Highway Teardown Tour | 1. New York, NY

Summary

The Big Dig – Highway Teardown Tour | 1. New York, NY

Podcast: The Big Dig
Host: Ian Coss, GBH News
Guests: Polly Trottenberg (Former NYC DOT Commissioner, former Deputy Secretary of USDOT), Laura Bernbach (Brooklyn Heights Association), Stephen Nessen (WNYC Transportation Reporter)
Date: May 20, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of The Big Dig launches a new miniseries, the "Highway Teardown Tour," with an in-depth exploration of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE)—specifically its most infamous segment: the deteriorating triple cantilever section in Brooklyn Heights. The discussion zeroes in on the BQE as a case study for aging American highway infrastructure, exploring its controversial history, present-day challenges, and what the future might hold. The episode was recorded live at WNYC’s GreenSpace and features historical context, political drama, community activism, and reflections on what it means to repair, replace, or remove highways that shape—and sometimes scar—our cities.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is the Triple Cantilever? Why Does It Matter?

• [02:00–09:45]
  • The triple cantilever is a unique three-tiered stretch of highway “hanging out in space” (B: 03:00). Built into a cliffside, it’s visually and structurally unlike anything else in the U.S., making repairs and redesign especially challenging.
  • The stretch is less than a half-mile but carries outsize significance, both as a critical traffic artery (130,000 vehicles per day, ~13,000 trucks) and as a symbol of 20th-century urban highway ambitions.
  • Robert Moses, notorious for destructive urban planning favoring cars over neighborhoods, pushed its construction to link Long Island and Manhattan: "Someone who’s comfortable cleaving neighborhoods. Especially...immigrant, Black, Latino, low income, which had to be destroyed to build this highway." (C: 06:31).

2. Historic Compromise and Local Drama

• [11:30–14:54]
  • Brooklyn Heights’ wealth, influence, and activism redirected the original highway plan (which would have bulldozed historic homes) out along the bluff instead, sparing the heart of the neighborhood but sacrificing private gardens for a public promenade.
  • Two origin stories: Community victory, or Moses' strategic bait-and-switch: “Moses was actually too clever by half...he leaked plans to provoke hue and cry, when in fact, all along his plan was the bluff.” (D: 13:34).

3. Engineering Headaches & Safety Worries

• [15:13–20:59]
  • The triple cantilever's age, vibration, and lack of modern supports create significant challenges: "No one in their right minds would have built something like that in a more modern era." (E: 18:27).
  • Maintaining the cantilever is uniquely complex and expensive—subways, sewers, and utilities run underneath, leaving engineers with few easy fixes.
  • Firsthand reporter tours showed “light coming through the concrete” (C: 19:44), alarming both residents and officials.

4. Political Gridlock and Failed Solutions

• [20:59–31:13]
  • In 2018–2019, urgency peaked: short-term fixes bought time, but big replacement projects faced fierce community and political resistance.
  • Two major options were floated:
    1. A temporary highway at promenade level, turning backyards into six lanes of traffic for years.
    2. Eight years of disruptive, piecemeal repairs and closures.
  • Both would cost ~$4 billion; neither was palatable to the community or broader city.

"The plans did not land well in Brooklyn Heights... considerable outrage, actually." — Laura Bernbach (D: 23:34)

5. Community Organizing and Coalitions

• [24:51–28:25]
  • Residents mobilized with their own alternative designs and focused on preserving the promenade as a vital public space—not just a neighborhood amenity.
  • Over time, the debate and activism expanded to include a coalition across neighborhoods affected by the BQE, ending the tunnel vision on Brooklyn Heights and revealing wider environmental and justice dimensions.
  • The Covid pandemic, plus political and structural compromises, shifted the debate: options were tabled, and a commission was formed to reframe the challenge.

6. A Case Study in Governmental Complexity

• [28:25–34:52]
  • Calls for a broader authority/commission—including state, city, MTA, Port Authority—reflect how intertwined and fractured jurisdiction is, making any single-entity solution impossible.
  • Polly Trottenberg: “I think to some degree, seeing it with your own eyes was just helpful in understanding the complexity... No one in their right minds would have built something like that [today].” (E: 18:27)

7. Highway Removal as Imagination and Policy

• [34:52–38:15]
  • Comparisons to cities like Boston (the Big Dig expanded capacity), Rochester, and San Francisco, where highway trench removal had fewer traffic consequences—a much tougher proposition for the heavily used BQE.
  • Nationally, the legacy of urban highways is both physical (community destruction) and political (community division).
  • Trottenberg highlights new federal programs (Reconnecting Communities, Neighborhood Access and Equity) as a hopeful template but notes the BQE is “in a class by itself” in difficulty.

"None are as complicated or difficult as the BQE. That is really in a class by itself." — Polly Trottenberg (E: 33:35)

8. Evolving Advocacy: From Parochial to Coalition

• [38:15–42:10]
  • The Brooklyn Heights Association’s vision expanded—now seeing the highway and its health and environmental impacts as a corridor-wide injustice best tackled with united advocacy.
  • Laura: "We're stronger together. We know that the powers that be frequently try to pit us against each other or we're our own worst enemies and we pit ourselves against each other. But let's really try to overcome that and work together.” (D: 39:52)

9. What Meaningful Community Engagement Really Entails

• [42:10–44:40]
  • Challenges of true engagement: "It's not the quantity of engagement, it's the quality.” Community wants clear trade-offs, not consultant-driven options with unclear impacts.
  • Persistent mismatch between technocratic choices and lived neighborhood values, especially around air quality, traffic, and climate.

