New York's Brooklyn-Queens Expressway Is Crumbling

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a section of I-278 that runs between the two New York boroughs, is falling apart. No part of the so-called highway is particularly good to drive on — it's a parking lot any time before or after about 3 a.m. — but one section in particular is a nightmare: A multi-level cantilevered area that cuts through Brooklyn Heights. It has the worst traffic, the worst drivers, and the worst structural integrity. It's gotten so bad, in fact, that by next year it'll be banned from carrying trucks altogether.

The cantilever system, like all of New York's worst features, was the brainchild of one of the city's most hated individuals: Robert Moses, possibly the only urban planner universally loathed enough to show up as a villain in fiction as well as reality. The layout saves space by stacking alternating directions of the highway atop each other, but exposure to the elements has weakened the structure towards a crisis point — a crisis that no one really knows how to solve. Watch Half As Interesting break it down with some great visuals:

The decay of the BQE has been common knowledge amongst New York's decision makers for years — a steel-supported overhang that gets coated in road salt annually was never going to last forever — but no one's yet come up with a better way to ferry trucks between Brooklyn and Queens at highway speeds. Of course, those decision makers may forget that "highway speeds" is a standard the BQE already fails to meet, especially through (and approaching) the cantilever section. Having personally baked on that road many times, in full moto gear, I can confirm that the BQE's through speeds may well be lower than the adjacent side streets. 

By next year, the BQE will be too structurally unsound to support the semi trucks that are supposed to justify its existence. It already can't meet the speeds that are supposedly so important for it to maintain. Why do we bother keeping it around at all?