BREAKING: State DOT Kills Entire Cross Bronx ‘Highway Expansion’ Project
They said, “No thonx.”
New York State is kiboshing plans to repair and widen five bridges along the Cross Bronx Expressway after a multi-year fight with local Bronx residents who objected to the plan on the grounds that a wider highway would bring even more cars and traffic to a noted asthma alley.
“Despite our best good faith efforts to bring this safety project forward, we have been unable to come to an agreement on how to successfully advance this project,” state Department of Transportation New York City Region Director Erik Koester said in a statement on the demise of a project issued Monday afternoon.
The announcement came after state DOT spent months planning to release, and then pushing back, a final environmental assessment that would have teed up the construction plan for the five bridges, one of which is close NYCHA’s Bronx River Houses.
“The state Department of Transportation will not be releasing the final Environmental Assessment on the Cross Bronx Expressway Five Bridges Project and will suspend the project,” Koester added.
The agency will instead monitor the state of the bridges and make repairs when necessary, Koester added.
The stunning demise of the Five Bridges Project is the end of a two-year fight that Bronx environmental advocates and residents of the Bronx River Houses waged against state DOT. In 2024, Gov. Hochul and a host of Bronx elected officials, some of whom would later walk back their enthusiasm, announced that New York won a $150-million grant to pay for part of a $900-million project to repair elevated pieces of the Cross Bronx Expressway between Boston Road and Rosedale Avenue.
Hochul said the federal grant would pay for a “community connector” that would expand transit and biking options in the Bronx, which lacks easy east-west transportation by bus or bike. But the “connector” initially turned out to be a four-lane, highway-sized diverter road that state DOT would build to send traffic around the deconstructed bridges while the state rebuilt them.
Bronxites have been burned before, and many loudly opposed to what they saw as a de facto expansion of the notorious Robert Moses project, even if two of the lanes were supposed to be bus lanes once the highway repairs were finished. Opponents of the plan pointed out that the “diverter road” would add another gigantic mass of concrete and steel to loom over Starlight Park and the Bronx River, and that it would still give drivers yet another lane for highway travel.
The connector also appeared to be the first piece of a long-planned but never-executed community connector that would have run parallel to the entire Cross Bronx and essentially expanded the highway across the entire borough.
Last September, Gov. Hochul relented on the plan to build the diverter road, and agreed to fix the bridges in place. But the state still insisted that when it repaired the elevated sections of the highway that it would need to expand the shoulders on the highway by 24 feet to bring the mid-20th century highway up to modern standards.
But the same coalition of advocates that killed the diverter road continued to fight the widened shoulders from the end of 2025 through the start of 2026, especially since the easternmost portion of the expanded highway would bring it that much closer to the Bronx River Houses, whose residents already have to deal with living next to the Cross Bronx.
As such, advocates hailed the state DOT decision.
“Last fall, state DOT scrapped some of the worst proposals on the table, thanks to the tireless advocacy of our Bronx communities [but] DOT’s remaining plans included a 50-foot expansion that would’ve brought the Cross Bronx Expressway even closer to the 3,000 families at Bronx River Houses, and threatened more than 64,000 local residents with toxic pollution and sickness in the decades to come,” Siddhartha Sánchez, executive director of the Bronx River Alliance, said in a statement. “We are still willing to work with officials toward an equitable repair plan that protects the health and safety of all Bronxites.”
Sanchez’s group, and others, are pushing a reinvention of the Cross Bronx.
Read More:
Streetsblog has migrated to a new comment system. New commenters can register directly in the comments section of any article. Returning commenters: your previous comments and display name have been preserved, but you'll need to reclaim your account by clicking "Forgot your password?" on the sign-in form, entering your email, and following the verification link to set a new password — this is required because passwords could not be carried over during the migration. For questions, contact tips@streetsblog.org.