10. Visions of a Post-BQE Future

• [46:34–50:15]
  • Laura: “Could any of you imagine a New York City without the BQE?”
    “I imagine it every day. I don’t pretend or imagine it would be easy or simple or uncomplicated. But I do think that it’s possible. And I think that’s a choice. We can choose to do hard things.” (D: 46:41)
  • Polly: While other cities removed highways and absorbed traffic, “I have not found an expert...who thinks 150,000 vehicles a day in that terrain could be absorbed” without enormous investments and planning. A full-scale BQE overhaul would dwarf even the Big Dig.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the weight of history:
  “Everyone in this room knows the book The Power Broker...Robert Moses is the person responsible for building this roadway. Someone who's comfortable cleaving neighborhoods.” — Stephen Nessen (C: 06:31)
• On the lived reality of infrastructure decay:
  “The shocks have been replaced so many times at this point.” — Stephen Nessen (C: 08:07)
• On the unique challenge:
  “No one in their right minds would have built something like that in a more modern era...” — Polly Trottenberg (E: 18:27)
• On the agony of consensus:
  “There is a tragedy to the way that you can have these groups of people who all hate the highway, who are at the same time bitterly divided about it.” — Ian Coss (B: 36:32)
• On new federal hope (and limits):
  “...That’s an incentivizing and helpful [approach]. If there’s a lot of conflict...federal partnership and resources matter.” — Polly Trottenberg (E: 34:52)
• A coalition reckoning:
  “We have come together to say enough is enough with the BQE. It impacts all of us in a terrible way...we’re stronger together.” — Laura Bernbach (D: 39:52)
• The power of imagination:
  "I imagine it every day." — Laura Bernbach (D: 46:41)
• On stark reality:
  “What if we don't have that much time?” — Stephen Nessen (C: 50:15)
  “Thank goodness I'm not the Commissioner anymore.” — Polly Trottenberg (E: 50:19)

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Timestamps of Important Segments

• [01:43] Introduction of the BQE, historic context
• [04:22] Media coverage montage – “Crumbling Stretch”
• [06:01] BQE basics: geography, usage, history
• [09:45] How Brooklyn Heights maneuvered the highway’s route
• [15:13] Polly Trottenberg describes inheriting a crisis
• [18:27] Engineering horrors on the cantilever
• [22:44] The two failed mega-project options and public fallout
• [25:02] Scenes from feverish public meetings, advocacy pivots
• [28:25] Governmental fragmentation – the need for a cross-agency commission
• [33:19] Comparison to other city projects—Big Dig, freeway deconstruction
• [39:52] Emergence of BQE Environmental Justice Coalition
• [46:41] “Imagine a city without the BQE?” – Diverse perspectives on urban possibility
• [50:35] The current state: structure safe until 2029—what comes next?

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Conclusion

This episode elegantly sets up the complexities facing New York City’s BQE, mixing history, politics, engineering, and civil society’s struggle for a say. Through candid storytelling and debate, it foreshadows broader national questions: How do we repair the physical and social scars left by mid-century urban highways? Who gets to decide, and what does transformative change look like? The conversation ends with hope, urgency, and a challenge for both policymakers and communities to imagine—and possibly choose—a different future.

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Next Up: A road trip to Syracuse, NY, where highways are already coming down.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

and also from Classic Harborline, offering family friendly cruises, corporate gatherings and sightseeing day sales throughout the summer in Boston. [e-mail]. When Zoran Mamdani ran to be the mayor of New York City, he ran, as you may know, on big plans, big ideas that he talked about every chance he got, including on transportation, making buses free.

[C]

And that's something that we will deliver.

[B]

Buses should be fast. We will make those buses fast and free. But now that he is in office, there is another issue facing the mayor that is not buses, not housing, not schools. It's something Zoran Mamdani did not run on or talk about much in the campaign. But it could become a defining issue of his time in office. The bqe, the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, specifically a half mile long stretch of this highway that is truly falling apart and is now his direct responsibility. Everyone agrees something has to be done. The question is what? My name is Ian Coss. Welcome to the Big Dig highway teardown Tour. Today, what to do with the bqe. And I'll just note that this highway we're talking about today is, is a truly bizarre, one of a kind piece of infrastructure. Brooklyn's infamous triple cantilever. Some of you will know exactly what I'm talking about. If you don't, I might suggest a quick Google image search of the term triple cantilever. You'll see a three level structure about a half mile long built into a hillside with each level just eight hanging out in space with no support at all. Beneath that outer edge, cantilevered in engineering speak, there really is nothing else quite like it, and therefore no problem quite like it. But within all that quirkiness, there is also a basic challenge that many cities on this tour can relate with. The highway is falling apart. The time to rethink it is now. Doing nothing is not an option. We recorded this conversation live at WNYC's GreenSpace. So the plan for tonight is I want to zero in on a one mile stretch of a single highway that I think is emblematic and illustrative of highway challenges around this city and around this country. This is a highway that has been in, in and out and in and out and in the news for a long time. And so I did a quick search of the WNYC archives for some of the recent coverage of it. And this is a little bit of what I found.

[C]

Brian Lehrer on WNYC so what can be done to fix New York City's most hated mile of expressway?

[B]

The debate over what to do with the most crumbling part of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.

[C]

Crumbling stretch of the Brooklyn Queens Express. Crumbling part of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Well, at this point in the game, listeners should be familiar with the term triple cantilever.

[B]

Should they? Should they? And that last voice in there is none other than WNYC's own transportation reporter, Stephen Nessen. I love it when you hear those back to back you get this exact phrase, most crumbling stretch of. Could we get some fresh copy maybe?

[C]

Deteriorating.

[B]

It's called a thesaurus falling apart. So I'm curious, has the term triple cantilever truly entered the New York lexicon?

[C]

I think for New York residents, yes,

[B]

you can just drop that in casual conversation.

[C]

I would, yes. But on air, I think my editor would prefer me to explain it a little bit before I use it or after.

