Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Everyone knows the BQE is in need of a fix. Especially that one and a half mile stretch that runs under the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights. That's the triple cantilever as they call it, with a highway running above ground and the Brooklyn Promenade on top. That piece of the highway, the state made the city responsible for, the rest remains the state's responsibility.

So far, there have been many ideas for how to rebuild the cantilever without losing that roadway entirely, and traffic has been restricted to two down from three-lanes each way, buying a little more time. There are now three proposals still under consideration by the transportation department, each of which would better connect the promenade to the waterfront. A recent panel at the Center for Architecture asked if we're on the right track, so to speak.

We're joined now by three of the experts who gathered for the discussion titled the The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at 75: A Crisis in Context. We're very happy to have Allen Swerdlowe, architect and fellow of the American Institute of Architects, specialist at the Fulbright Foundation and Founding Trustee of Brooklyn Bridge Park, or he helped organize the panel.

Sam Schwartz, former longtime Gridlock Sam Columnist at the Daily News, Former New York City Traffic Commissioner, President and CEO of Sam Schwartz Engineering a Transportation and Planning and engineering firm and author of the book, No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future and Michael Kimmelman, Architecture Critic for the New York Times and the author of the The Intimate City: Walking New York. Thank you all for joining us this morning. Welcome and welcome back, in some cases, to WNYC.

Panel: Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: Allen, let's start with the framing as a crisis in context, as I think the event put it, what's the nature of the crisis? Why call it a crisis rather than an annoyance?

Allen Swerdlowe: It's a crisis for a number of reasons. First of all, we're looking at a potentially imminent collapse of a highway. Just to put that in context, in 1973 the West Side Highway collapsed. Several cars and trucks went through the highway. Nobody was killed thank God. Over the next 10 years, the highway was removed. In this case, we're talking about a major piece of the interstate system.

Several mile long connector of the interstate system. If this happens to the BQE, we're talking about significant economic and potentially human tragedy. Maybe it's the only thing that will spur the authorities in charge of this to do something. If you look at the condition of the BQE right now, it's falling concrete, rebar is exposed, it hasn't been maintained for 30 to 40 years, especially in the central area.

Now, the more important issue is a visionary issue. The BQE is a kind Robert Rose's style highway built in the '30s and '40s. It divides communities along its 15 mile length from LaGuardia Airport of Arizona, Narrow Bridge. At that time the waterfront was not considered a place to go. It was industrial, it was polluted, basically devoted to maritime uses. That went away in the 1960s and we started to rethink what the waterfront could be.

The problem though was you had this noose around the neck of Brooklyn and Queens creating a literal barrier in some places between the urban areas and their waterfront. Just one final thing is that we don't have to invent anything here. Communities around the world have had the same kinds of infrastructural problems, many of which have removed their infrastructure and replaced the infrastructure with tunnels, green spaces, pedestrian areas and significantly improved the quality of life.

Brian Lehrer: Michael Kimmelman, if Allen just established that it is legitimately a crisis facing the BQE and the communities around the BQE, I think it was Churchill who was credited with saying, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." I'm guessing it's your role here to urge us to make the plans such that the city is more livable at the end, right?

Michael Kimmelman: Absolutely. I'm happy to play that role and I think all three of us feel the same way about that, too. It is a crisis and it is an opportunity. Allen mentioned the collapse of the West Side Highway when I think Sam was working for the city and understood the extent of that calamity, that did ultimately produce some pretty drastic changes along the West Side.

I think we could go back over that history. This might not be the occasion, but it's not new that we are sometimes paralyzed, that we wait too long, that tragedy happens before we've taken action. I think in this case, a lot of the focus around the BQE has been along this stretch that Allen's talking about, along Brooklyn Heights.

There is an opportunity now to think through the whole BQE. Allen talked about making connections, the city has lately under Mayor Adams been talking more about how to think about the sections north and south of this area through Brooklyn Heights, the wealthiest and most privileged part of the stretch that the BQE runs through.

I'm hoping that what happens out of this is that we can address the immediate crisis and deal with the opportunity as Allen says, "To reconnect the waterfront with this neighborhood and other neighborhoods throughout the BQE." That we also don't get hung up only focusing on this little part of the BQE, because that would be not just a missed opportunity, but a huge question of inequitable redevelopment.

Brian Lehrer: Michael, do you think that whatever conclusion the policy makers come to, that New York has a harder time than other places doing long-term planning and actually implementing it?

