On June 22, after 27 public ascertainment meetings and many thousands of brightly colored Post-It notes, NYC Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) finally unveiled their own solution to the problem of replacing the Triple Cantilevered Roadway (TCR) calling for a complete removal of the current TCR and replacement with a modern, stacked highway structure.  

The new design by Michael Stein addresses many of the issues planners and local communities have been wrestling with for more than a decade, but it also leaves many more issues unresolved, and worse, it is an acknowledgment that none of the public concerns that have been raised are to be addressed.  

It is now apparent that the muti-year NYC DOT public process has failed to deliver on addressing any of the profound issues affecting the communities along the BQE. NYC DOT has failed not because of lack of community advocacy or consultation with renowned international engineering firms; It is failing due to lack of vision, lack of engineering staff depth and lack of a real commitment to address the larger issues they have promised to address.  

The city is simply not equipped or staffed for a project of this complexity, magnitude and impact. Their cadre of dedicated and committed staff members may do a good job of maintaining our local streets but they are not up to this job.  

• The city has failed to address the key public safety issues — through traffic overflowing into residential communities and reducing Transportation Related Air Pollution (TRAP) for the residents along the BQE.

• The city has failed to create a city/state/federal partnership that all agree is essential.

• The city has wasted many precious years planning to build an interstate highway where one is not needed and many believe actually the cause of the problems. 

• The city has wasted countless hours of dedicated volunteer and civic organization time.

• The city has created problems and controversies that turned out to be entirely unnecessary — such as extensive meetings and proposed designs for the Atlantic Avenue interchange — only to reveal that they did not own the recently State reconstructed bridge and have no plans to make any changes to the interchange.

• It has proposed decks and parks above roadways that it does not own, control or have the intention to fund.  

• It has proffered designs for much needed pedestrian improvements that are well within the scope of DOT to implement — no meetings or federal funds required. 

• The city has developed no meaningful maintenance of traffic plan for re-routing a major inter state freight corridor. The detour for all traffic for at least three to five years will be through local streets in historic neighborhoods.  

• They have developed no plans for protecting the residential communities during the three to five year period of construction.  

• The city has not even been able to secure the cooperation of Brooklyn Bridge Park even though the Mayor controls the majority of the BBP Corporation board seats.  

• Finally, the hard fact is that the party responsible for the deterioration of the TCR due to lack of maintenance is NYC DOT. 

NYC DOT has lost the trust of the 400,000 residents who live adjacent to the BQE/I-278 alignment. It is time for our local elected officials to acknowledge that NYC DOT has failed and to call for New York State to take over the city-owned portion of the BQE — from Sand Street to Atlantic Avenue, including the TCR — to prevent wasting any more precious years in the process. 

New York State DOT already controls all of I-278 in Brooklyn — the only exception is the Triple Cantilevered Roadway — and it has done a good job of maintaining the portions north and south of the Triple Cantilevered Roadway. NYS DOT has the experience with large urban infra structure projects that the city lacks. The recently completed Kosciuszko Bridge, rebuilding the Bruckner Expressway and the conversion of the Sheridan Expressway into an urban boulevard with new parks and investment in affordable housing speak to the state’s ability to execute large scale infrastructure projects within New York City.  

The four objectives outlined by Mayor Adams for revisioning the BQE Corridor — Urgency & Resiliency, Equity, Fiscal Responsibility and Stakeholder Involvement — are noble goals that have been met with universal approval. His call for a “transformative solution” and recognition that this is a once in lifetime opportunity to address the problems of what may be the worst stretch of Federal Interstate Highway in America is also agreed upon by all. But we can now all also agree that NYC DOT has failed to achieve any one of those objectives.  

It is now time — really long past time — for our local elected officials to call for state control of the entirety of I-278 in Brooklyn.

About Roy Sloane:

Cobble Hill resident Roy Sloane has always offered insightful and transformative ideas. He is a longtime civic leader having served for decades as the president and an officer of the Cobble Hill Association. Together with Tony Manheim, Sloane led the community’s efforts to create Brooklyn Bridge Park and secured the first million dollars from local elected officials to create the Local Development Corporation (LDC) for that park.

He served as the public affairs chair for the LDC and organized all the large-scale community engagements that led to city and state funding. In 2010, the State recognized Sloane’s transportation acumen and appointed him as the only citizen member of its BQE Technical Advisory Committee during the initial BQE study.

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