[B]

But it's gotten to the point where you're kind of like, nah, maybe we can just, just throw that in there. Yeah. I'm guessing this is a non representative sample, but are we familiar? Okay, before we get to the infamous triple cantilever, I was wondering if you could give us a little bit of a bigger picture. This is part of a larger highway called the bqe. Brooklyn Queens Expressway. What is it? Why does it exist?

[C]

So the Brooklyn Queens Expressway is the only major highway that can really connect all the five boroughs. It was built between 1937 to 1964. It's a 12 mile interstate. Actually part of it's owned by the state. The small Cantilever section is actually owned by the city.

[B]

Okay. So it's really like the BBMSQ.

[C]

It's a little bit of a mouthful, that acronym. 130,000 daily vehicles. 13,000 of them are trucks.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So it gets traffic. Everyone in this room knows the book the Power Broker. I'm sure it's on your shelves whether you've completed it or not. But Robert Moses is the person responsible for building this roadway. Someone who's comfortable cleaving neighborhoods, especially in particularly immigrant, black, Latino, low income, which had to be destroyed to build this highway. And part of his goal was to connect the Long island highways he built to Manhattan to get some of that traffic into the city goods workers. Obviously you know about highways. This was the time to build them. The golden era.

[B]

Yeah. So we found some audio from the opening ribbon cutting of part of the bqe, including Robert Moses. Could you play that clip for us just to give us a little sense of the mood? In 1950, I believe that this beautiful sunshiny day is an auspicious beginning for this great highway. This one of the greatest city arterial routes ever launched. This is the pride and the pet of Brooklyn. So is the Brooklyn borough president at the time calling it the pride and the pet of Brooklyn. That was the mood then. What's the mood now?

[C]

Oh, I mean, now it's. If you're stuck on it, of course, it's misery.

[B]

Do you drive the BQE yourself?

[C]

I do have a favorite stretch. It's been a long time, I think, you know, like my children hold their breath when they drive past a graveyard. Sort of hold your breath while you're driving under the triple cantilever or on it, I guess.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And does your car have some scars?

[C]

The shocks have been replaced so many times at this point.

[B]

Yeah. Now, to be fair, it's really easy to beat up on a road like the bqe. It's ugly, it begs for it, but it also serves a purpose. So can you talk about why it is still there and why some folks want to keep it there?

[C]

Sure. So really, the triple cantilever we're talking about is 0.4 miles. The miniscule part of this larger highway, really, that runs along really, really nice neighborhood called Brooklyn Heights.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

Very wealthy, great apartments, classic, historical. As Moses was building this highway, he had to get through this neighborhood to connect the northern section that runs through Queens to downtown Brooklyn with the southern section.

[B]

Yeah. And that connection is key because like you said, this was kind of the missing link in his grand Vision to get you out to Long island and Staten island and those places.

[C]

Exactly. But unlike some of the other neighborhoods that were completely obliterated, to build this highway, to keep it straight or whatever it was, that wasn't going to work in Brooklyn Heights. So as a sort of solution, I suppose they built this very advanced engineering structure at the time, and you sort of stacked the highway, unlike in other parts of the road, and as a sort of treat or cherry on top, they built this beautiful promenade on top of. Yeah, great view, great place to look out, people get married there, proposals are held there, all kinds of things. And that was sort of a bonus for building this sort of highway in this beautiful neighborhood.

[B]

Got it.

[C]

But over time, this was built a long time ago. It wasn't designed for the sort of current standards of vehicles that we have today. Big trucks, heavy cars, a lot more traffic than when the roadway opened.

[B]

Got it. I think that is a perfect segue to bring out our guests for the evening. So Stephen and I, we're just two dudes who, like, cover transportation.

[C]

Two dudes with facial hair.

[B]

Two dudes with facial hair, more hair on the bottom and then on the top who cover transportation. But we've got with us two fantastic guests who have lived and breathed this issue for many years. We've got Polly Trottenberg, who has held many roles, including as Deputy Secretary of Transportation under Pete Buttigieg. But especially relevant to this conversation, she was the commissioner of the New York City Department of transportation from 2014 to 2020. Polly, please join us. And we've also. And also with us, we've got Laura Bernbach, who is the executive director of the Brooklyn Heights association that Stephen was just referencing. This is a neighborhood advocacy group that was founded in 1910. All right. And has played a historic role in many highway debates in the city. So, Laura Bernbach. So, Laura, I want to start with you. Stephen offered us bit of the lore of the triple cantilever. Could you talk about the role of your organization, the Brooklyn Heights association, in the origin story of this unusual structure? How did this come about?

[D]

Sure. The BQE construction started, I believe, in the 30s and finally finished in 1960. But in the middle era, in the 40s was when Robert Moses brought his plan for the BQE to Brooklyn Heights, as you referenced. And originally, the story goes. One story goes that originally the plan would have been to run the highway along Hicks street, and it would have taken out many, many, many 19th century historic homes, cut right through the heart of Brooklyn Heights in the way that the highway cut through the heart of many other neighborhoods when the BQE was being constructed.

[B]

I can't picture Hick street, but like

[D]

brownstone brownstones, brick federal townhomes. So the story is that when the plans came out in the mid-40s, the neighborhood, led by the Brooklyn Heights association, which, as you noted, was or had already been in existence since 1910, mobilized to fight back. Brooklyn Heights had many of its own power brokers, and they were ready to step up and fight this plan. And eventually what happened was Moses was persuaded to change the route of the highway and build it along the Brooklyn Heights bluffs, essentially above Furman Street.

[B]

What did it look like beforehand? Was it truly a cliff?

[D]

It was a cliff, and there were.

[B]

Let's build a highway on the cliff.

