After more than a decade of deliberation, community opposition and scuttled proposals, city officials have no plan to rebuild the rapidly deteriorating Brooklyn-Queens Expressway beneath Brooklyn Heights — so they’re plotting a patch job instead.
The highway’s triple-cantilever structure tucked beneath the Brooklyn Heights Promenade will be shored up in a repair meant to last 20 years, Mayor de Blasio announced Wednesday.
Any comprehensive plan to rebuild the 71-year-old highway will be up to the next mayor, de Blasio said.
Sections of the structure could be at risk of collapse as soon as 2024 if they aren’t fixed, city Department of Transportation officials said in 2019.
But instead of rebuilding the busy highway, which serves roughly 150,000 vehicles and 15,000 trucks per day, the mayor said the city would crack down on weight restrictions on the roadway and carry out quick repairs to its most problematic areas.
He claimed it would keep the roadway from falling down while city officials work on a “long-term vision.”
Come Aug. 30, the roadway’s two levels between Atlantic Ave. and the Brooklyn Bridge will shift from three 10-foot-wide lanes to a pair of 12-foot lanes, the standard width for highways, with a nine-foot shoulders.
Some joints in the BQE’s structure will also be waterproofed, and the city will no longer salt the road during snowstorms, to prevent further corrosion of the 71-year-old highway, officials said.
“By eliminating the salting of the roadway and waterproofing the joints, you are able to create a situation where the structure can be safe and intact for another 20 years,” Transportation Department Chief Strategy Officer Jee Mee Kim said during a news conference.
De Blasio said the plan hinges on legislation passed in Albany this year that allows for automated enforcement of truck weight restrictions. The bill still requires a signature from the governor.
Hizzoner also wants to push more freight away from trucks and “onto rail, onto the water, and turning to smaller vehicles that make less negative impact overall.”
Crews will install “a series of high-tech sensors that will measure on an ongoing basis the behavior of the roadway,” said Transportation Department Commissioner Hank Gutman.
The announcement comes nearly three years after Transportation officials were lambasted by Brooklyn community groups for a proposal to build a temporary highway over the Brooklyn Heights Promenade to allow repairs to be made to the road below. The pitch would have closed the waterfront park for six years.
De Blasio halted that plan after the pushback — and in 2019 convened an expert panel to come up with alternatives. The panel in January 2020 recommended “an immediate fix for the roadway, prioritizing the safety of the public” and noted “sections of the road may become unsafe and incapable of carrying current traffic within five years.”
Gutman defended the lack of a long-term plan to rebuild the highway, and said the Transportation Department would continue a community outreach process that’s gone on since 2006.
“The conclusion of the community outreach process the expert panel did was that the community wanted us to launch a broader communitywide consensus-building vision process, which is exactly what we are doing,” said Gutman, who was a member of the expert panel before he was appointed transportation commissioner in February.
The state Department of Transportation in 2006 began surveying the crumbling structure, and in 2009 began preparing an environmental impact statement to move forward with a major overhaul. But that work was put on hold in 2011 amid a fiscal crunch caused by the Great Recession.
The city took over the project in 2014 — and little work has been completed since.
After a plan to shut down the promenade was scuttled, several developer groups and lawmakers in 2019 floated proposals to reimagine the busy highway.
The design firm Bjarke Ingels Group floated a similar idea that would convert the six-lane highway into one underground roadway that would be capped with a public park.
And city Comptroller Scott Stringer pitched banning most passenger cars from parts of the roadway and converting one of the stacked roadways into a public park that would stretch from Brooklyn Heights to Carroll Gardens.
“A real planning vision for the corridor, rather than piecemeal rehabilitation, is the best hope we have to tap into the federal and state investment that our transit infrastructure so desperately needs,” Stringer said in a statement.
