Mamdani's BQE fix raises concerns as city plans temporary highway along park

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to fix a crumbling stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is already hitting some bumps in the road.

The mayor on Monday said the city will repair the highway’s dilapidated triple-cantilever structure in Brooklyn Heights by fully closing the roadway. But in order to handle the 130,000 vehicles that use the corridor each day, he plans to build a temporary highway on Furman Street that will run along the edge of Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Some community groups worried how the temporary highway would affect the waterfront park, which was just completed over the last decade. Others wanted the city to dismantle the triple-cantilever altogether.

”There's nothing in this plan that moves us as a city away from the kind of long-discredited now, Robert Moses era status quo of these urban highways [like] the BQE, that continues to poison New Yorkers and really at the end of the day, privileges trucks and cars avoiding tolls on the New Jersey Turnpike,” said Lara Birnback, executive director of the Brooklyn Heights Association. She called the plan “depressing.”