Michael Kimmelman: Yes, I do. I think it's become worse and worse. I'm very concerned, actually, about the ways in which the city has increasingly become a place that's really good at saying no, in which we've perfected obstruction. We've weaponized environmental legislation and community engagement, which was progressive legislation created to allow people to participate in a process and to ensure good environmental outcomes.

Now often what happens is we can't get anything done, anything at scale. Think about even the BQE, in many ways it's an absolutely essential artery in the city and it's also a much loathed project, but it's also a massive project. Between whatever 1947 and '64, we were committed to this. It's almost 30 years to doing a big piece of infrastructure. This was the same time the city was building Bristow, building bridges.

Now you know there are fights over a bike lane that take 10 years. This is really a very unhealthy environment now in the city. It jeopardizes us. I'm sure Sam can talk about this in ways that people may not realize. If you go back to these periods like the '60s and '70s and early '80s when much of the infrastructure of the city was collapsing, this was a time of economic hardship and real failure of government in the city. I fear in some ways we are amnesiac.

Brian Lehrer: Sam Schwartz, for you who actually has had the position of City Traffic Commissioner and being a traffic [unintelligible 00:08:46] generally with your column Gridlock Sam. The last conversation we had on the show about the BQE was largely focused on whether to keep it at two-lanes each way or going back to three.

You've spoken before about how reducing capacity does not necessarily lead to more traffic congestion. In other words, there isn't necessarily more traffic, slower traffic, more crowding on a two-lane highway versus a three-lane highway, to a lot of people that will sound counterintuitive. Does history really tell us that's the case?

Sam Schwartz: Absolutely. History in New York City tells us the case. I was one of the engineers at the collapse of the West Side Highway in 1973. Two years later with a loss of an enormous amount of capacity, more people came into the central business district without the highway than before the highway. They came in by other means, and some of the traffic disappeared. The other factor here is that the BQE at three-lanes, it's three lousy lanes, you have a stop sign at Atlantic Avenue. This is before the conversion to the two-lane option over there. Three lousy lanes equals two good lanes.

The city should make this decision immediately because making it three lanes in each direction means a tougher problem to solve and probably intrusion into Brooklyn Bridge Park. I want to add that this has been 16 years now that the state and then the city is working on this. If dreams and then ideas and concepts were concrete, we'd already have a wonderful BQE, but we have nothing but the dreams and the ideas, make a decision now, proceed.

Not everybody will be happy, they never are in New York, but as Allen pointed out, concrete is already falling from the structure. There have been some punch-throughs of the deck, the prognosis, and I was the engineer in the 1980s who saw 15 people die in bridge collapses in New York and Connecticut. This is quite serious. That urgency couldn't be overstated.

Brian Lehrer: Allen, back to you as the architect in the room. You did a study in 1997, I see, way back then that recommended scrapping the above-ground highway altogether and replacing it with a tunnel. The city council considered that as an alternative pretty recently in 2020. I don't think I see this so much on the table right now. Do you see a tunnel as the best alternative? Maybe you want to talk about its advantages?

Allen Swerdlowe: The tunnel basically removes traffic from the surface, removes the artery, and allows all of these communities to be knit back together. The state VOT study, my study then at Pratt when I was teaching there and reviewed it in context of its economic benefits, found it to be beneficial, and then never came back to the table. Again, with my study lease, they came back to the table in 2011, 2016 or 2020. All of those studies recommended the use of a tunnel.

Now, what does a tunnel do? We don't have to look that far away. We can look to Boston. Boston created the Boston artery. It was rioted, cost $16.9 billion. It created incredibly high level of quality of life in central Boston. It brought most of its traffic underground, and it brought back hundreds of billions of dollars in economic benefits. Now, we don't talk about that anymore. As we speak Seattle was taken down their Alaskan Way. It's 2.1 miles of a highway that vaguely looks like the old BQE, but actually more, in fact looks like the proposed new BQE.

They've taken it down. They replaced it with a tunnel, and they're in the process of reconnecting their waterfront with Seattle proper. My favorite, I can go on and on with hundreds of examples, but my favorite is in Little Osler, Norway, where they had a 30 to 40-year plan to actually connect the waterfront with its city which it was disconnected by highways and other kinds of infrastructure, create miles of pedestrian paths and cultural institutions.

