Much ado about the BQE. Will it be more than nothing this time?

“There is an asthma belt from Greenpoint to Bay Ridge for the people who live along the BQE. The noise, the vibrations, the division that it has created within our communities,” City Council Member Lincoln Restler listed as just a few of the ills created by the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE). Clad in a tan raincoat and a friendly smile, Restler has a cartoonish charm only matched by his oratory prowess. At the request of Transportation Alternatives (TA), a nonprofit that advocates for biking, walking, and public transit, Restler, Assemblymember JoAnne Simon, State Senator Andrew Gounardes, and a handful of other local leaders shared their grievances over the BQE.

March 4 was a cool morning in Brooklyn, but a small crowd of residents stood behind the officials, ready to participate in a visioning walk along the central portion of the BQE. The group ranged from a former NYC DOT Commissioner to a local mom who was just excited about the potential to improve the neighborhood. After the speechmaking and pandering to the press, the real work began. The 50-some odd group walked along the BQE, pausing to ask attendees for suggestions on how to improve areas and providing context and history about the existing features alongside the expressway. This was the second of three walks led by TA, the third of which covered the southern portion of the BQE, the area closest to this paper’s reader base.

Built between 1937 and 1964, the construction of the expressway led to entire neighborhoods being divided, often bulldozing its path through lower income or working-class neighbor-

by Katherine Rivard

hoods. The structure is now past its design life, but around 130,000 daily vehicles (about 13,000 of which are trucks) travel on the BQE each day. This transportation corridor comes at a cost to the surrounding inhabitants who are subject to air and noise pollution, increased traffic on side streets, and decreased access to neighboring areas.

These days news and events about the BQE are almost as constant as the traffic on the expressway itself. The city is considering plans to re-design portions of the aging expressway, and the structure’s outsized footprint in Brooklyn has led to significant interest from advocacy organizations to professional groups and beyond. But with so much buzz around the potential infrastructure, it is hard to not worry that many of these discussions are either siloed, and thus not being heard by decisionmakers, or giving outsized weight to every spoken criticism or thought, and therefore leading to a tempered plan that does not attempt to create something new and great.

Transportation Alternatives and other transportation advocacy groups are not the only ones excited about this project; urban planners and engineers also recognize the massive potential this project has to improve the lives of thousands of residents.

On March 14, the American Institute of Architects hosted the event “The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at 75: A Crisis in Context.” In the non-profit’s stunning space near Washington Square Park, intellectuals and practitioners sat eating cheese, sipping beer, and shaking their heads about the inability to make the changes necessary to really transform the BQE.

Experts like former NYC Traffic Com- missioner Sam Schwartz and Associate Principal Raju Mann from the design and engineering firm Arup each gave presentations on past BQE plans, proposed changes that failed to come to fruition, and the difficulties of implementing any plan. The thread throughout the presentations was clear—grand (and some less grand) BQE renovations have been put forward for decades, but all have been mired by bureaucracy or concerns around funding. Each plan and study has been shelved until now, when the BQE’s physical failure is imminent. While advocacy groups and planners think up meaningful ways to make changes, the City’s Department of Transportation (DOT) is doing its best to propose a modern, effective design that makes sense financially and reflects community input. On March 16, DOT presented a BQE update to Brooklyn Community Board 6’s Transportation/Public Safety Committee over Zoom. DOT Chief Strategy Officer Julie Bero calmly presented a simple overview of DOT’s approach, timelines, and community engagement efforts. While the former Administration’s plans for the BQE involved spending about half a billion dollars to simply preserve the BQE, the new administration hopes that new infrastructure money in the form of federal grants will allow for a longterm fix.

The city owns the 1.5 miles of expressway near the Triple Cantilever in Brooklyn Bridge Park, while the other 10.6 miles are owned by the state. Therefore, DOT is tackling the BQE updates in three chunks—Central (Atlantic Avenue to Sands Street), North, and South, and leading with updates to its portion—BQE Central. The design concepts, newly released in Feb- ruary, include three options to re-attach the surrounding neighborhoods to Brooklyn Bridge Park. Named The Terraces, The Lookout, and The Stoop, the concepts attempt to make the area more pedestrian friendly. All three options are largely expressway updates with greener facades rather than meaningful changes to an outdated and changing transportation system.

The potential designs for BQE Central are moving forward and DOT is preparing for the environmental review process (to stay updated on the project, visit bqevision.com). Meanwhile, BQE North and South will receive short-term fixes to improve public space, safety, and mobility, with the longer-term goal to design and implement a goal of reconnecting communities. Concurrently, the Regional Planning Association is collecting information related to truck and freight use to provide white paper recommendations on freight diversion.

Robert Moses had a goal in mind—an expressway—and in his uniquely Machiavellian manner, he achieved his goal. Now, as the city and state grapple with how to move the BQE into the 21st century, there seems to be no one with either the power or the vision, let alone both, to take the BQE and truly reimagine it into something efficient, equitable, and sustainable for Brooklyn.

While the amount of community engagement and meetings for the project has been admirable, residents will feel the greatest impact from having a leader step forth to transform their feedback into a clear, visionary plan for a modern BQE, and then, to actually build it.