City Plans Costly Brooklyn-Queens Expressway Repairs, Promises Less Chaos Than Last Time

The fate of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway exposes both the perils and promise of infrastructure renewal in America’s largest city.

On weekday mornings, nearly 150,000 vehicles choke the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (B.Q.E.), a battered artery originally conceived in an age before seatbelts, smartphones, and urban sustainability plans. For years, locals gazing over its triple cantilever in Brooklyn Heights have watched the structure deteriorate, a patchwork of corroded steel and crumbling concrete that portends both civic neglect and urgent need. Now, after decades of dithering and short-term fixes, New York City’s leaders have unveiled a revised proposal to remake the B.Q.E.—a gambit with consequences stretching well beyond city limits.

The plan, released by the Adams administration in May, reimagines a 1.5-mile stretch of the expressway’s most troubled section. Gone is the earlier scheme for an ill-fated superhighway; in comes a narrowed roadway, expanded green space, and environmental mitigation for long-suffering neighbours. The city’s Department of Transportation promises not simply to patch and mend, but to “transform” the roadway, spending an estimated $5 billion over a decade. The aim: keep freight, commuters, and commerce flowing while at last halting structural decay.

For New York, the stakes are not merely cosmetic. The expressway ferries a sizable chunk—some 13%—of the city’s total truck traffic each day, underpinning the regional supply chain from Hunts Point to Red Hook. Boroughs to the east and south, with weaker transit alternatives, rely even more upon its 12 lanes (much to Manhattanites’ chagrin). Were the double-decker structure to fail, as several engineering reviews have warned, cascading gridlock and economic loss could follow. The memory of the West Side Highway’s partial collapse in 1973, with its ensuing decade of chaos, looms in policy-makers’ minds.

Yet remaking the B.Q.E. carries secondary consequences equally worthy of scrutiny. The original expressway, championed by New York’s notorious master builder, Robert Moses, sliced working-class neighbourhoods in two and cast a shadow—sometimes literal—over local housing and parks. For decades, condemnation and construction displaced thousands. Today, urbanists and local activists fret that a refreshed highway could enshrine, rather than undo, Moses’s divisive legacy. No plan will please all: the city’s commitment to shrink the roadway meets howls from drivers, while green space advocates cajole for a full teardown.

The practical challenges are as daunting as the political ones. The highway, built for mid-century traffic, now accommodates more than triple its intended volume, much of it articulated trucks that daily violate weight restrictions. City inspectors, in peacetime and pandemic alike, have attempted partial bans on overweight vehicles. The result has been fitful enforcement on one of the country’s most heavily monitored corridors. The city’s 10-year plan includes technological tools—weight sensors and digital policing—but these portend a future where privacy and autonomy dangle in uneasy balance with public safety.

It is not just logistical calculations at stake, but questions of equity and public health. Pollution from idling traffic has led to rates of childhood asthma along the B.Q.E. corridor that rival those found near freeways in Los Angeles. Surface tempers spike during hot summers, worsened by the concrete heat island effect. The city pledges plantings, air monitoring, and an expanded promenade above the expressway, borrowing from the “cap-and-cover” approach seen in Boston’s Big Dig. The promise, though, comes freighted with scepticism in a town jaded by cost overruns and construction delays.

If New York succeeds—a proposition on which the city has punted before—it could bode well for other metropolises juggling decrepit mid-century roadways and new environmental mandates. San Francisco’s Embarcadero, famously reimagined after the 1989 earthquake, rebounded as a pedestrian and development magnet. Boston’s Central Artery/Tunnel project, for all its puny predictability on budgets, radically reduced local pollution and stitched together once-separated neighbourhoods. Yet both projects also invoked the sort of eye-watering expense and timeline inflation that make municipal accountants blanch.

A national barometer for urban reinvention

Across the United States, bridges, freeways, and tunnels are ageing out sooner than their designers reckoned, with the American Society of Civil Engineers now grading the nation’s infrastructure at a paltry C-minus. Federal largesse—$1.2 trillion under the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law—offers cities a once-in-a-generation chance to mend their bones. The B.Q.E. thus stands both as guinea pig and weather vane for other cities weighing whether to entomb, threadbare, or demolish antique urban roadways.

This moment is also a stress test for local governance. In the long shadow of Robert Moses, the Adams administration promises “listening sessions” and robust consultation, in theory eschewing the top-down decision-making that marred twentieth-century megaprojects. Still, as many New Yorkers will attest, consultation does not equate to consensus. With community boards sharpening demands and lawsuits looming, every mile of new macadam will be paid for not only in dollars but hours of negotiation.

Ought New York simply to demolish the B.Q.E. and repurpose its footprint for less car-centred uses—a land bank for the climate era? Urbanists invoke the “surface option,” but the city’s famously sluggish transit expansion dims that prospect for now. For better or worse, the expressway remains too vital to current patterns of mobility and goods movement to be excised without crippling collateral damage. But to merely refurbish the old road, with all its scars, would be to miss an opportunity for improvement and urban healing.

What is clear is that no solution is perfect. Trade-offs—between commuters and communities, commerce and quiet, present need and future aspiration—abound. In a city built on improvisation and grit, the capacity to weigh those compromises will determine not just the B.Q.E.’s ultimate form, but also the template for infrastructure renewal nationwide.

Where the B.Q.E. leads, others may follow. America’s urban highways, trending toward decay, await their own difficult reckonings. New York’s handling of its most iconic thoroughfare will serve as a measure—of engineering, of statecraft, and of the willingness to think, at last, beyond the car. ■