BQE Project Should Make Highway Truck-Only, Comptroller Says

BROOKLYN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — The city's comptroller has come up with a new idea to fix the 1.5-mile stretch of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway for the coming years of traffic — close part of it down to traffic altogether.

New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer announced Wednesday that he has sent a proposal to the Department of Transportation that would offer an alternative to their controversial plan to reconstruct a portion of the BQE, likely by closing the iconic Brooklyn Heights Promenade for up to six years to build a temporary six-lane elevated highway in its place during construction.

Stringer instead suggested that two miles of the expressway from the Brooklyn Bridge to Hamilton Avenue be turned into a truck-only highway, with a linear park on top.

"We think there is a possible middle ground that both responds to traffic needs while also dramatically improving local air quality, reducing noise pollution, and rebuilding neighborhoods that have long been divided by the BQE," he wrote in a letter to DOT officials.

The new proposal would let trucks run in both directions on the middle level of the BQE's triple-cantilever structure during reconstruction of the bottom level. This would mean that no dreaded temporary highway, which advocates have said would pose environmental and health concerns, would be needed, Stringer said.

Then, once construction is done, the bottom level would permanently become a truck-only highway, according to the proposal.

"Given that trucks represent only 9 percent of traffic on this six-lane section of the BQE, we are confident that two lanes will be sufficient to accommodate their daily and hourly throughput — as well as a handful of express buses that would also have access to these lanes," Stringer wrote.

The middle level of the highway would also be closed down to cars under the proposal, and instead would be built into a linear park, including playgrounds, ball fields, bike lanes and dog parks, Stringer said.

He added that the new park would help make up for Cobble Hill residents who have had to deal with "noisy, polluting, gash running directly through the heart of their neighborhood." There even might be money left over from the project to create a similar park on the BQE's trench in Williamsburg, he said.

Stringer contended that the Hugh Carey Tunnel, Belt Parkway, carpooling and public transit would be enough to accommodate the cars that now wouldn't be allowed to use the stretch of BQE.

More than 80 percent of the 72,000 cars that travel the highway section are doing so for intra-city travel, 35 percent within the borough, he said, arguing that this means local alternatives could serve most of the cars instead.

He even suggested that closing the highway section to cars would reduce car traffic in the area.

"As we've seen time and time again across the nation, highway traffic follows an iron rule: build more highways, get more cars; eliminate more highways, get fewer cars," he wrote.

Stringer sent his letter to DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg and asked that she review it. His is at least the second alternative plan that has been submitted to Trottenberg since the DOT's plans were announced.

The Brooklyn Heights Association, which has held protests against DOT's proposals, has drawn up its own alternative, suggesting that DOT move traffic to a temporary two-level structure west of the existing stretch of highway instead of building the six-lane "highway to hell."