BQE 'Plan' Will Extend Roadway's Life Till 2040

NEW YORK CITY — The decaying Brooklyn-Queens Expressway will see its life extended to 2040 through a combination of fixes, preservation efforts and traffic changes, officials said.

But the final step of a four-part plan unveiled Wednesday by Mayor Bill de Blasio is essentially to develop a long-term plan.

De Blasio and transportation officials denied that approach kicks the can down the BQE's crumbling road.

“First of all, 20-year solution — I’m not going to sort of treat as like a short-term thing,” de Blasio said. “That’s a major, major deal.”

“We have a structure, we thought it was in danger of literally imminent collapse,” he said. “It turns out there’s a way to preserve it.”

Concerns about the BQE cantilever's deteriorating condition have swirled for years. Transportation officials initially proposed a fix that would close the popular Brooklyn Heights Promenade for six years, but backed off in favor of more study by an expert panel after community pushback.

The plan outlined by de Blasio and transportation Commissioner Hank Gutman comes in four parts:

• Preserve the current infrastructure by: stopping water infiltration; shifting lane markings from three to two lanes from Atlantic Avenue to the Brooklyn in an effort to reduce weight; installing “weigh-in-motion” technology to automatically fine overweight trucks
• Perform immediate maintenance: ongoing concrete and rebar repairs on the Hicks Street retaining wall will continue this year; work on two deck spans showing faster signs of deterioration will begin next year
• Expand monitoring by: installing sensors to provide a real time picture of how the structure is behaving under traffic
• Develop a long-term vision by: engage communities from Staten Island to Queens about the BQE's future; manage the last leg of freight deliveries by incentivizing and encouraging off-hour deliveries, freight consolidation, cargo bike deliveries and use of electric vehicles and electric carts; work with freight companies to shift deliveries to water and rail

“The headline is we found a 20-year solution to maintain the health of the structure,” said Jee Mee Kim, chief strategy officer for the Department of Transportation.

A longer-term plan will probably take a "couple years" to develop, Kim said.

But Gutman, the transportation commissioner, noted putting the long-term plan in place will require community input, buy-in and lining up funding.

“That takes time — the time we’re buying is that time,” he said.

“This 20-year fix buys us that time,” Kim said.