BROOKLYN WEATHER

UPDATE: DOT Continues to Weigh Constructing Alternate Highway or Re-Routing Traffic onto Local Roads During BQE Re-Construction

By Yehudit Garmaise

“Where will the drivers who create the heavy traffic daily on Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) go when the massive construction project to reconstruct the crumbling tripled cantilever finally gets underway?” is a question that DOT officials and residents have been asking themselves and each other for years.

Hearkening back to a plan first proposed and then scrapped in 2018, DOT officials are once again considering building an “interim highway” that runs atop an unnamed residential street on the edge of Brooklyn Heights and likely next to Brooklyn Bridge Park, announced the DOT.

The DOT could not share its estimated cost of the temporary roadway that would take approximately one year to build.

If finalized, drivers would use the alternate roadway for two to three years.

Although the DOT will start conducting urgent repairs on the BQE in 2024, the alternate route for the BQE would not be up and running until 2027, when the DOT plans to launch a reconstruction of the beleaguered BQE. 

The other option the DOT continues to consider is to simply close the BQE on some nights and weekends and send the considerable traffic out on onto local roads.

As might be expected, Brooklyn residents hate both ideas: the temporary highway and the diversion of traffic onto local roads.

“Spending millions of dollars and years of construction on a temporary structure would not only be hugely disruptive for multiple neighborhoods and Brooklyn Bridge Park but would be a poor way to spend a lot of time, money, and effort,” said Lara Birnback, the executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association (BLA). 

Ironically, when the DOT first considered the idea of creating a temporary roadway near Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2018, the idea originated with Brooklyn architect Marc Wouters, who was hand-picked and chosen by the BLA.

Not only are locals angry about the potential interim highway, ever since June 2021, when the DOT announced its plans to detour tens of thousands of trucks and cars onto local streets during interim repair work of the BQE, locals have been kvetching about that plan, as well.

“East Fifth Street is a one-way narrow residential block with a school, playground, library, and Caton is two-way with two schools and a park: directing hundreds of thousands of trucks onto it seems insane,” Assembly Member Robert Carroll (D-Windsor Terrace) told Streetsblog back in July.

“No matter what the DOT decides, the agency will likely have to take grief for years on how to re-route the traffic as the BQE is reconstructed,” one New Yorker said.

While the BQE is revisiting Wouter’s idea to reroute BQE traffic to a temporary highway, one of the three final designs of the BQE the DOT is considering also originated with the Brooklyn architect.

“The Stoop” is what the DOT calls Wouter’s original design concept, on which the DOT has continued to improve in terms of “structure and scope,” DOT Press Secretary Vin Barone told Boro Park24.

While Wouter originally proposed that the DOT only partially replace the full cantilever, the DOT’s version of “The Stoop” is a full and permanent replacement of the cantilever, Barone said.

The other designs, which are called, “the Terraces,” and “the Lookout,” are similar, but differ in the extent to which they create green space for pedestrians, bikers, and scooterists.

In addition to continuing to seek input from residents in public hearings, Barone added that the results from a months-long environmental review process that begins this Fall will also contribute to the BQE’s final design.

“Elements of each of the three design concepts could be incorporated into the single final design,” Barone said.

This article was updated with the input of the DOT.


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