[D]

There were homes that had beautiful back gardens that extended down the hillside. So these were private gardens that belonged to the lucky homeowners of the time. And that was part of the way that the promenade or the esplanade came about, was that as part of this compromise, those homeowners would lose their private gardens, but a beautiful public space, a beautiful public garden would be placed on top.

[B]

Got it.

[D]

There's an alternative story, mythology number one. Yeah, mythology number one. Maybe not mythology, but origin story number one. Origin story number two is that Moses was actually too clever by half and knew that he would face opposition in Brooklyn Heights. He was obviously not a naive guy. He knew what he would be up against in Brooklyn Heights and that he leaked. Or somehow these plans to run the highway along Hicks street leaked, causing a great hue and cry, when in fact, all along his plan had been for reasons that he and his engineers decided were preferable to run the highway along the bluff. That was his intention all along, but yet he allowed the neighborhood to feel like they had some sway over his plans. I don't know the truth. I don't know whether it's story one or story two, but they're both interesting to think about.

[B]

Stephen, thoughts?

[C]

I read that he. The second version, I read that he actually sent surveyors out to very obviously look like surveyors.

[B]

Theatrical surveyors.

[C]

Yeah, like over the top. So I believe one of the local Brooklyn papers wrote about Moses plan, and that's how it snowballed and got on folks radar.

[B]

So, Polly, you come into office in the city in 2014, so now we're decades, many decades later. This triple cantilever with the promenade on top, these layers of highways stacked along what was once a cliff. What is the state of that whole structure when you come into office.

[E]

Yeah. And there's a little bit of more modern history, which is, as Lara was saying, BQE was sort of built in a period from the 30s through the 60s. So by the time you got to the early 21st century, it was in pretty poor condition. And, you know, the deviousness of Robert Moses, he also cut corners and built in a lot of places, pretty substandard highways. So it had been. I think conversations in New York had been happening by the point I became Commissioner probably for 20 years about this highway starting to fall apart. We're spending. Both the city and the state are spending a lot of money to maintain it. At some point, you want to do something that's going to be more cost effective and fix it. And some in this room may even remember that the state sort of jumped into the Fray in around 2010 and came in with a proposal, and it was also met with a big firestorm, and the state, essentially, I think it's fair to say, beat a hasty retreat. So when I came in, the state was not sort of interested in being part of the process. And as we talk about the complexities of the BQE, most of the BQE, it's about 20 miles long, is owned by the state, except for the infamous section that runs between Atlantic and sand streets, that 1.2 miles, which is the most complicated, not just the triple cantilever, but there's a lot. Those of you who've driven over it knows the way it goes up and down and weaves, and it's an incredibly complicated piece of infrastructure. So when I came in, and it's easy to look back in hindsight and second guess yourself, but when I came in, my bridge engineers were already starting to talk to me on a pretty regular basis about their concerns about the. The safety of the structure and what we might need to do. And we did make our entreaties to the state to see if they wanted to be part of that discussion. And there just wasn't a lot of appetite there.

[B]

And is it really? I mean, this section is so unusual where there are these three layers and each layer is only supported on one side. That's what makes it a cantilever. Are there unique challenges to maintaining that kind of structure or repairing that kind of structure?

[E]

There are a lot of unique challenges to that. It's very hard. People who live near it in Brooklyn Heights know this. It's noisy because it vibrates a lot, because it doesn't. It's only supported on one side. It's very Hard to do the work piecemeal because you can't really route traffic around it. If you think of a highway that's supported on both sides, you can maybe close one lane and get cars to go around the other side. It's really not so easy to do on a cantilever, so. And just to add to the complexity of sort of what we confronted diving in, there are four different subway lines that run under it. There's a major sewer interceptor. There's a whole bunch of other utilities. So in addition to just the sheer complexity of the engineering of the highway, there is just a bounty of other types of typical New York City infrastructure that run underneath it. I can safely say this. No one in their right minds would have built something like that in a more modern era because it is so very complicated to go back and repair.

[B]

As I understand it, the two of you, Steven and Polly, went on tours, or maybe Polly, you were the one giving the tour.

[E]

We did.

[B]

Could you kind of set the scene of what it actually looked like inside?

[E]

100%, no. And look, as we started the.

[C]

That was 2018, right?

[E]

Yeah. When we first started bringing plans out, and obviously, a lot of folks in this room, no big political firestorm there. And one thing we decided to do, because it is almost an incomprehensibly complicated piece of infrastructure, was to start taking journalists and elected officials and community members, and, by the way, an amazing crew of engineers and other folks who had deep expertise to go and look underneath it. And we started to peel back some of the parts of the wall which had not been peeled back.

[B]

When we say peel back, you mean like jackhammer back, jackhammer back, peel back. Is it actually hollow inside? Like, you open it up and there's a.

[E]

Parts of it are. Parts of it aren't.

[B]

You can just walk around under there,

[E]

and there's weird, like, old pieces of stuff back there and things that got left behind, and it's really, like, old

[B]

equipment that was just abandoned.

[E]

It's quite astonishing. And you know, to go underneath it and you can look up and, you know, see holes where the cars are drying over and just feel the sheer kind of sound and force of the volume of traffic. I mean.

[C]

I mean, for me, Right. It was like seeing the light coming through the concrete, and that didn't seem right.

[E]

And, you know, when you're transportation commissioner and you see the light coming through and you know that that structure is carrying 150,000 vehicles a day, which makes it one of the busiest highways in this entire region, it doesn't feel right either.

[B]

Right. A different kind of light at the end of the tunnel, not the light you want at the end of the tunnel.

[D]

Don't go towards that light, don't go towards the light.

[C]

And we were told at that time, I think every 50ft there are joints that are leaking and damaged. And that also seemed really troub.

[E]

Yeah, it was.

