The Case for Removing the BQE
What was marketed as progress came at an enormous human cost that still shapes Brooklyn and Queens today
Robert Moses built the BQE in stages between 1937 and 1964.
It is part of Moses’ citywide legacy of urban renewal projects which displaced more than 250,000 New Yorkers, disproportionately targeting immigrant communities and communities of color. The expressway links the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in Red Hook to the Grand Central Parkway in Queens. It cut a 15-mile path through some of the densest neighborhoods in the country and displaced tens of thousands of people. Entire blocks of housing, businesses, churches, and schools were demolished as the highway carved through the existing street grid.
The damage didn’t end in 1964.
Seven decades later, the BQE is still doing harm. The communities along the BQE live with some of the highest levels of traffic, noise, and air pollution in New York City. Residents are exposed to daily exhaust, fine particulates, and toxic compounds from exhaust and brake and tire wear. These conditions inflict some of the highest childhood asthma rates in the United States, with rates in neighborhoods running at roughly twice the citywide average, as well as cardiovascular disease and other health burdens.
Today, the BQE divides neighborhoods and limits mobility.
It acts as a physical wall, separating neighbors who live just a block apart. Streets dead-end into embankments or underpasses, forcing long detours just to reach schools or jobs on the other side. Despite being built in the name of mobility, the highway has actually reduced safe, direct connections for people walking, biking, or riding transit. Today the structure continues to lock communities into an auto-dominated pattern that no longer fits the needs or values of a 21st-century city
The BQE has outlived its intended lifespan by twenty years
Fixing the BQE requires a complete rebuild
A $60 billion megaproject would lock the city into another century of congestion, pollution, noise, and fractured neighborhoods.
A full rehabilitation of the BQE is not a simple repair job. To keep traffic flowing, engineers would need to construct a temporary bypass highway through dense urban neighborhoods, directing more traffic, pollution, and noise into communities already overexposed. Only then could crews demolish the deteriorating segments and rebuild the expressway to modern federal standards.
Efforts to rebuild the expressway have repeatedly stalled. In 2018, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposal to route a temporary highway across the Brooklyn Heights Promenade collapsed amid community opposition. The Adams administration put forward several reconstruction plans between 2022 and 2024, but none won federal funding or broad community support. Planning is further complicated by split jurisdiction: the city controls the stretch through Brooklyn Heights—from Atlantic Avenue to Sands Street, including the aging triple cantilever—while the state owns and manages the remaining segments.
There is a better option: Take it down
We can decommission the BQE as a highway and replace it with productive, sustainable urban assets that serve today’s city.
Instead of pouring tens of billions into rebuilding a mid-20th-century expressway, New York can invest in 21st-century priorities: transit, housing, parks, safer streets, and climate resilience. We can dismantle the highway and reallocate the space it occupies with tree-lined boulevards, efficient transit, bike lanes for people and cargo, housing, and green open spaces.
Cities around the world have removed urban highways, including New York.
San Francisco removed the Embarcadero Freeway. Seoul removed the Cheonggyecheon Expressway. Portland removed Harbor Drive. Milwaukee removed the Park East Freeway. In not one of these cities did the predicted traffic catastrophe materialize: traffic dispersed, transit ridership grew, surrounding property values rose, and the reclaimed land became more livable, more walkable, and more economically productive.
The BQE’s core infrastructure was built before World War II and has never undergone a full structural overhaul. Decades of heavy use and continual overweight truck traffic have pushed the structure far beyond what it can handle. Engineers now warn that without major intervention, key segments will fail within the next five to ten years.
We can replace the BQE with tree-lined boulevards, new transit, and bike lanes for people and cargo.
Highway removal works
Removing highways is cheaper than rebuilding and maintaining them, and it frees up billions of dollars that can be reinvested in transit, housing, bike infrastructure, and parks. It transforms polluting infrastructure into productive land that supports homes and businesses, and generates new economic activity and public revenue while reconnecting communities. Decades of experience in cities around the world show that when highway capacity is reduced, traffic adjusts, neighborhoods become healthier and more walkable, and families save money.
New York has already done this once
After a section of the elevated West Side Highway collapsed in 1973, New York eventually replaced it with an at-grade boulevard (West Street / Route 9A) and the linear Hudson River Park. The result is a thriving waterfront, miles of new public space, and a Manhattan that functions better without an elevated highway slicing it from the river.
What removal would actually look like
Removing the BQE means decommissioning the structure as a highway and reallocating the corridor to the uses a 21st-century city actually needs: tree-lined boulevards that move local traffic at human speeds, light rail and bus rapid transit, protected bike and cargo-bike infrastructure, deeply affordable housing, and green open space. The corridor unlocks roughly 75 acres of buildable land — enough to address multiple citywide crises at once, from the housing shortage to the parks deficit to the transit gap. Done right, with anti-displacement protections built in from day one, the communities that were harmed most when the highway was built are the same communities that stand to benefit most from its removal.
Two Financial Futures for the BQE
We cannot afford to rebuild an outdated mid-century highway that locks the city into another hundred years of congestion, pollution, divided neighborhoods, and economic dead zones. Removing the BQE and replacing it with transit will be better for communities, public health, and the environment. It is also, unambiguously, the fiscally responsible choice.
30-YEAR PUBLIC COST COMPARISON (NOMINAL USD)
$40B
saved by removing the BQE
Over 30 years, removal + transit costs $40 billion less than rebuilding —
and generates billions in revenue that a highway never could.
WHAT DOES EACH OPTION BUY US?
“New York is overdue to make a decision on the future of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. So, which way, Gotham? Double down on the insanely bad ideas of the Robert Moses era, or chart a new course?”