New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson’s proposal to bury the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway would solve the BQE eyesore at the expense of deepening car culture’s stranglehold on New York City. Replacing the BQE with parks, freight and passenger trains is a more sensible approach.
The New York Times reported that a new study backed by Council Speaker Corey Johnson recommends replacing the BQE with a car tunnel. Some of the article’s sources wonder how NYC will pay for this $11B project. The answer sits in the bumper-to-bumper traffic all around us. The BQE’s drivers should pay to modernize it — if New York won’t give free rides on the subway then neither can it afford to on the BQE. A more apt question than how we will pay for BQE maintenance is: why replace the BQE at all?
The BQE, whether it’s above or underground, adds massive unfunded healthcare and quality of life expenses that likely dwarf the estimated $11B project cost. Removing cars from the BQE would avoid thousands of future BQE-caused premature deaths from pollution, traffic violence, and childhood asthma. Replacing the BQE with mass transit would restitch the neighborhoods that the BQE ripped apart and give Brooklyn a multi-generational economic boost that an underground freeway can’t deliver.
No immutable law forces us to rebuild car right-of-ways where a dilapidated ill-conceived Robert Moses totem stands. City after city has removed freeways like the BQE without causing spikes in traffic elsewhere. We could shut down the BQE to cars and lay tracks for a Brooklyn-Queens electric rail that would actually serve the pedestrian supermajority of NYC. Combining electric rail with the parks proposed in Comptroller Scott Stringer’s plan would put NYC on the vanguard of waterfront urban development. Would this be expensive? Absolutely. It would not, however, cost as much as it does to give free waterfront NYC real estate to single-occupancy vehicles. Asking permission from the driving minority to reclaim the city’s roads benefits no one and leaves us playing catch-up with the developed world.
Opponents of transit-oriented development claim that trucks need to be able to deliver goods. But developed cities require most large trucks to leave their cargo at the edge of the city center where smaller, more efficient delivery bicycles, trains, and EVs can then pick up and distribute cargo. Any plan for the BQE teardown should build on the growth of NYC bicycle and electric delivery and contemplate a new era of clean, last-leg delivery in NYC. A tunnel would entrench a system in which oversized diesel trucks are prioritized and sacrosanct. The $11B slated for this project could go a long way towards an intra-city freight train network to replace the less efficient BQE.
Transit-first proposals reduce traffic for drivers and increase the quality of life for the rest of us. Council Speaker Johnson should dream bigger than his current proposal and support a car-free BQE filled with electric trains, not car lanes.