[C]

I mean, that's one way to alarm people and get people's attention is take journalists there, show them these holes and tell them this is a problem that you can see with your own eyes.

[E]

And I don't think we weren't trying to alarm people, but I just think there was a lot of misunderstanding about the nature and complexity of the structure. And we just thought it would be useful for people. We didn't want people running out screaming. And we tried to reassure people that we were doing a lot of things on a day to day basis to maintain the structure. But I do think to some degree, seeing it with your own eyes was just helpful in understanding the complexity of the challenge.

[B]

And what I love is when you listen to those stories from say 2018, you go here and there, something has to be done by 2026, otherwise dire, dire things will happen.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Here we are in 2026.

[C]

Well, I mean, to the dot's credit, and I know Polly can talk about this, the alarm bells were rang and a lot of folks did something.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Not necessarily what you would think of as like, well, let's replace it or whatnot, but these short term fixes to like extend the life of that section of the roadway.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And some of them, you know, are in place today and seem very effective at least to buy some time while we come up with. While they come up with a different solution.

[E]

Yeah, I mean, we were fortunate. And after sort of things we first proposed met with fierce political resistance, we. We did form a commission. We're lucky. Some of the members of that commission are in the audience tonight. And it was a great group, civic leaders, engineers, transportation thinkers, a lot of really creative people. And we did start to hash out some of the things that I think have helped extend the life of the structure. Doing better monitoring, working with the state actually to improve the enforcement of overweight trucks, restriping it so that you would have a smoother traffic flow. And so there were, I think, a lot of solutions that have helped maintain the structure. Other ideas still on the table from folks today. The debate right now is can you keep doing that? At what point does that just start not to work? And I think that's part of the question that still remains on the table.

[C]

But there was two options floated at the time.

[B]

Yeah, indulge in the fierce resistance part if you're willing to relive that for a moment.

[E]

It's a little traumatic, but I'll relive it with you.

[B]

Take us back to the options.

[E]

Yeah.

[C]

So there were two options. One was to build a temporary elevated roadway at the level of this lovely promenade, which would essentially put traffic in people's backyards in Brooklyn Heights. While that's up there, they could demolish the roadway below and build another one. The other plan was to do it piece by piece over eight years, 24 weekends of full lane closures. Both of these would have cost at the time about $4 billion and potentially could have been done close to now if they had started at that time.

[B]

So, Laura, these two plans come to you. Your organization, you know, represents the residents along this promenade who would have to look out and listen to and follow along with this construction project. How did those plans hit you?

[D]

So what happened was the plans did not land well in Brooklyn Heights.

[B]

Sort of understatement.

[D]

There was considerable outrage, actually. I think that's probably a good word to use at the idea. I think people certainly understood that something needed to be done. Nobody wanted to see any kind of collapse or a piece of concrete falling onto someone. The seriousness of the situation, that was well understood by many people in the community. But I think the idea that a six lane highway would be built on top of the promenade, which is not just an amenity for Brooklyn Heights, it's a world famous tourist destination. So that that would be taken out of commission for eight plus years, replaced with six lanes of traffic outside of your window, essentially was unacceptable. And that it would be a mistake to address the cantilever without looking at the corridor in a much more holistic way.

[B]

Yeah. Could you set the scene a little bit of the public meetings that took place and the community organizing that took place around this kind of take us in there.

[D]

You really want to go back to the trauma. Right.

[B]

One moment longer and then we'll move on.

[D]

I mean, it was for someone like

[B]

me who wasn't there. Doesn't follow. I just understand what that moment.

[D]

The bha, as the representatives of the neighborhood, quickly mobilized. There was event on the promenade. There was a town hall meeting that was organized that had a lot of. We happened to be in an election year, so it was advantageous in a way for us because many of the candidates who were interested in taking that office were aware of this debate and wanted to get in front of of a community that is vote rich. And so we had a number of them come to a town hall that we had organized the BHA at that time similar to what we did. I think when Moses was originally building the highway, we put forward an alternative plan of our own. We had commissioned a local architect, Mark Wooters, who developed a bypass highway. One of the reasons we did that was because we felt like it was important not just to say no to something, but to try to come up with an alternative that would potentially be more palatable. I think our thinking and the conversation about the BQA as a whole has evolved a lot since that time. So at this point, that's not a plan that we would put forward, but at the time, it was an important way for us to demonstrate that there are other possibilities out there besides the two plans that the DoT had come up with.

[E]

Yeah, I think to sort of follow on from that, I think what Laris referring to. And it's interesting how the politics played out, which is for a long time the debate was solely around the triple cancel lever. These plans were very elaborate, very expensive, and only focused on sort of the section near Brooklyn Heights. And so, yeah, there was, there was that political debate going on. But then the political debate started to expand as communities on other parts of the corridor sort of said, well, now you're talking about spending 10 billion just for Brooklyn Heights, but what about us? And that sort of expanded the debate to, we need the state at the table, because this is a quarter wide challenge. And also asking the question of how much are we investing.

[B]

Yeah.

[E]

In mitigating on this. If, you know, hey, New York City, if you had 10 billion to spend on transportation or anything else, and you were concerned about equity and other things, how would you spend it?

[B]

Right.

[D]

Yeah.

[E]

So it quickly grew from a hotspot debate, a fierce one, to something that got much bigger and even more complicated and required, I think, a lot more players to begin to solve.

[B]

One of the things that strikes me about the BQE and other kind of road issues like this is that they kind of go through these cycles where it'll really heat up and there'll be a lot of ideas floating around and debates and meetings, and then it'll sort of simmer down and go into the background. So in that 2018, 2019 period, there was obviously a lot, a lot going on. What kind of quieted it? What was the signal?

[D]

Covid?

