Mayor Mamdani’s ill-considered plan for the dilapidated triple cantilever section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is kicking the can down the road, even as he says in his cheeky video that “we’re done kicking the can down the road,” where he deftly stops a rolling paint can with his right foot.
We take issue with two aspects of the Mamdani approach. First, he abandons even attempting to get federal funds for the much-needed project and second, his proposed rehabilitated roadway, which will take a full decade to construct, will only last 40 years, but that might be optimistic and 20 to 30 years might actually be the case.
File that under “kicking the can down the road.” The $4 billion price tag will be borne solely by New York City, which unlike Uncle Sam, can’t print money, and then when the Mamdani fix-up ends its lifetime, someone will have to build a brand new roadway. That is a big mistake.
For years, there have been many ideas as to what to do with the Brooklyn Heights portion of the aging, decaying highway, which has two levels of maddening creeping Brooklyn-bound traffic on the bottom deck and Queens-bound traffic on middle deck and the loved-by-all promenade on the top deck. The promenade was how builder Robert Moses won the consent to plow the BQE through the influential neighborhood, unlike the side-by-side open cut in other, less powerful, areas.
The structure is still standing, but it must be replaced, with upgrading to modern highway standards, a tricky proposition that has to account for the 130,000 daily vehicles, a tenth of them trucks.
Some advocates want to do away with all the traffic, permanently, but that’s impossible, as is turning the BQE into a quaint country lane. Sorry folks, it will have to remain a busy highway.
What seems to be motivating Mamdani’s move is a reluctance to confront the anti-car caucus that doesn’t want any highway. And he is presenting the cumbersome and lengthy federal funding process as a reason to go it alone.
We thought that the mayor supposedly gets along with the president. But even if there is some bad blood going on, the Trump administration Department of Transportation only has two more years to go. Even more significantly, in just four months there’s a very high likelihood that the next House speaker will be from Brooklyn, Hakeem Jeffries, and there’s also a chance that the Senate majority leader will be another Brooklyn guy, Chuck Schumer.
Giving up any chance of dough from Washington is just foolish, especially with the changing political alignment.
The BQE is a federally-designated portion of the interstate highway system, I-278. The central section in question is owned by New York City, while the northern connection towards Queens and the southern approaches toward the Verrazzano and Staten Island are owned by New York State.
New York is in this mess because the infrastructure that Moses erected had a 50-year lifetime and it’s been 70 years. So now Mamdani wants a rehab that will last far less? And if his plan happens, the BQE can’t be rehabilitated again. It will need a complete replacement.
It would be far smarter to do the whole job now and get the feds to chip in.