” which occur with frequency, the BQE can almost immediately be made safer with shoulders by simply restriping the roadway. While this means the roadway may have several more hours/day (than today) when demand exceeds capacity, there would be a sharp reduction in “worst-case” events and fewer casualties.
While Governor Andrew Cuomo has been silent on the BQE project, Municipal Art Society (MAS) president Elizabeth Goldstein, a parks and preservation advocate who was part of the panel, told Gothamist the project would become a state issue if it extends beyond the Atlantic to Sands Street stretch; while the triple-cantilevered stretch of the roadway is maintained by the NYC DOT, the highway that precedes and follows is under the authority of the state DOT.
While conducting its review, the panel discovered that cantilevered stretch of the BQE is in worse shape than previously realized, and repair work is needed as soon as possible. According to the report, "the presence of many overweight trucks and faster-than-expected deterioration may cause sections of the road to become unsafe and incapable of carrying current traffic within five years," and as such, "the cantilevered section of the BQE will need to be repaired immediately." (A visit to the site in 2018 showed how the BQE is crumbling every day.)
Repairing the cantilevered stretch is expected to cost over $1.7 billion, the NY Times reports.
Close-up of the BQE retaining wall, note decay and dirt.
Goldstein told Gothamist on Thursday night that this repair work "is more critical and urgent than even the city realized." She also said that "an expensive and damaging plan [referrring to the DOT's original proposal] that only repaired one section of the highway without broader consideration the generations of harm this Moses-era project has done would be unacceptable," and therefore, "a two-fold approach is the only reasonable, feasible, and responsible plan for transforming this essential artery."
The panel also specifically rejected "any proposal to build a temporary highway at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade or Brooklyn Bridge Park."
After the DOT originally announced its plan in 2018, a new community group formed in Brooklyn Heights called A Better Way, led by Hilary Jager. While the panel did reach out to them for input throughout their process, Jager told Gothamist on Thursday night that they "did not discuss the report with us prior to its release." In fact, no group or community member we spoke with had seen the report before it was released to the public.
Brooklyn Heights Promenade during rally against the DOT's plan
Jager told us, however, that they are "thrilled that our collective advocacy has paid off and the panel has rejected the DOT’s two ill-conceived plans while echoing our call for traffic mitigation and a visionary rebuilding of the BQE." She added, "With this project's legacy of complacency and inaction, it is more critical than ever that our Federal, State and local leaders join us in finding a truly innovative solution for the next century."
Patrick Killackey, of North Heights Neighbors, echoed the sentiment and told us, "We were thrilled with the Panel’s report, especially in their recommendation to immediately reduce the roadway to four lanes and of course in their unqualified rejection of the Promenade Highway."
We have reached out to the DOT to find more about their next steps and timeline, and will update when we know more. Goldstein, the panel member from MAS, told us the DOT has "already begun some immediate things" in regards to the repair work.
UPDATE 1:40 p.m.: On Friday's Brian Lehrer Show, de Blasio said oversized truck enforcement will begin on Monday, with substantial fines up to $7,000 per violation (this is for trucks over 80,000 pounds). He added that this spring, the DOT will start "very substantial immediate repairs," though the big decisions around a longterm solution will still need to be made. When asked about his panel's proposal to narrow the roadway to four lanes, de Blasio seemed unconvinced that the so-called "road diets" advocated by some transportation experts actually reduce traffic congestion. "We have to be careful," de Blasio said. "If we say ‘hey, let’s reduce the amount of lanes,’ that’s not a guarantee people get out of their cars, it is a guarantee of traffic jams and other challenges.”
Other cities have seen cars vanish when they've done complete teardowns of roadways. For example, Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct carried 90,000 cars a day (the BQE is at around 150,000 a day) before being shut down for demolition in early 2019. After the viaduct was closed, reports the Seattle Times, "commute times have been slightly above average—but have fallen far short of the most dire predictions. And fewer cars and trucks than normal have been traveling on the region’s other major highways." Instead of driving, public transit use picked up, more people started biking and using the water taxi service, and, well, "the cars just disappeared."
