Complete with a video showing him booting a metal container and declaring that New York City was not going to “kick the can down the road” any longer on repairing the key freight thoroughfare of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway’s (BQE) cantilevered section, Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled a plan to rebuild the highway.
Earlier plans to “rehabilitate”–the city’s term–the roughly 1.5 miles of the BQE that is owned by the city, and which includes the cantilevered section that has been under such strain, have either been withdrawn or replaced with short-term measures like stronger enforcement of weight limits.
But Mamdani’s plan announced Monday is a more extensive project to do extensive repairs on the section while allowing traffic to keep moving.
At its core is the construction of an alternate temporary roadway so that vehicles can continue move in the right-of-way that connects traffic coming off the Verrazano Narrows Bridge across Staten Island up to a key highway serving Long Island and other routes that go north into the Bronx, upstate New York and New England and vice versa.
13K trucks a day
The estimate is that 13,000 to 14,000 heavy-duty trucks use the section of the highway each day that has been dubbed BQE Central. It is located in Brooklyn along that borough’s border with the lower portion of the East River and contains exits used for vehicles looking to cross the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge into Manhattan.
In its announcement of its plans Monday, the city’s Department of Transportation (DOT) did not use the word “rebuild” to describe its project. Instead, the city said it was “proposing to repair and strengthen the existing BQE Central structure. This work is called rehabilitation.”
The city plans to “fix deteriorated parts of the structure, including repairs to the highway deck, walls, joints and other structural elements,” according to the DOT’s media release on the plan. It also speaks of fixing drainage, railings and lighting.
Two lanes still the plan
For the freight industry, there are two key parts of the plan beyond just improving the road.
First, the road isn’t going to be expanded beyond two lanes. Additionally, there aren’t any plans to change the interchanges on BQE Central. Current exits will remain as they are now.
Second, in what is easily the biggest change in the Mamdani program compared to those of previous mayors Bill DeBlasio and Eric Adams, a temporary two-level bypass will be constructed for “some locations.”
The proposal in the Mamdani plan would be a bypass that would travel over Furman Street, which is one block east from the BQE. The bypass’ height, according to the DOT, would “be no higher than the existing Queens-bound level.”
There would also be a bypass that would travel above the existing BQE north of the Furman Street bypass. The city said these temporary roads would be removed after the project was completed.
40 more years
The work is expected to extend the life of BQE Central by 40 years, the city said. But it might not need all that time; the city’s statement gave a silent nod to voices calling for the entire structure to be replaced, noting that the latest project “(maintains) the option for future reenvisioning of the full BQE corridor.”
One of the earlier proposals for rehabilitation called for a temporary road to be built over the Brooklyn Height Promenade during a BQE reconstruction, a popular public spot with stunning views of lower Manhattan and the New York harbor. That was the DeBlasio plan for what to do with the traffic that would still need to flow during the rehabilitation without shifting it down on into downtown Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights local streets.
But the Promenade plan was greeted with enormous pushback from local communities and was ultimately scrapped.
Groundbreaking for the project is expected in 2030, with a 10-year timeline on the project’s duration. The city’s City Environmental Quality Review, necessary for the project to proceed, is expected to take 18 to 24 months, the city said.
A DOT spokesman said the weight limit enforcement would continue.
TANY happy with the project
Zach Miller, the vice president for government affairs at the Trucking Association of New York (TANY), in words even he conceded were unusual, heaped praise on the Mamdani administration for its plan.
“We applaud the administration’s commitment to this,” Miller said. His group will review the draft of the work necessary as well as the environmental impact, “but we are very supportive of the administration’s announcement today.”
While Miller did not mention the “kicking the can” description, he did say that from the moment TANY began discussions with the Mamdani administration over the issue of the BQE, “it really was going to fall on them to do something about it because we are so so close to the point where if nothing was done, trucks would have to be banned from the corridor, which was the situation we all wanted to avoid.”
“We have to live in reality, and I believe that’s exactly what this administration is doing,” Miller said.
In the video, Mamdani speaks of Robert Moses, New York City’s master road builder and owner of a mixed legacy as somebody who both got things done but often rammed through car-centric development that have been seen as damaging neighborhoods. The BQE was a Moses project.
“When (Moses) finished the BQE Central in 1954, it was only designed to handle around 50,000 car trips a day and last for 50 years,” Mamdani said in the video. “But here we are, 70 years later, with more than 130,000 vehicles driving on it daily, including 13,000 heavy trucks, you do the math. This isn’t a new problem. For decades, prior administrations have been trying to figure out a way to address the urgently needed repairs of the BQE.”
Mamdani in the video that “every year we don’t do something about the BQE, it costs the city $160 million.”
“This plan allows us to safely fix the current problem without slowing our city down and wasting decades more waiting while the BQE continues to get worse,” he says in the video. “This won’t be easy, won’t be quick, but we’re done waiting on one of the city’s most severe infrastructure issues. Let’s get to work.”
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