What if we stopped building highways
and started building a city?
NYC’s outdated and crumbling highways are wrong for our city today.
Off-Ramp NYC advocates removing urban highways to reclaim public land, protect public health, and redirect public funds to community needs.
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New York’s highways are failing
The BQE is crumbling. The FDR Drive floods regularly. The Cross-Bronx Expressway, one of America’s most polluted corridors, needs massive structural work.
Instead of rebuilding failing mid‑century highways that lock in congestion, pollution, and divided neighborhoods, we should remove them and invest the tens of billions in more equitable, sustainable alternatives.
For less than it would cost to rebuild, we can replace the BQE with tree-lined boulevards, new transit, and bike lanes for people and cargo.
Spotlight on the BQE
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Spotlight on the BQE 〰️
The BQE is crumbling
the BQE has outlived its lifespan by twenty years and the triple cantilever under the Brooklyn Heights Promenade is expected to fail by 2029. But the cantilever is not the only portion that needs rehabilitation. Rebuilding the entire BQE as it crumbles will be a $60 billion megaproject, widening the same roads, and locking the city into another century of pollution, congestion, and divided neighborhoods.
But we shouldn’t rebuild it
Decommissioning and dismantling the BQE instead would deliver roughly 75 acres for new housing and parks, 35 track-miles of light rail, and hundreds of millions in annual city revenue at about one-third the rebuild cost.
Cities all around the world are removing urban highways
Including here in New York, on the West Side Highway. Every city that has removed a highway—San Francisco, Seoul, Portland, Paris, Milwaukee, Rochester Utrecht—has seen revenues rise, costs fall, neighborhoods heal, and economic activity flourish. None has asked for its highway back.
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