BQE Debate Heats Up as Boston’s Big Dig Offers Cautionary Tale for Brooklyn

As New York debates the fate of its aging Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, hard-earned lessons from Boston’s expensive “Big Dig” project loom large for the city’s economic vitality and urban fabric.

Perched atop the triple cantilever beneath Brooklyn Heights, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) groans under a burden its architects could scarcely have envisaged. Built for another era, when car ownership portended progress and elevated highways sliced unchallenged through urban neighborhoods, the BQE now stands sentinel—a decaying symbol of New York’s infrastructural anxieties. In recent years, concerns have given way to action: in 2021, city engineers removed whole lanes and ramped up fines for overweight trucks, red flags that the BQE was buckling in more ways than one.

The fate of this battered 1.5-mile stretch has become the metronome for a broader civic conversation about how cities should respond when major transport arteries age out of usefulness. A milestone report by the City Council in 2020 acknowledged the BQE’s pivotal role in moving people and goods, but also questioned the wisdom of simply patching up the past. Former-mayor Eric Adams floated the idea of not just repairing but widening the road—by a puny 67 percent, no less—before his departure last year. Now, his successor Zohran Mamdani faces a crossroads with an outsized opportunity: to resist the entrenched New York habit of building forever “more” highway.

To see what is at stake, New Yorkers might look north to Boston for both inspiration and caution. The so-called “Big Dig”—an $8 billion (in 2007 dollars) odyssey to bury its Central Artery—remade downtown. Gone was the hulking viaduct that had for decades rent the city’s neighborhoods asunder. Freed land blossomed into parks and construction sites, catalysing $7 billion in local investment and yielding 43,000 new jobs. Urbanists worldwide hailed the cleaner air and air temperatures, and the tedium of highway noise faded from city streets.

Yet the triumph contains the seeds of its undoing. The Big Dig’s planners, in a fit of road-building orthodoxy, expanded the highway from six to eight lanes, and replaced a modest bridge with a 10-lane giant. This widened funnel simply absorbed more traffic, confirming what transport researchers have called “induced demand”: cars, like gases, will fill all available room. Just two years later, Boston reliably ranked among the most congested American cities, with some commutes approaching the Sisyphean.

The warning for New York is obvious, and slightly alarming. Rebuilding—and especially widening—the BQE would not relieve congestion, but merely bake in its worst attributes for another generation. Data from the City’s own analyses forecast that broader roadways would attract more vehicles, undermining stated goals to curb emissions and, paradoxically, worsening traffic mayhem. Meanwhile, budgetary consequences grow: any “Big Dig redux” would likely run well into the billions, tying the hands of a city already squeezed by pandemic aftershocks and labor cost inflation.

Nor are the civic stakes confined to traffic jams and swollen balance sheets. Urban communities bordering the BQE, some long blighted by particulate pollution and noise, stand to benefit or lose much depending on the choices made. Boston’s rekindled waterfront shows how, given enough political will, land previously sacrificed to motorways can be reclaimed for parks, housing, and business. A less car-centric corridor could, in theory, foster healthier air, boost land values (and thus, city coffers), and even help reunite neighborhoods—reversing sins of 20th-century urban planning.

There are, inevitably, trade-offs. The BQE remains a “critical route for the movement of people and goods,” as the City Council noted. Simply removing it would require robust alternatives: rapid-transit upgrades, extra bus capacity, perhaps a light-rail spur or dedicated freight corridors. The risk is not of returning to a prewar Eden, but leaving the city vulnerable to a “Carmageddon” in miniature if commuters lack credible substitutes. Recent experiments elsewhere—San Francisco’s Embarcadero, Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon—show promise, but also complexities. Each required careful choreography between demolition and reinvestment in transit.

New York’s deliberations sit within a wider national rethink of the “urban highway.” Cities from Rochester to Dallas now toy with tearing down, not propping up, their concrete leviathans. Abroad, Paris and Madrid have gone from motorway expansion to motorway removal, betting that cities function better when streets serve people rather than traffic volumes. The difference—often overlooked—is that American car dependence, and hence political pushback, runs deeper. Projects like the “Big Dig” have become both cautionary tales and blueprints, depending on whom you ask.

Lessons from Boston, tailored for Gotham

If Boston demonstrated anything, it is that money alone does not guarantee a happy ending. The Big Dig inspired awe for the sheer scale of its ambition and expense—over $20 billion in today’s dollars by some counts—but failed in its founding rationale: making traffic less dreadful. New York, with its far denser transit spine, can afford to be bolder. Rather than aping Boston’s mixed legacy, Mayor Mamdani’s administration could pioneer a model for restructuring, not expanding, public infrastructure: slicing away overhead sections, filling in scars, and shaping new streetscapes tuned for 21st-century needs.

Political appetite for such a metamorphosis may appear tepid—no mayor relishes controversy about gridlock or the specter of unwelcome change. Yet, as New York’s battered highways age out one by one, incrementalism risks turning into abdication. Merely patching the BQE, let alone inflating it, would portend decades more of environmental harms and sunk costs.

We reckon that the path forward lies less in grandiosity than in nimble adaptation. New Yorkers, notoriously resilient and not averse to change when shown demonstrable benefit, might accept inconvenience if it is coupled with better air, safer streets and more parks. The alternative—ploughing billions into asphalt that guarantees more congestion—should, by now, be anathema.

History suggests New York’s reflex to double down on highways is weakening. That weakening ought not to be reversed in an age of climate-warnings and surging urban populations. The lesson from Boston is clear: sometimes the only way out is forward—not by excavating more tunnels, but by reimagining what a city’s public spaces should serve.

A 21st-century metropolis like New York deserves more than another “Big Dig.” The city has a rare chance to chart a different, wiser course—and other urban giants will be watching. ■