BQE Reconstruction Topic of Tonight’s CHA Meeting

By on May 23, 2011 12:51 pm in Transportation

An update on the plans for reconstruction of the triple cantilevered roadway of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which runs past Brooklyn Heights below the Promenade, will be one of the items on the agenda for tonight’s Annual Meeting of the Cobble Hill Association, to which all are invited and there is no admission charge. The meeting will be in Conference Room A of Long Island College Hospital (enter at 339 Hicks Street, between Atlantic Avenue and Amity Street) starting at 7:30. More deatails are at Cobble Hill Blog.

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  • BH Resident

    Hopefully the idea of tunneling the BQE is still under consideration — I know it would be expensive but the positive impact on the Heights and the new park would be huge. You could do something like the highline with the old cantilevers.

  • MARTINLBROOKLYN

    Francis Morrone is the featured speaker, talking about the history of the BQE, Robert Moses, and the rest of it plus some glimpses into the possible future. Whenever Francis speaks it is worth a detour to hear.

  • Eddy de Lectron

    BH, even if the tunnel is built it would not completely do away with the cantilever roadways, they would still be needed to handle local and bridge access. It would greatly reduce the volume traffic passing through… and that’s a good thing.

  • epc

    There’s basically zero chance of tunneling the BQE unless the state or city can come up with funding independent of setting up a toll. My understanding from the March meeting I attended was that a toll on the BQE is prohibited by federal law or regulation, though it would be pretty much the only way to fund a tunnel (or pretty much any of the options other than rehab what we have). The Boston “Big Dig” ate up any goodwill towards the feds funding any major urban roadworks for the foreseeable future.

    Personally I think slapping a toll on the BQE to fund ongoing maintenance of it and construction of a tunnel would be fantastic but not only is that prohibited, the likelihood of a toll getting any support locally is probably zero as well.

  • http://n/a Anthony A. Manheim

    The cost could be materially reduced by tunneling only under the central area (including Flatbush & Atlantic Avenues and the subway lines). Open cuts, which are much cheaper, are used almost every where else in the “outer boroughs” (e.g. Prospect & Van Wyck Expressways and the BQE itself).

  • Floater

    NY needs to seriously update it’s project delivery rules which are 50 years behind the times, and don’t allow for Design-Build or PPP yet. Other states have done for years and get more large scale projects done faster and with less capital risk.