We all know the Oslo Opera House, the new Moot Museum, and other cultural facilities sit on top of that tunnel. There is no traffic at the waterfront. It set the path for congestion pricing. In the opposite of what New York is trying to do, which is do congestion pricing first, maybe get some financial benefits from that and maybe do something good for the communities around it. Oslo said, look we have to invest in all of these benefits, reconnect to the waterfront, make this a livable city, and then we'll do congestion pricing, which is what they've done. Last year, 83% of vehicles registered in Norway were electric.

Brian Lehrer: Michael Kimmelman, on your frustration with how difficult it is to get things like this done in New York, does it take a bully like Robert Moses, if we can characterize him that way, to get things done? In fact, I think the triple cantilever of the BQE was the result of pushback from the neighborhood against Moses in the first place, wasn't it?

Michael Kimmelman: Yes, it's actually a question I once asked Robert Caro after Hurricane Sandy, do we need somebody like Moses again? Of course, as Caro rightly pointed out, what you want is the young Moses building all of those parks and public benefits and not the old Moses driving highways through communities in the Bronx. It is definitely the case, I think, that we do need leadership. One of the things that's going on here, we haven't talked about it yet, but it's the fact that you mentioned it, Brian, that the state essentially dumped the BQE's most difficult problem on the city.

You have lies in many parts of New York, these complicated jurisdictional problems where we have the city and the state and often lots of different agencies and they can't talk to each other or they're competing. Things get tied up. It's the same thing around Penn Station. In the case of what you're mentioning in this case, actually, Moses was, I think, at his most clever, if I understand what actually happened, which is that he'd started to build a BQE, was running it during the section along Hick Street, where it's depressed, a buried highway.

People in wealthy Brooklyn Heights were looking at that, coming up all the way through their neighborhood and started to protest. Moses, I'm not sure actually ever really intended to drive it through Hick Street in the middle of Brooklyn Heights. There's some evidence that he'd always wanted to put it on Furman Street, the street that runs between the waterfront and Columbia Heights, that part of Brooklyn Heights. Essentially he strategically allowed Brooklyn Heights to believe that it had won the battle with Moses.

He ended up building what we have now, which is actually one of the most amazing and beautiful accomplishments of infrastructure in New York City with that promenade, beautiful example of architecture and engineering. I'll say one other thing about it, the cost of that was so high, and because there had not been enough money put aside for the entire project that in the end, playgrounds and parks that had been promised to poorer sections of Brooklyn through which the BQE ran never got those playgrounds and parks.

That's an interesting example historically for me too. We need to think holistically about the BQE if we're really going to talk about how to improve Brooklyn, see this as an opportunity and think equitably about the future.

I think Allen's point about the tunnel is very interesting because when you have a very shortsighted view of things, the costs of it can seem just daunting. The Big Dig in Boston is often held up as an example of profligacy run rampant. In fact, if one looks over long-term investments and returns for cities, Allen's right, that in most cases, in many cities around the world, these large investments, even when prices go much higher than had been anticipated, end up earning back that in all sorts of ways, not just monetarily but socially, physically.

Brian Lehrer: Sam Schwartz, I'll give you the last word and to set it up, we're actually going to play a clip of Robert Moses from 1959. This is from an interview with Landscape Architect Gilmore Clarke on NBC, and listen to how he talks about the political majority versus minority in architectural planning.

Robert Moses: I can say as a generalization that there is no big program of any kind, no physical program, whether it's parks or highways or bridges or whatever it may be that doesn't start with an enthusiastic minority. Now if you're unhappy in a minority, and most people are in this country, you don't go any further. You assume that if you're in a minority, you must be wrong. Because that's the democratic process. In any event, most people feel uncomfortable in a minority. Some of us don't. I never felt that way about it because all big programs start with minorities who become majorities in the end.

Brian Lehrer: Sam Schwartz, last 30 seconds. Who gets to decide? Majorities or minorities?

Sam Schwartz: I think the mayor has to make a decision here. The state has turned it over. You do need a champion to make this happen, and you have to make it happen fast. Tunneling, while very nice, and I've been involved in building some tunnels, I think that time has passed. We've got to come up with something that keeps the BQE up. It is the only expressway through Brooklyn, and we are really at risk in the very near future.

Brian Lehrer: Sam Schwartz, Allen Swerdlowe, Michael Kimmelman, thank you so much for having this conversation.

Sam Schwartz: Thank you.

Allen Swerdlowe: Thank you, Brian.

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