For decades, the city Department of Transportation has asked, “How should we rebuild the crumbling triple cantilever of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE)?”
We at Off-Ramp ask a different question: “Why would we rebuild this midcentury relic of Robert Moses? Why wouldn’t we take the opportunity to remove the entire BQE and build transit in its place?” So we developed an economic model to quantify what each option would cost, and what each future would enable.
We found that removing the BQE, from the Verrazzano to LaGuardia Airport, and replacing it with light rail, at grade — along with miles of parks, housing, climate resiliency, and reconnected neighborhoods — would cost about 30% of the cost of rebuilding it. Bus rapid transit would cost less than 20%.
This would save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and create a growing annuity of property tax and farebox revenue. It would also leave us with a more beautiful, better-connected, less polluted, more affordable, and more human-scale NYC.
The critical insight for why such a massive transit project would be so much cheaper than rebuilding a highway is that developing anything up in the air or below the ground in a trench or tunnel through a complex urban environment is far more expensive, dangerous, and uncertain than developing at street-level. When seen in this light, it becomes obvious: proceeding with a highway rebuild would be purchasing another lifetime of some of our city’s worst problems at extraordinary public expense.
Highway removal is not new. It has been done in cities around the world, including New York, on the West Side Highway, which used to be double-decker below 59th St. Cities that remove their highways have seen revenues rise, neighborhoods heal, air quality improve, and economic activity flourish.
Proponents of a BQE rebuild argue, “But it’s a critical freight corridor!” This is true for the 8% of vehicles on the BQE that are trucks, because we’ve invested taxpayer dollars heavily in infrastructure that encourages them. Rebuilding a wider, taller highway that incentivizes ever-larger big rigs to drive directly through NYC and its neighborhoods is poor planning with even poorer economics.
Considered more completely, demand management (package pricing, overnight delivery hours, truck size regulation and real enforcement) and major investments in alternative modes (truck stepdowns outside the city to e-cargo bikes and e-vans, marine freight aka “blue highway”, rail freight, excess capacity on overnight public transit, etc) can and should be scaled aggressively now to dramatically reduce the number of trucks.
Critics will also warn of traffic chaos on local grids, but evidence suggests otherwise. When San Francisco removed the Embarcadero Freeway, New York tore down the West Side Highway, and Paris eliminated its Seine Highway, the predicted gridlock never materialized. Traffic simply “evaporated” as drivers adapted over time: shifting to transit or choosing alternative routes and times.
A highway rebuild that encourages continued car dominance costs residents directly as well. Only 42% of New York households own a vehicle. The household burden of car ownership is huge: a blended average annual cost of $18,000 with free parking to nearly $28,000 with commercial garage storage. The fastest way to change the household math is to replace highways with public transit that reconnects neighborhoods. A truly affordable city is one where nobody needs to own a car.
Proponents of highway reconstruction often frame it as the fiscally conservative position — prudent, incremental, responsible. The math argues otherwise.
McLaughlin is co-founder of Off-Ramp NYC, an organization that advocates for the removal of urban highways and the reclamation of public land, public health, and public coffers.