By: Hadassa Kalatizadeh
On Monday February 24th, the City Council released a report divulging its solution to the crumbling state of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. The proposed bid is an $11 billion plan which would tear down the BQE and replace it with a 3 mile underground tunnel. The proposal is being back by Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who told The New York Times that the effort marks “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build the city we deserve and need in the future.”
The city deserves better than the “poor air quality, divided communities, traffic violence, visual blight, and noise pollution” the highway delivers its neighborhoods, reads the report’s opening statements. Urban design firm ARUP, was commissioned by the council to report on the topic, and came up with the tunnel as one of two options. As reported by Crain’s NY, the second option proposed in the report, would be to reconstruct the three-tiered structure of the highway with a single level, then deck over that level with an expansion of Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Currently, the 1.5 mile stretch built more than 70-years-ago in the Robert-Moses-era is traveled by more than 153,000 cars every day. Most of those are private vehicles, with only about 10 to 13 percent of the traffic being trucks. Johnson, a 2021 Mayoral hopeful, argues that vehicles on highways contribute to roughly 30 percent of NYC’s total carbon emissions, and that 83 percent of that is from private cars. “That should keep you up at night. If you believe in science — and you believe that climate change is real — join me in this fight. Let’s get people out of private cars,” said Johnson. “The Lexington Avenue subway line carries more passengers than [the BQE] in a morning rush hour,” he added. “The city should study alternatives … including the removal of the BQE in its entirety.”
The proposal detailed in the engineering report includes a 57-foot tunnel that would run from Gowanus to Bedford Avenue in South Williamsburg. Arup says the tunnel’s construction would probably take about 7 to 10 years. The study suggests the tunnel be built using automated tunnel boring machines, which would both reduce costs and limit above-ground disturbances. Those same machines were utilized for the delayed 7-line expansion and the upcoming East Side Access project.
As reported by Crain’s NY, the idea to replace the roadway with a tunnel has already been suggested and simultaneously rejected. “DOT studied digging a tunnel in 2016 finding many routes were impossible due to infrastructure including subways & water tunnels,” tweeted De Blasio’s Department of Transportation in September 2018. “Huge risks when building underneath some of the most historic neighborhoods in the city,” the DOT added in another previous tweet. The Arup report too concedes the plan may be imperfect, “beyond the issues of governance and cost, the potential largest hurdle to this plan would be the possible need for taking of private property at the tunnel portals and emergency egress shafts.”
The plan would need approval from Mayor de Blasio’s administration. At the end of 2018, his office decided to go with a $3.6 billion plan to rebuild the highway while diverting traffic to a temporary roadway built above the BQE. In April, following opposition, the Mayor said that an “expert panel” would further review the issue. Last month, that panel suggested reducing the size of the highway from six lanes to four lanes. Also, the Mayor had said the NYPD would do more to curb overweight trucks from using the highway.
The City Council will hold an oversight hearing on the BQE Tuesday at 10 A.M. on “The Future of the BQE”. “We still have a fight on our hands over the future of the highway and how to transform our neighborhood and the entire corridor for the better,” wrote the Brooklyn Heights Association who will provide testimony, along with other community groups, at the public hearing.
