Reynoso said that one option to keep open is to take just down the highway in its entirety. The highway is going from three lanes to two, and the city will continue repairing concrete and rebar walls this year while beefing up traffic monitoring. Reynoso said there needs to be a committee made up of stakeholders, businesses, residents, commuters, and elected officials that can thoroughly suss out a community-led vision of the new BQE for the new mayor.
Ariama C. Credit: Ariama C. That iteration would convert the triple cantilever into a three-tiered park and extend that greenery down to Brooklyn Bridge Park with six acres of lush parkland. A similar vision, based on the BQP and the Tri-Line proposals, was recommended in a February report by engineering and design firm Arup, which was hired by the City Council to study and recommend alternatives proposals for the BQE.
In that version, the highway would remain at the level of the Cobble Hill trench and pass under Atlantic Avenue; it would then level off with Furman Street and be decked over with an expansion of Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Aside from being cost prohibitive, tunnels come with a slew of logistical challenges. This would allow the city to transform much of the expressway running through brownstone Brooklyn into a ground-level boulevard with bike and bus lanes, park space, and other pedestrian amenities. The downside? In , DOT conducted a feasibility study that looked closely at six possible tunnel configurations.
The survey explored the myriad issues such an undertaking would raise, chief among them navigating the dense web of existing infrastructure beneath Downtown Brooklyn, including subway lines and massive water pipes.
Of the proposed tunnels, city officials say only one would be workable: a roughly three-mile shaft starting around 21st Street on Third Avenue and ending near Kent Avenue in Williamsburg—similar to the tunnel more recently proposed by Arup. It would essentially serve as a bypass, shooting vehicles past Downtown Brooklyn between South Slope and Williamsburg, with no direct links to the Brooklyn or Manhattan bridges, or any of the local connections for the neighborhoods above the tunnel.
Horodniceanu noted that current tunnel boring technology can create tubes with a diameter up to 54 feet, which can only accommodate two lanes of traffic. The BQE, on the other hand, has three lanes in either direction. Emergency exits, among other things, would also need to be included in the design. To do that, the city would need access to private property along the route—likely exerting eminent domain to acquire those properties.
No matter what method is used to repair the expressway, one thing is certain: There are no painless solutions. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.
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Read on. What a renovated, widened Brooklyn Heights Promenade could look like. A rendering of the temporary parallel bypass method. Marc Wouters Studios and Nightnurse images inc. The temporary parallel bypass plan. A traffic jam on the BQE. A diagram of a possible BQE tunnel. The cause: similar water and salt infiltration into the concrete that encased the steel stays that supported the roadway. The steel stays rusted, weakened and snapped. Engineers had warned officials.
The officials failed to act, the repair work was never done, and the bridge collapsed. City engineers found severe deterioration in the steel girders supporting the structure. Cracks in the concrete roadways were expanding daily. The engineers declared the bridge unsafe forcing Seattle to suddenly close the bridge. Seattle anticipates that the bridge will be closed at least until The West Seattle Bridge is 46 years old and carried , vehicles daily.
The nearly half mile of triple stacked cantilevered roadways adjacent to Brooklyn Heights is a unique bridge structure not duplicated anywhere else in the United States.
Robert Moses in the s hung the cantilevered bridge of the BQE in a narrow corridor along the steep slope rising from the Brooklyn waterfront to Brooklyn Heights above. Moses had initially proposed that the highway cut through the heart of Brooklyn Heights along Hicks Street, an appalling plan that produced opposition sufficient to cause Moses to move the highway to the edge of Brooklyn Heights along Furman Street, an industrial waterfront at the time with few residents.
Moses adopted a unique design: a cantilevered structure. The cantilevered bridge is supported on the land side with heavy concrete and steel walls sunk into the slope. Hanging from this single land-side wall are two three-lane roadways and the Brooklyn Promenade.
The weight of the roadways and the Promenade are supported by steel buried in the concrete roadways. The steel is in tension as it transfers the downward force of its weight to the land-side wall.
If the steel in the roadways corrodes and weakens there are no outside columns to support the roadways and the roadways will fail. The roadways will no longer be able to support their own weight or the weight of passing vehicles. Steel reinforcing rods embedded in the concrete roadways during the s were not coated with a protective covering.
Salt and water infiltrate the roadways of the cantilevered bridge through cracks in the pavement, and at the joints which occur every 50 feet and run perpendicular to the direction of traffic. Water and salt infiltration rust and weaken the uncoated steel. Engineering studies of the concrete pavement and the joints in found salt and water infiltration at levels that were two to three times higher than acceptable limits.
At the level found, corrosion is inevitable. The corrosion is obvious to even a casual observer. Visible from below the cantilevered bridge are wire mesh screens hanging beneath the joints of the deck. City DOT installed the protective screens to keep concrete from falling as the joints corrode. There is no cure for water and salt infiltration that has already occurred. Patching the roadway will not restore the lost strength and stiffness of the cantilevered section of the BQE.
If the structure falls below margins of safety set by the State and federal government, the City must close the BQE. It will have no choice. The narrowness of the right-of-way is the primary difficulty in designing a replacement for the cantilevered bridge.
With a cantilevered structure, Moses was able stack the roadways one on top of the other, rather than place them side by side. Today, in , the right-of-way of the cantilevered bridge remains just as narrow, but conditions for reconstruction of the highway are worse. On the landside, Brooklyn Heights and its landmarked historic houses have grown even more revered and untouchable.
On the waterside, the piers and derelict structures have long ago been demolished and replaced by the hugely popular Brooklyn Bridge Park and several new upscale apartment houses, hotels and restaurants.
The constraints of this narrow corridor present a dilemma. The City would achieve this dual project by stacking the detour on top of the highway construction. The City would first demolish the Promenade and build a six-lane highway for the detour where the Promenade had been. Once the , daily vehicles could be moved to the Promenade, the City would demolish in stages the two cantilevered roadways below and build an eight-lane, double-decked, elevated interstate highway on columns rising from Furman Street.
The vehicles would be moved down from the Promenade detour once the interstate highway was complete. At that point the Promenade would be rebuilt above the interstate highway. The finished elevated, double-decked, interstate highway would be supported by columns set on either side of Furman street.
The plan included travel lanes eighteen inches wider than the lanes on the cantilevered bridge, longer exit and entrance approaches, and an additional breakdown lane. These changes would add about 15 feet to the width of a new elevated, double-decked highway. Construction of the detour and the interstate highway would, the City projected, take six years, but could take much longer.
The plan itself was highly innovative and risky. Unknowns included the stability of the Brooklyn Heights slope and the risks associated with the removal of the wall supporting the cantilevered roadways. The City assumed that the existing BQE traffic of , vehicles a-day would grow by another 40, vehicles. As the Panel observed, projections of increased traffic are almost always overstated or, worse, self-fulfilling.
Bigger roads attract new vehicles. The opposite is also true.
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