Add The New York Post on Google He won’t leave it B-QE.
A crumbling section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway will finally be fixed under a $4 billion plan unveiled by Zohran Mamdani on Monday — the latest pitch to tackle a dangerous problem that has long bedeviled New York City mayors.
Groundbreaking won’t happen until at least 2030, but the plan would rebuild the expressway’s troubled stacked roadways — known as the “triple-cantilever” — rather than demolish them completely, as proposed by some long-frustrated New Yorkers, officials said.
A temporary highway running along Brooklyn Bridge Park will be built to avoid sending tens of thousands of cars onto local roads as crews complete the fixes, which are set to take about 10 years, Mamdani said in one of his signature slick social media videos.
“This will extend the life of the BQE for another 40 years,” he said. “This plan allows us to safely fix the current problem, without slowing our city down and wasting decades more waiting while the BQE continues to get worse.”
New Yorkers have heard mayors promise they’d fix the BQE before.
Former Mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams both fielded and pitched various plans to address the deteriorating cantilever section — part of a 1.5-mile stretch of the BQE near Atlantic Avenue and Sands Street in Brooklyn that’s solely under the city’s control.
But the myriad proposals all fizzled, notably de Blasio’s 2018 idea to temporarily divert traffic through the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.
Hoity-toity Brooklyn Heights residents wary of losing their beloved promenade for six years helped scuttle the plan, forcing de Blasio to backpedal when he announced another project three years later focused on “preservation.”
Adams unsuccessfully tried to get the federal government involved for a longer-term fix.
But his administration also laid the groundwork for Mamdani’s plan, as Councilwoman Joann Ariola (R-Queens) pointed out — accusing the new mayor of underhandedly taking credit.
“This is becoming standard operating procedure for this administration … The mayor and his team are taking all the credit for a project that started well before he was in office,” she said.
“It is insulting to everyone who worked on this before, but his propaganda machine is doing a great job of convincing the masses that Zohran Mamdani single-handedly is going to get the BQE repaired and save New York City.”
Regardless of where the credit lies, the plan revealed by Mamdani largely differs from past proposals in where it directs traffic during years of construction.
It calls to keep traffic below the Brooklyn Heights Promenade by building a temporary, two-level highway bypass on top of Furman Street from Atlantic Avenue to Columbia Heights.
The bypass will be roughly the same heights as the current Queens-bound highway, officials said.
A second temporary, elevated highway bypass from Columbia Heights will be built over the Brooklyn Bridge approach to the Manhattan Bridge, officials also said.
The BQE was a brainchild of controversial urban planner Robert Moses and opened in 1957.
Mamdani, during an unrelated news conference in Queens, argued that the BQE costs the city $160 million to maintain every year it goes unfixed.
“The plan does require a bypass, a four-lane bypass, at the level just below the promenade,” he said.
“Previous proposals had put that bypass on the promenade, which would have been quite disruptive. We feel this proposal does lessen the community impacts of prior proposals.”
— Additional reporting by Craig McCarthy
