the most fraught complicated and long-running infrastructure problem in the United States is not what you'd expect it's not a failing Dam or an aging Bridge it's just this damn road this is the Brooklyn Queens Expressway in New York City it is at this very moment in the process of literally falling apart inching closer and closer towards catastrophic collapse and there's nothing we can do about it why well buckle up literally buckle up if you ever go on this Expressway you better hope you're wearing a seat belt first a little background the road we're talking about
the BQE is a section of Interstate 278 that runs from here the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to here the Grand Central Parkway in Queens this relatively short stretch of Expressway is arguably one of the most important Freight corridors in the world bringing 13,000 trucks to and from New York City's two most populous buroughs every single day it's also terrible it's constantly congested it's loud it's arguably very ugly and much like me when you call me congested loud and ugly it's also about to snap and kill someone for the last decade the BQE has been rapidly deteriorating
and within the next decade it's expected to collapse in some way or another at least the problem area specifically is right here the section of the BQE running through Brooklyn Heights when the expressway was being built in the 1940s the residents of Brooklyn Heights weren't too thrilled about a six Lane Highway cutting straight through the the middle of their neighborhood so Robert Moses the guy responsible for this and a whole bunch of other bad ideas did some quick maths and came back to them with a different proposal what about a three-lane highway twice this compromise
which split the highway in half by stacking three lanes on top of the others was a huge hit it created the famous Brooklyn Heights prominon and shrunk an otherwise chunky Expressway into a relatively Compact and pretty package the problem as we would later all find out was that this structure wasn't designed to stand the test of time the Triple can lver as it is affectionately known is falling apart for a few different reasons and weirdly enough the primary reason is salt this Expressway needs to be salted every time there's a risk of snow or ice
and while that does succeed at making it more delicious it also poses a risk the structure holding up each road is made of steel rebar incased in concrete and over time cracks in the asphalt above have allowed the road salt to seep into the structure and make contact with the steel that is bad news because salt can pretty quickly corrode steel and corroded steel can pretty quickly stop holding up the BQE the other problem is that for various reasons the BQ is now responsible for holding up a lot more weight than it was designed for
the expressway was built to carry about 47,000 Vehicles a day less than a third of the 150,000 it currently carries and that's not to mention the fact that the vehicles in general are a lot heavier than they were in the 1940s this is what a big rig looked like in the 40s carrying at most 20 tons of cargo and this is is what they look like now these Hefty boys can legally carry double that and as long as you're not worried about the legally part they can carry a whole lot more given how timeconsuming and
expensive it can be to get cargo into the greatest city in the world baby it's become pretty common place for shipping companies to illegally stuff their trucks Way Beyond Federal weight limits and send them careening down the BQE in a manner so reckless that even Robert Moses is cringing in hell so now the question is why can't we fix this why do we have a giant perilous of concrete dangling over one of the densest cities in the world and why are we doing anything about it well it's complicated the city has done a few things
to buy itself some time the three-lane highway has been cut down to just two reducing the strain on the can levers and more recently they installed a system to actively weigh trucks as they travel along the highway so when it inevitably breaks we'll at least know who broke it these Solutions however are kind of like putting a Band-Aid on your arm that has already fallen off the BQE needs to be fixed or replaced and pulling off such a complicated construction project in such a dense and frankly whiny area is pretty much impossible just as an
illustration let me break down everything the city has tried and why none of them have worked plan a reroute the BQE one of the city's first proposed Solutions in 2018 was to shut the Triple C lever down for 6 years and replace the entire thing in the meantime they would reroute traffic up onto the prominade which would become a temporary Highway until the triple Canever was fixed the problem with this is that the only way the QE was allowed to be built in the first place was by compromising with the Brooklyn Heist residents by giving
them a cute little prominade and they're still not willing to change the terms of the deal even if it means that a highway is going to fall on them that brings us to plan B fix it piece by piece this is the other solution that was proposed in 2018 which involves not rerouting the highway and instead temporarily closing down small sections of it as they repaired this however would make an already congested Highway even more congested and was expected to last 8 to 20 years which would essentially hamstring all of Brooklyn for decades so plan
C bury the damn thing there have been a number of different proposed plans to turn the BQE into a tunnel and why not as long as you can't see it then you don't need to worry about it there are however a few different ways to approach a tunnel and not to spoil the ending here but none of them work one proposal was what is called a capped Highway in this plan you would move the six Lane Expressway down to what is now fernum Street and then bury the whole thing under a brand new park and
this graphic does look pretty appealing I mean you could fit like six Shake Shacks up there but the problem or I should say problems are that there's a massive sewer system right here this whole thing would end up burying several MTA substations and existing apartment buildings along the park would have to move their lobbies up to the third floor and just get rid of the first two floors so that doesn't work the other option is to actually bury it by just digging a tunnel underneath Brooklyn and sending the cars down there but this tunnel would
cost $1 billion and would make it nearly impossible for the BQE to connect to the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan Bridge which is like one of the main reasons it exists so finally that brings us to plan D get rid of it unfortunately you can't get rid of it despite all these headaches the BQE is still pretty darn important it is still essentially the only way for trucks to reach Brooklyn from the western United States and the primary connection between New York's two most populous buroughs so it's a bit of a pickle the most recent plan
proposed by the city and the one they're currently pursuing is to just do plan a anyway way and then when people ask how they're going to deal with rerouting traffic just be like I don't know but even as brilliant as ignoring everyone in Brooklyn Heights might seem this plan is also not guaranteed to prevent disaster the expressway is expected to become unsafe for trucks by 2026 and this project if approved will only start construction with -3 years until that happens but as soon as they get that time machine up and running the BQE will finally
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