The New York City Department of Transportation has announced a $4 billion, 10-year plan to rehabilitate an outdated 1.5-mile corridor of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway currently handling double its designed capacity.
The corridor, which is 20 years past its design life, was described in a press release from the office of Mayor Zohran Mamdani as deteriorating and currently carrying 130,000 vehicles per day, including 13,000 truck trips. The project aims to address negative impacts caused by the aging infrastructure, including trucks and vehicles being forced to use local roads, disruption to freight supply chains and rising costs.
Work will begin in 2030 to add 40 years of design life to the expressway. This would be the shortest-term rehabilitation plan required to keep the expressway safe, while NYC works with the state of New York on a long-term plan.
The project will only cover the part of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway owned by New York City, known as the BQE Central. According to the press release, the project has been delayed for decades and currently costs NYC $160 million per year in escalation.
NYCDOT will deploy temporary bypass structures during construction to allow for the repair of deteriorated sections without diverting regular traffic onto local streets in neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights Promenade and Brooklyn Bridge Park. A two-level highway bypass will be erected on top of Furman Street below the promenade from Atlantic Avenue to Columbia Heights, and a second elevated highway bypass will run from Columbia Heights over the Brooklyn Bridge approach to the Manhattan Bridge.
