The BQE is Still Crumbling

By on January 27, 2021 10:04 pm in 11201, BQE rehab, brooklyn bridge park, Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn Heights Promenade, News, Transportation

The Daily News has a piece by former City DOT Commissioner Ross Sandler, who describes in detail the ongoing process of corrosion that is weakening the supports of the cantilevered portion of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade above it. As we reported a year ago, an expert panel appointed by the mayor, on which Mr. Sandler served, recommended that repairs to the highway begin immediately, and that they be done in a way, as Mr. Sandler is quoted as saying, that would “avoid encroaching on Brooklyn Bridge Park or the homes of Brooklyn Heights.”

Now the Brooklyn Paper reports that Mayor De Blasio

revealed that city will resume planning for a long-term fix to the crumbling Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the coming weeks, after a year of radio silence from officials regarding the beleaguered roadway.

The Brooklyn Paper story quotes the mayor as saying he’s “hopeful for help from the feds under the new Democratic presidential administration of Joe Biden,” and praising the president’s appointment of former NYC Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg as a Deputy Secretary of Transportation. The story also notes that the City DOT

has started some repair work on the 1.5-mile section between Atlantic Avenue and Sands Street the agency has jurisdiction over (the remaining stretches of the highway are run by the state), such as a fix to the wall at Hicks Street near Poplar Street, which started in October.

According to the Brooklyn Paper, “[a] spokesman for DOT did not return a request for information whether the agency had done any other work on the BQE since January 2020, or to reveal the city’s future plans.” As we noted here, in June 2020 some resurfacing work was done.

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  • B.

    So don’t cantilever it. Sink supports into Furman and lay strong horizontals beneath all the levels the way the FDR Drive is in spots.

  • Andrew Porter

    There have been a whole bunch of proposals and plans made; don’t revive the argument over what to do.

  • streeter

    What happened to ticketing oversize and overweight trucks? They were cited as a major contributor to the crumbling. I see the oversize 55’+ trucks every single day and they’re illegal on every single square inch of Brooklyn.

  • B.

    None particularly good.

  • Nomcebo Manzini

    Really simple, all this. Leaving aside how very awful deBlasio has been – start to it-can’t-come-soon-enough finish – the final year of a talentless Mayoral administration … with the incumbent having no future at all, with the City all but out of money but unwilling to even think about coping mechanisms, … nothing is going to happen pre-election – short of some disaster happening there … or money raining down on NYC as miraculously as anything in the Bible. The Mayor did an artful kick-the-can, so I’m not sure there was time enough even ex-Covid to attempt to figure out which of the contending forces could deliver votes and/or money.

    The cabal which dominates posting on this board would argue otherwise, but those who think cars and trucks are dead or even dying aren’t thinking straight. Going forward, the constraints (financial, governmental [State buy-in], lack-of-consensus) all but dictate a band-aid approach. Infrastructure projects are right up there with income inequality. For all that almost everyone agrees that they demand attention, other things will likely demand that much more convincingly. Last, Biden-Harris have enshrined racial equity and environmental awareness as cornerstone values. It’s too easy for the latter to be used to derail any big project that makes driving more likely. (No logic there, because idling is far worse, but the “optics” of hwy projects are simply terrible until/unless electric cars are much more plentiful.