Opinion: The BQE is 75 years old. It’s time to tear it down.

What New Yorker hasn’t experienced the joy of the traffic-snarled Brooklyn Queens Expressway? That gloriously decaying piece of infrastructure that connects an 11.7 mile swath of post-industrial Brooklyn to Queens. Frustrations about driving on the BQE are only matched by the frustrations of trying to walk underneath it – a sad rite of passage for those who live along the corridor. The sidewalks below the roadway are dark, grimy and covered in bird droppings. As the BQE pushes past 75, it is time to tear it down and invest in next-generation infrastructure. 

The Navy Yard area of Brooklyn was once a thriving enclave of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. But today, it is a tangled mess of concrete and poorly planned sidewalks. Walking toward the Manhattan Bridge, there is an overgrown lot next to an exit ramp for the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. This is where 31-33-35 Sands Street once stood, buildings that belonged to my great-grandparents, Pietro and Rosolina Tomao. Like thousands of other immigrant families, they were displaced to build Robert Moses’ concrete dreams – people replaced by highways, a core legacy of New York’s car-first transportation system.

In 1947, New York held a series of trials where homeowners along the proposed BQE route disputed Moses’ valuations of their homes. The city’s attorney argued that Pietro, my great-grandfather, didn’t have the construction expertise to do much of the work he claimed he did. My great-grandfather had put thousands of dollars into the Sands Street properties, but the city refused to consider those improvements when assessing the value of the home. 

“I do anything. When you’re a laborer, you do everything,” said Pietro, according to a digitized transcript of the hearing. After a long back and forth, the city attorney grew frustrated: “Your honor can see from the witness that he is not quite familiar with the English language.” The court ruled in the city’s favor.

And so it went for many of the other immigrant businesses and homeowners in the area. Their land was taken on the cheap – neighborhoods condemned to build highways for private vehicles. The priorities of city officials were clear: remove residents as quickly as possible, for as little as possible. In total, 250,000 New Yorkers were displaced during Moses’ reign. 

With the cancellation of congestion pricing, policymakers are cementing Moses' legacy of displacement and unequal transportation, keeping New York’s transportation frozen in time. Congestion pricing would have allowed for the expansion of outer-borough transit, reduced the number of vehicles entering Manhattan by 17% and lessened the need for outdated infrastructure like the BQE. Plans for MTA projects like the Interborough Express, connecting southern Brooklyn to Queens, are likely scuttled indefinitely.

And despite unprecedented resources from the federal infrastructure bill to remove urban renewal era highways, New York is spending 90% of its federal infrastructure money on roads. Mayor Eric Adams has even proposed widening the BQE or possibly rebuilding it, taking New York City transportation policy backward. Lawmakers have forgotten that the long arm of transportation inequality reverberates for decades. In 1956, six children in Williamsburg were killed while playing alongside a BQE construction site as excavation sand banks collapsed on top of them. A New York Times article covering the deaths noted the “expressway route runs through a densely populated tenement area (that) teems with children.” Angry residents planned to picket the construction site “to insist if there had been playgrounds and parks in the area, the deaths could have been avoided.” What was clear in 1956 is still clear today: New York needs to center people, not cars. Of New York’s 51 City Council districts, the neighborhoods that line the BQE often rank lowest on a host of environmental, health and mobility outcomes. Council District 33, which encompasses Williamsburg and Greenpoint, has the seventh-worst air pollution of the city’s 51 council districts. The 38th District – anchored in Sunset Park – has the eighth-highest amount of permeable surface area in the city and ranks dead last for the number of bus lanes, with exactly zero. These outcomes are deeply rooted in the creation of the BQE itself.

New York's urban planning policy has centered car congestion over livable communities for the past 80 years. Highways decimated dozens of New York neighborhoods from the Bronx to Brooklyn. This is the main lesson of the BQE: highways do not create communities, people do. My family’s displacement shows just one cost of this ideology. Today, we are still paying for the era of freeway clearance in bad transit commutes, pollution and growing inequality. Maintaining this status quo isn’t worth the cost. Building a transportation system that centers people, not cars, means replacing the BQE with transit.