"New York is among the big cities around the country grappling with a crumbling problem: What to do with highways built more than a half-century ago? These cities face a stark choice - tear them down or replace them. Detroit, Seattle, New Orleans, Baltimore and New York all feature highways built between the 1950s and 1970s, when traffic planners sought to make it easier for drivers to get from the suburbs to city centers."
"None may be as pressing at the 0.4-mile section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway known as the triple cantilever. The section along the Brooklyn Heights waterfront was once considered an architectural marvel. Now, it's being shored up with short-term fixes while the city figures out what to do next. "Something has to be done, right? Doing nothing is not an option," said Ian Coss, the creator of the " Big Dig" podcast about Boston's notorious project to tear down an elevated highway downtown."
Many large U.S. cities face aging mid-20th-century highway structures that require major decisions: demolition, replacement, or extensive repair. A 0.4-mile triple-cantilever segment of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway along the Brooklyn Heights waterfront is structurally precarious and currently receiving short-term shoring while long-term options are evaluated. Boston's Big Dig serves as a cautionary precedent, having taken two decades and nearly $15 billion and prompting other cities to avoid similarly disruptive, expensive projects. Local officials and planners must weigh engineering complexity, cost, disruption, and political risk when choosing a path forward for such critical urban infrastructure.
Read at Gothamist
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