Friday Video: How Mamdani Can Avoid His BQE Bypass Boondoggle
Readers rejoice: Mayor Mamdani need not build a disruptive highway detour through the Brooklyn waterfront — because the car-maggedon his administration expects to materialize from a potential highway teardown is a myth.
A recent video from the Joint Transit Association, a transit advocacy group of current and former New York City public school students, lays out in great detail why and how the city should plan for a future without the Robert Moses-era highway.
There are plenty of examples to choose from to make the case for removing the BQE, whether its the Inner Loop in upstate’s East Rochester, the Bonaventure Expressway in Montréal, the Catharijnesingel in Utrecht, the Harbor Drive in Portland, Oregon, the Cheonggyecheon in Seoul, or of course, the West Side Highway in nearby Manhattan.
“Whenever you close a highway, the result is not some big scary congestion. Instead, people find other ways to get around or not make the trip at all,” says the video’s presenter. “We ought to take the lessons of other cities — and New York City itself — and apply them to the BQE.”
Mamdani administration officials, meanwhile, insist that time has run out for bigger picture thinking. They warn of an impending traffic meltdown if the BQE goes away, but other major roadway shutdowns show that’s not what happens. Los Angeles, for another example, braced for “Carmageddon” when it shut down its busy Interstate 405 for two days, but traffic continued to move freely because people adapted to the change.
“If L.A. can figure this out, why can’t we?” the JTA video asks.
The group acknowledges that a Trump administration likely won’t green-light a major expressway removal anytime soon. But it still makes a convincing case that City Hall — with some help from the state — should close the triple cantilever for repairs without building a $4 billion bypass along Brooklyn Bridge Park and over the Brooklyn Bridge itself.
And all of it would cost less than a quarter of Mamdani’s current plan — and give the city time to plot a BQE-less future.
Watch the whole video below:
Read More:
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