Highly recommend the Wolfram blog post

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".

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.

Reinstating those lanes will literally kill people when the increased loads lead to a collapse on that section.

I would say it gets "torqueir" rather than heavier, but either way lots more stress. Reducing that to two lanes with no other changes will extend the useful lifespan significantly. Going back to three lanes will kill people when it collapses.