[E]

Well, Covid, Yes. I think again, sort of having a panel and Saying, we're taking the options that everyone's the most angry of off the table. We're going to take a fresh look. We're going to look at some ways that we can, some of the steps that were taken to preserve the structure so we'll have more time to work through it. And one thing I just wanted to note at that time, something that I thought was a great idea was the creation of, as you have here in New York, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, different types of authorities. I really felt that would have been so helpful for the bqe, just very hard for the city to solve on its own in the envelope of the part of the roadway that the city owned. And I remember at that time, Assemblyman Joanne Simon had a piece of legislation up in Albany. It was going to create a BQE commission, I don't remember exactly the title that would have brought the city, the State Parks Department, mta, Port Authority, all the players, Brooklyn Bridge park, all the players that could help produce that larger solution that people got interested in. We can reduce truck traffic. Can we put more traffic on the water, can we bring more mass transit service, all those things which are way beyond the city's capabilities, but could be part of a commission that brought in all the right agencies. I still think to this day that would be a great solution to help even now think through all the ways that you could tackle the quarter. And by the way, it's not just even that quarter. I mean, some of the things you want to do to tackle the quarter are larger questions about in an era where everyone's getting things delivered and how do we manage truck traffic in New York City? How do we continue to expand our mass transit system in an era when we have fiscal constraints?

[B]

So Laura mentioned Covid as sort of this signal that the debate was over for the time. For you, Polly, was there another moment when you felt like, okay, it's time to withdraw these plans we've been pushing

[E]

and, well, I think we withdrew them pretty quickly. So, I mean, that sort of happened almost overnight, I'd say.

[C]

Was that disappointing?

[E]

No. I mean, contrary to what people believe, I was not particularly wedded to any particular idea. I think we did feel like we needed to get the debate started, but, no, not disappointing in the slightest. And I really enjoyed the opportunity to have a commission that brought a lot of great thinkers to the table. I never pretended that I thought the city had all the answers on it. I don't think the city does to this day. And it's Interesting to me. You know, we have people say it's a new administration. What's this mayor going to do? The challenge is much bigger than for the mayor. It requires state actors and other agencies and a lot of players, I think.

[B]

Do you regret not pushing harder in that moment?

[E]

No, I don't think it was possible.

[B]

So what is possible now for the bqe? That's after the break. So, Stephen, could you catch us up to the present a little bit? It's been now, you know. So that was in 2018, 2019. What has happened since then?

[C]

Well, a couple years ago, Mayor Adams and his administration presented a series of ideas for how to deal with the triple cantilever. And it's actually staggering. When I went back to look and I asked the DOT, they said they've presented 40 design concepts for how to deal with this part of the roadway,

[B]

just for that one stretch, which I

[C]

can't even get my head around, but it's a lot. But so they do all these workshops. They've done 19 public meetings with folks, and they sort of come up with these fun names for different designs.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

One's called the Stoop, another's called the Terraces. Another one's called the Lookout. And for each one of these, there's also three variations of how it would work and either connect to Brooklyn Bridge park or not. What to do with the. Ostensibly, the biggest problem is the traffic. Right?

[B]

Right.

[C]

So are you going to have the vehicles stacked on top of each other? Are they going to be horizontally aligned? And there's multiple variations for each of those configurations that they've presented to the public, which I'm not sure how anyone in the public quite gets their mind around or chooses. I like that one. That one.

[B]

Well, that's your job, Right?

[C]

My job is to look at it and try to understand it, but it's even a lot for me to get my head around, and I'm still looking at it.

[B]

So, Polly, I'm curious for you, looking ahead at this next chapter, the new administration, what are the lessons you take from your time in office that you feel are relevant now?

[E]

I mean, and I. I'll take the second just to broaden the lens, because also, I'm just coming, as you noted recently, from the Biden administration. And I got to sort of. I'm very familiar with the Big Dig, but I'm familiar with a lot of these projects all over the country.

[B]

Yeah.

[E]

And I've said this many times publicly. I'll say it again, none are as complicated or difficult as the BQE that is really in a class by itself.

[B]

But a lot of that's not just New York exceptionalism.

[E]

It's. No, it's not New York exceptionalism. And that wouldn't be a good thing to brag about anyways. But a lot of them are pretty difficult and they have some commonalities. And I think New York example is in some ways the most heartbreaking, right? Which is in so many of these cases, neighborhoods were just the way I've heard it described. They were clear cut. And the devastation and the impact is incredibly complicated. And many decades later, it's very hard in a lot of cases to fix just the costs, the complexity and finding the consensus. And I was happy in the Biden administration. We had a couple of programs, one called Reconnecting Communities and one called Neighborhood Access and Equity, that actually put some federal dollars on the table. And that's, I think, just tremendously incentivizing and helpful. If there's a lot of fraction and conflict and difficult questions about how to fix some of these roadways, to have a federal partnership and to have those resources as well.

[B]

Did that experience of going around the country and you know, going to Detroit or New Orleans, Rochester, did that change how you see the bqe? Did you come to appreciate the challenges in a different way?

[E]

I mean, I think it reconfirmed for me just how hard the BQE is. And you mentioned Rochester, which is, I think a good example, my father's hometown. And just in some cases in these upstate New York, Rochester and Syracuse, you had these highways, they were often trenches. So from an engineering point of view, somewhat easier to deck over than to deal with something like a triple cantilever. In a lot of cases they were disgustingly overbuilt. So they flattened this neighborhood and built whatever, an eight lane highway. And then the traffic didn't come. The complexity here is the BQE is a huge volume of traffic. And not that that's an insurmountable problem, but it's not so easy to just necessarily say, well, without doing a lot of the other things that have been talked about, it's harder to manage that. But I do think there's a commonality that I've seen in a lot of places around the country. Fierce political opposition, very hard to achieve consensus, litigation, conflicts between city and state. I mean, these are, I think, commonalities. And this is, you know, among the sort of tragic legacies of the interstate era and the damage that it did to so many communities. It's left not only Sort of physical scars, but it's just left political and governance and community questions that are also scars in their own way.

