Expressway Expansion Could Threaten Brooklyn Bridge Park

If the New York City Department of Transportation goes ahead with a proposal to expand the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, known locally as the BQE, to three lanes in each direction, the road could cut into green space now part of the Brooklyn Bridge Park, reports Kevin Duggan for Streetsblog NYC.

The park, an 85-acre space completed between 2010 and 2021, is “one of the most expensive urban parks ever built” at $400 million. Former Traffic Commissioner San Schwartz and former Transportation Commissioner Hank Gutman both made public comments signaling their concern for the park and how an expanded highway footprint would damage the green space created by it.

DOT’s plans aren’t entirely clear, Duggan writes. While “DOT’s conceptual renderings of a future highway do indeed show substantial new open spaces covering the roadways and sloping down to Brooklyn Bridge Park,” the renderings show a 40-foot-wide highway, which would only accommodate two lanes in each direction. Yet in a December statement, DOT said the agency anticipates that their analysis “will result in three lanes of traffic.”

An analysis conducted by Schwartz’s firm three years ago “found the roadway could work with just two lanes if officials tried to discourage driving by closing some ramps or limiting them to high-occupancy vehicles, or by charging to cross the East River bridges at the same rates as the tolled Hugh Carey Tunnel.” A spokesperson for the park says “park officials had been assured the repairs would not reduce green space.”