elprophet t1_jars8o3 wrote on March 3, 2023 at 4:25 PM

Reply to comment by notlodar in SHOCKER: Mayor's private BQE meeting could divide Brooklyn politicians by psychothumbs

Yeah there's two conversations happening here- should the rebuilt section have three lanes or two? Three is what it had before and the rest of the BQE has three, so that's the status quo. While I personally push for lowering the entire thing to two it's entire length and replacing that with non-road alternatives, that's a massive undertaking and rebuilding of the city on the scale of the original highway system. I get that.

The other conversation in this thread is "just reopen those lanes now" and that notion is what I was responding to.

notlodar t1_jaru0by wrote on March 3, 2023 at 4:37 PM

The 3 lanes now already spill over to residential lanes - see Columbia and Park as an example. Add in the factor that the majority of this traffic is caused by Staten Island and New Jersey commuters, will have to work on the public transit in those areas first.

Any study that to any study that touts the benefit of public transit over additional lanes of Highway needs to be scrutinized and contextualized properly in order to compare it to the complex systems we have a New York City.

elprophet t1_jas4kd5 wrote on March 3, 2023 at 5:45 PM

Absolutely. SI and NJ are hugely transit underserved, as much as the outer borough loops. And then take in context of the risk of catastrophic structural failure of the current cantilever. The correct answer was "rebuild the entire thing in 2010" but there was one of those decadal "once in a lifetime" global recessions going on. We're long past that date, the current cantilever is somewhere between "likely to collapse" and "imminently collapsing".