New York City began using weigh-in-motion (WIM) technology Thursday on a key stretch of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE), with fines eventually awaiting trucks that exceed current weight limits.The plan is one part of a back-and-forth decision-making process by the city as it figures out what to do with a cantilevered section of the BQE near Brooklyn Heights and across lower New York Bay from the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan. It is a key truck route in the New York City area.
And while the view from that location might be spectacular as Lower Manhattan comes into view northbound or southbound, the visual landscape is taken in on roads with cantilevered decks that are both uniquely constructed and in significant need of repair but with no clear decision on how to proceed.
Specifically, the area in question is between where the BQE crosses the terminus of Atlantic Avenue and Spring Street near the highway, which is also known as Interstate 278. The length of the section where WIM will be in operation is about a mile and a half.
The WIM enforcement campaign kicked off following the enactment of a New York state law that was signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul last month.
“The BQE is a critical regional transportation and economic artery, and swift implementation of automated enforcement will help to deter overweight trucks from putting additional wear and tear on this aging piece of infrastructure as New York City develops a long-term repair plan,” the DOT said in a prepared statement announcing the enforcement initiative.
The stretch of the highway set for the WIM enforcement initiative at the beginning will be just for traffic that is headed away from Brooklyn and toward Queens in a northerly direction. For the first 90 days of the initiative, the transportation department said, trucks found to be in violation will be given a warning. After those 90 days are up, trucks found to be overweight will be subject to a fine of $650.
Installing the WIM technology in the lanes that head toward the Verrazano Narrows Bridge that crosses into Staten Island is ongoing, according to the spokesman. When that section of the road is ready for the test, it will also begin with a 90-day warning period followed by the prospect of $650 fines.
The enforcement of weight limits by WIM technology was foreshadowed more than two years ago when the city backed off more extensive proposals to rebuild the highway and instead focused on extending the roadway’s life by deterring overweight trucks from using it.
Kendra Helms, president of the Trucking Association of New York (TANY), said her organization had been opposed to the legislation that allowed the WIM technology to be used for enforcement.
“To use them for automated enforcement, we had a lot of concerns,” Helms told FreightWaves.
She said the limit for the typical five-axle truck in New York is 80,000 pounds. She did not disagree that some trucks during the state’s preliminary testing of the technology were overweight on the BQE, citing one behemoth that came in at 176,000 pounds.
But since the idea of using WIM technology was introduced in 2021, TANY has made the argument that overweight permits granted by the state make enforcement tricky.
A spokesman for the New York City Department of Transportation said in an email to FreightWaves that the estimated truck traffic on the section of road is 11,700 vehicles per day. The number of trucks that are estimated to be overweight is 10%, based on the results of WIM technology that has been in place for a portion of the road since 2019.
However, Helms cited the permits as skewing the data. The 10% figure, she said, made no provision for trucks that were allowed to be on the highway because they were permitted to be there.
The state of New York in the past issued what are called divisible permits. There are categories for downstate and upstate.
The downstate permits, which would include New York City, allow a five-axle vehicle to be as much as 93,000 pounds and a seven-axle vehicle to be as much as 120,000 pounds.
“Some of the trucks that the city was showing as overweight are actually operating under a valid permit,” Helms said.
New permits under the program are not being issued by the state, Helms said. But the older ones can be transferred from a truck being retired onto a new truck within the same fleet.
By not allowing new permits but letting existing permits transfer to a new vehicle within a fleet, Helms said, “they’re creating a system of haves and have nots in New York City, which creates challenges from a competitive aspect.”
But the permits will become moot in the enforcement action, Helms said. Overweight vehicles even with a permit can be ticketed if the WIM system signals them as being too heavy. So a truck with a permit can drive all over New York state overweight but would need to stay off the cantilevered 1.5-mile stretch of the BQE.
As far as the next step in fixing the BQE’s cantilevered section, Helms said it has “taken a bit of a pause” as New York City gets ready to roll out congestion pricing. That program will charge vehicles an added fee if they drive in Manhattan below 61st Street.
“One of the things they want to find out from congestion pricing is how that changes traffic flows, and whether there’s potentially going to be an impact on the BQE as a result,” Helms said. “It could potentially be worse.”
A spokesman for the NYC DOT told FreightWaves in an email that the road sensors are manufactured by Kistler. C2Smart, which is a transportation research institute connected to New York University, “worked closely with DOT to install and monitor weigh-in-motion sensors along the city-owned section of the BQE.”
What comes next is uncertain. A radical plan that would have had rebuilding the cantilevered levels alongside shifting the highway temporarily to the storied pedestrian promenade that runs above the cantilevers was scrapped under heavy local opposition.
The spokesman said the city’s budget has $1.5 billion allocated for what he called the “core” BQE project, beginning in 2026. Until then, there is $31 million in this year’s budget for interim repairs and $2.8 million for sensor application this year.
There had been hundreds of millions of dollars budgeted in prior years. But as the city moved away from its original plans, spending was shifted into the future.
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