As BQE Decision Looms, We Can Heed Boston’s Big Dig and Skip the Mistakes

As New York City weighs the fate of aging highways, Boston’s Big Dig looms as a costly object lesson in how infrastructure ambitions can entrench the very problems they aim to solve.

Beneath Brooklyn Heights, 70-year-old steel and concrete strain visibly. Each day, some 150,000 vehicles clatter across the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE), once a triumphant artery, now a civic headache. For New Yorkers and policy-makers alike, the question is not whether but how—if at all—the BQE should be rebuilt. Into this fraught debate, the spectre of Boston’s Big Dig intrudes, cautioning against recasting a 20th-century blunder in 21st-century concrete.

The Big Dig—officially the Central Artery/Tunnel Project—remains notorious. Conceived in the 1980s and not finished until 2007, Boston’s effort to sink its highway beneath the city ultimately devoured nearly $15 billion (in today’s money). By some measures, the city succeeded: burying a massive elevated expressway, unlocking 30 new downtown acres, and sparking investment across the seaport. Yet the triumph soured. The replacement was also an expansion—six lanes grew to eight, a new bridge boasted ten—and congestion quickly returned, abetted by a well-documented principle: induced demand.

What Boston achieved above ground, it forfeited on the roads. The new capacity invited more drivers, and soon, traffic again clogged the city centre. Urbanists now reference the “Big Dig mistake” as a textbook example of infrastructure fueling, not relieving, gridlock. After a brief honeymoon, Boston found itself among America’s most congested metropolises, air now cleaner perhaps, but journey times as tortuous as ever.

New York faces a remorselessly similar crossroads. The BQE’s triple cantilever—an engineering marvel in the 1950s—has deteriorated, battered by decades of salt, water, and constant overloading. In 2021, such was the structural peril that officials closed a lane in each direction and began fining overweight lorries. Temporary victories, but unsustainable; even now, sections threaten to crumble. A detailed City Council report flagged the urgency. Yet consensus on the way forward remains notably elusive.

Some, not least former mayor Eric Adams, have floated a “Big Dig redux”: rebuild and, pointedly, widen. His plan, at one point, entertained fattening the highway by up to 67 percent. Others, including key figures in the current administration, lean towards preservation, arguing that the BQE is too vital to the movement of goods and people to contemplate its removal. The underlying premise in both camps remains: the highway must persist, whether in new or old form.

But does it? The experience of Boston suggests otherwise. Destroying and expanding highways only deepens dependence, rarely addressing the root causes of urban congestion. New York’s leaders might instead consider more radical alternatives. Proposals from urban advocates envision tearing down the BQE, filling in trenches, and transforming the corridor into a linear park flanked by new housing, rapid transit, and protected cycle lanes—a chance to create amenities fit for a modern city.

Such an approach would portend profound shifts, beyond the built environment. Urban highways scar neighborhoods, dividing communities and lowering property values. Removing the BQE altogether could re-knit Brooklyn, reconnecting places long sundered by eight lanes of roaring autos. The environmental upshot would also be significant. Fewer vehicles, less pollution, more green: the city would gain lungs as well as legs.

The economic effects are knotty but far from puny. The Big Dig catalyzed $7 billion in private investment and 43,000 new jobs; New York, with land values vastly higher, could plausibly unlock even greater returns by liberating dozens of acres along the BQE. Equally, construction (or deconstruction) would disrupt traffic patterns for years, risking turbulence for businesses reliant on the corridor. Some might carp about displacing lorries onto local streets or undermining supply chains, though cities from Seoul to San Francisco have navigated such transitions with grit and, in the end, some success.

Political risk is inescapable. Voters tend to mourn lost parking and fret about longer commutes. Yet the alternative—a gold-plated expansion that locks in auto dependence for half a century more—may portend even greater discontent down the line. The recent energy of New York’s political scene, now led by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, gives reason to suppose that boldness, not timidity, may in fact be rewarded.

Cities don’t have to keep repeating their old mistakes

Historically, American metropolises chased the holy grail of more lanes, bigger expressways, and ever-faster traffic. Yet global exemplars tell a different tale. Seoul, for instance, turned the Cheonggyecheon highway into a riverfront park, sparking economic and cultural renewal. Paris and Madrid, albeit at smaller scales, have narrowed or buried thoroughfares only to discover that congestion does not (contra intuition) inexorably rise. Roads are not rivers: take a lane away, and people adjust their habits, often in unexpectedly efficient ways.

New York’s decision on the BQE is thus freighted with more than local symbolism. America’s largest city, once a pioneer of the urban expressway, could instead become a standard-bearer for their undoing. The playbook of the last century—widen, patch, repeat—offers tepid comfort, particularly as city-dwellers across the country demand cleaner air, safer streets, and more liveable neighborhoods. To cleave to the mistakes of the past is a counsel of both convenience and despair.

A hard-headed cost-benefit analysis, long a staple of The Economist’s thinking, also points away from mere replacement. To bury or rebuild the BQE will cost billions, tying up invaluable public land for a generation to come. To remove it may cost as much in the short run, but offers a much richer return as public space, environmental improvement, and untapped property value.

For New York, the question is not just whether to repeat Boston’s mistakes, but whether to reimagine what an essential “corridor” should be. Any mayor bold enough to take the jackhammer to Robert Moses’s legacy may find, when the dust settles, that the city can breathe anew.■