New plan for NYC’s BQE involves temporary roads: Mamdani

Complete with a video showing him booting a metal container and declaring that New York City was not going to “kick the can down the road” any longer on repairing the key freight thoroughfare of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway’s (BQE) cantilevered section, Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled a plan to rebuild the highway. Earlier plans to “rehabilitate”–the city’s term–the roughly 1. 5 miles of the BQE that is owned by the city, and which includes the cantilevered section that has been under such strain, have either been withdrawn or replaced with short-term measures like stronger enforcement of weight limits. But Mamdani’s plan announced Monday is a more extensive project to do extensive repairs on the section while allowing traffic to keep moving. At its core is the construction of an alternate temporary roadway so that vehicles can continue move in the right-of-way that connects traffic coming off the Verrazano Narrows Bridge across Staten Island up to a key highway serving Long Island and other routes that go north into the Bronx, upstate New York and New England and vice versa.