[B]

There is a, there's a tragedy to the way that you can have these groups of people who all hate the highway, who are at the same time bitterly divided about it. And that, as you said, the legacy is it, you know, divides communities, the highway, but it also divides, it creates this divisive, you know, physical remnant that pits us against each other.

[E]

I think that's completely accurate and just also a haunting reminder for all of us that do transportation, these investments last for decades and cities and communities adapt and grow around them. And so mistakes at that scale are profoundly difficult to fix. They can be fixed. And communities around the country are doing it. And I think did it in Boston. Not. It's not a good analogy to New York, because one difference in the Big

[B]

Dig, because Boston's not New York.

[E]

I know, no, no, it's not that I'm born in Boston. I'm not being snobby about it, but

[B]

just we have our own exceptionalism.

[E]

Just one big difference that I think is not the part of the dialogue here in New York that's not well known. I mean, the Big Dig project in Boston vastly expanded the highway network in

[B]

Boston, first and foremost, the highway expansion

[E]

project, you know, here in New York we're trying to, I think, aim for something much more difficult, which is to take a very high volume highway and reduce capacity. And it's not that it can't be done, but it's much more challenging than either a project where you vastly expand the roadway network, or again, in the case of like a Rochester, where the highway was overbuilt and you can shrink it back down to a surface road without big impacts.

[D]

I have a couple reflections on what, what the discussion has been. I'll go back really briefly to this period when I, when I said Covid. So we had the expert panel report come out that really was influential in helping the Brooklyn Heights community. As I said, think about the entirety of the bqe. So, for example, there's an organization, El Puente in Williamsburg, in Southside Williamsburg, which had done a lot of work thinking about the BQE even before the debate about the cantilever came to be. They had worked very hard for 10 years on a community vision for capping the trench in Williamsburg. It was called the BQ Green. So we were fascinated by this, wanted to learn more about it, reached out and said, hey, we know you're struggling with the bqe. We're struggling with the bqe. Can we learn about the situation in each other's neighborhoods? So we started with that, but the outreach to the other neighborhoods continued to the point where now there is a really fantastic coalition called the Brooklyn Queens Expressway Environmental Justice Coalition. So we have members, community groups, citywide transportation groups like Riders Alliance. We have groups like the bha, El Puente Uprose in Sunset Park, Red Hook Initiative. And the point about the division between different communities who all hate the bqe, certainly we are a lot of groups that don't agree on everything, but we have come together to say enough is enough with the bqe. It impacts all of us in a terrible way. As I said, much more so in many of these frontline neighborhoods, frontline communities, than in my own neighborhood. And we're stronger together. We know that the powers that be frequently try to pit us against each other or we're our own worst enemies and we pit ourselves against each other. But let's really try to overcome that and work together.

[B]

Yeah. Are there lessons you took, Laura, from that really kind of heated period we were talking about, about how to be a more constructive and productive community advocate? Like, does your organization approach the issue differently?

[D]

It's a good question. I think we approach the issue differently because we are no longer looking at the cantilever without looking at the rest of the corridor. So what was probably at the time a fairly narrow or parochial vision responding to the problem as it was laid out for us, the problem as it was laid out for us in the community was the cantilever is structurally unsound. What are we going to do about the cantilever? But one of the problems, I think, is that the public has not been presented in a. In a. Presented with the problem in a way that helps people to understand what the trade offs are. I think people are mature enough to understand that policy choices have trade offs and that there's not going to be one perfect solution that's going to make everybody happy. But it is not often presented to us in a way that if we did X, Y or Z, here are the things that would result that you all might think are really positive. But here are some of the drawbacks. And to allow people to wrestle with the trade offs, to bring their own values to the table, because the community are. We are not transportation experts, we are not engineers. We are not going to be able to weigh in on the. The weedy aspects of the project. But we do know our values and we do know our neighborhoods. And we have to be given a chance to really relate to the proposed solutions on those terms.

[B]

This is maybe a weighty question, but on what you're saying, do you feel like there is such thing as too much community involvement?

[D]

I know why you're asking that question, And I understand some of the debates that are out in the ether about abundance and why projects don't happen and the environmental review process and critiques of that. So I do understand that. I think I would say that it's not the quantity of the engagement, it's the quality. That's what I was trying to get at with what I was just saying. Right. It's not how many meetings are you having or how many residents have you given a survey to who maybe don't even really understand the survey that they're taking. You know, even as Steven noted, he's a transportation reporter and he struggled, as I did, to understand some of these 40 different options and plans that were laid out in one public meeting and to come up with some kind of comprehensive understanding of. Well, I think I like this, but I don't really understand what the impacts are. We asked many times, we want to understand what this would mean for the air quality in our neighborhoods. We want to reduce vehicle miles traveled. How do these plans respond to the demands from the community for a less car intensive city? The communities that live along the BQE have the highest rates of asthma in all of Brooklyn. How do these proposed plans respond to that? How does this respond to the climate pledges that the state and the city have gotten involved in? And we didn't really have any answers to those questions. So it's frustrating for the powers that be, for the decision makers who are holding these town halls and feel like they just get yelled at. And it's frustrating for the community who feels like we're not speaking the same language and we don't. We're trying to solve different issues. You're trying to solve the problem of how to continue as much throughput as possible on the BQE so everybody can get their goods from Amazon and single occupancy vehicles can drive to their heart's content. But we're trying to solve the problem of how do you have better public health outcomes, how to have better climate outcomes, how to invest in public transit. So it's a little bit of talking at cross purposes.

