Good morning on a blissfully crisp Tuesday morning.

Yesterday’s big news was the announcement of Mayor Mamdani’s plan to rehab the deteriorating BQE over ten years starting in 2030. But Mamdani’s new $4 billion plan to rebuild the BQE’s aging “triple cantilever” stretch would effectively lock in the car and truck conveyor for generations, critics charged.

“Every single time we dump a lot of money into a long-term solution… we’re dooming everybody else to live with that highway for that long — or longer,” said Cindy McLaughlin, a longtime community activist and co-founder of Off-Ramp NYC, which advocates for removing the city’s many highways.

Instead, McLaughlin’s organization has proposed the city replace the “mid-century relic” with transit and public park space, which would cost a fraction of rebuilding it for cars and trucks. Removing the noisy eyesore would also unlock space for development of sorely needed housing in the Five Boroughs, as Erik Engquist, a columnist at the real estate publication The Real Deal recently suggested.

Highway removal projects have succeeded in cities across the country and globe. In Seoul, officials replaced the Cheonggyecheon highway with a river and park. In Seattle, officials removed the Alaska Way Viaduct and 90,000 daily car trips “just disappeared.” In the Netherlands, the Dutch reverted the Catharijnebaan from a highway back to a canal.

Mamdani, who promised to make city streets “the envy of the world” when he took office, won’t match that ambition with the BQE. Instead, he plans to maintain the status quo of a highway that runs 130,000 cars and trucks per day through dense neighborhoods, spewing pollution and unleashing congestion and traffic violence onto local streets.

You can read more from Kevin Duggan at the link below — and be sure to check out today’s headlines for some news on our much-discussed Mamdani-o-meter.

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