[E]

Yeah, I want to respond a little bit to what Lara said because I having in my own time done a million meetings, a big panel, a lot of town halls brought in architects and engineers and experts I mean, I think we did try to engage. I think you're raising something, though, that makes this complicated. You're saying, well, we go to these meetings and no one talks about how they're going to add more transit. Well, that's true, because the MTA isn't at the table. And so I think it's a little unfair in some cases to be. I'm mad at the city because they're not explaining how we're going to get more subway service. That's, again, why I sort of feel like you need a commission that's going to bring all those players together. Because to the extent that the community is frustrated that the things that they want to hear about are not in the purview of the agencies, and that was my problem at New York City dot. I didn't control the subways. I don't control freight movements on the water. There are a bunch of things I don't control. You have to demand that the right people are part of the process. And just. It isn't easy to be the official there saying, I'm sorry. I would love to expand the subway system, too, but I also want to make sure the roadway doesn't collapse. And I'm sort of caught between those two. And I don't think there's too much public input. I think it's such a complicated problem. You need that continually. And I agree with Larry. It was a great development, I think, for Brooklyn Heights and the neighboring communities.

[B]

And I don't ask that as an implicit criticism. I was honestly curious.

[E]

I think, again, as I've said about a lot of these, they now have just some governance conflicts, and you need to resolve them. You need the right players. You need an entity that can bring those players together to answer the comprehensive questions that the community has and has some power, after all that input, to make some decisions and has the resources to do it.

[B]

Could any of you imagine in New York City without the bqe?

[D]

I imagine it every day. No, for real. I imagine it every day. I don't pretend or imagine that it would be easy or simple or uncomplicated. But I do think that it's possible. And I think that it's a choice. It is a choice that we can make. We can choose. We can choose to do hard things. Maybe that sounds, you know, facile. I don't. I'm really not a Pollyanna type of person. You can. You can ask my husband, who's here somewhere in the room. I am not a. I am not a. A dreamer. In that grand sense. But having worked on the BQE now for seven or eight years, having investigated what is possible in what has been possible in other cities around the world, having talked with a number of co advocates along the highway, I think it is possible. We just have to choose it. And I 100% agree with the idea that the governance is key and that we need a multi stakeholder effort and absolutely understand the frustration of being asked to solve a problem that is not within your jurisdiction. That's not possible and it's not fair. So we need to bring all these players to the table.

[E]

Yeah. And remember as we started out this discussion, the BQE, it's 150,000 vehicles a day. And there are places famously like the Embarcadero in San Francisco is one, and one could argue to some degree the west side highway right here in Manhattan, where the road came down and the traffic was absorbed pretty easily. I've not really found an expert, for what it's worth, who has told me that they think that volume of vehicles in that particular terrain of Brooklyn and a lot of the other places where the roadways come down, there may be another roadway that could carry some of the volume. So I think that's the debate, and I agree anything is possible. If you go back to the history of the interstate era and remember the bargain was that the Federal government paid 90% of the cost, well, by the way, starving mass transit systems all over the country, including here in New York, and it was an astonishing influx of federal dollars. There's been a bunch of different estimates about what it means in contemporary dollars, but hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. And so just an investment, a federal investment of that side and what it did to, in some ways to tie our country together and produce economic gains, in other ways, destroy parts of cities in lasting ways. But just the sheer magnitude of the investment in federal dollars to me says to do something big like that, and the big dig is the example of that which turned out to be $15 billion project with a big chunk of federal dollars. Part of the answer for these things that were really driven at the federal level and largely paid for by federal dollars is the federal government also needs to be a partner. It's hard even for a city and a state as rich as New York to come up, I think with the kind of resources that would be entirely if you picture the 20 miles of the BQE and those of you who know the city can picture it, to completely deck it over and fix everything and do all those things, it would be a much bigger project even than the Big Dig. And I hope with more, maybe in more politically favorable times, the federal government will want to come to the table again.

[C]

What if we don't have that much time?

[E]

Well, thank goodness I'm not the Commissioner anymore.

[B]

As of now, the City of New York says that the triple cantilever is safe to use until 2029, which would be Zoran Mamdani's final year in office. After that, something will have to change. Next up on the Highway Teardown Tour, we take a road trip across the Empire State to look at two different cities that are doing exactly what Laura has been dreaming about, removing the highway altogether. These are some of the most ambitious projects we'll look at on the entire tour, and they are actually happening right now. So I hope you will join us for that conversation starting in Syracuse, New York. Thank you again to our guests Polly Trottenberg and Laura Bernbach, and of course to our partners at WNYC for this taping, Stephen Nessen, Emily Bottin, Clayton Goose, and Ryan Andrew Wilde. If you want to hear more from Stephen Nessen, I actually taped a whole separate conversation with him specifically about how we tell the stories of these massive infrastructure projects. If you want to hear that conversation, it in the HOV Lane feed. The HOV Lane is our paid membership program. It's a way for you to support everything we do here at the Big Dig and also get early access, or in this case, exclusive access to our content. So if you want to learn more and sign up, go to wgbh.org hovlane and know that your support really, really does mean a lot to us. The Highway Teardown Tour is produced by Fiona Boyd and myself, Ian Coss, with support from Isabel Hibbard. Our editor is Lacey Roberts. The Executive producer is Devin Maverick Robbins. The artwork is by Bill Miller. The Big Dig is a production of GBH News and distributed by prx. See you in Syracuse. I really hope you're enjoying the show and before I let you go, I just want to drop in with that constant podcaster's reminder to please rate the show, leave us a review, subscribe, and of course tell a friend. All that stuff really, really does help us keep the show going. Thank you so much

[E]

from Prime.