George Wirt/Shutterstock Add Jalopnik on Google: Google Discover The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, New York City's section of Interstate 278, is a major artery for trucks to ferry freight between Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens. It's also crumbling. The city-owned triple-cantilever section, built under Robert Moses, was never meant to last this long or support the weight of modern vehicles. Prior city administrations have all but left the decaying infrastructure to its own devices, limiting traffic across it while doing little else to address the core problems, but the Mamdani administration has a solution: It will spend $4 billion across 10 years to rehabilitate the triple-cantilever entirely. Out of every possible solution proposed for the problem that is the BQE, this is the least innovative and probably one of the worst. Out of all proposed solutions that are in any way realistic, however, this is likely the best that we New Yorkers could have hoped for. The snooty residents of Brooklyn Heights get to keep their precious promenade, folks in Staten Island and Queens still get their goods trucked in, and people in Cobble Hill and Downtown Brooklyn don't have to deal with increased trucking traffic on their small side roads. A long-term problem We're done kicking the can down the road. Here's how we're fixing the city-owned section of the BQE.— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@mayor.nyc.gov) 2026-08-24T11:38:11.649Z The Mamdani administration's plan rehabilitates "BQE Central," the 1.5-mile stretch of the highway that's actually owned by the city itself. This includes the triple cantilever, the source of so much frustration with the road — and the source of most of its terrible traffic. The $4 billion project will redirect traffic to the side of the cantilever, to a temporary road built atop Furman Street alongside Brooklyn Bridge Park, while the city works to "repair and strengthen" the decaying structure. The New York Post, with its typical ire towards all things Mamdani, claims the plan is largely taken from an earlier De Blasio attempt to address the cantilever. While the unique and novel idea of "fixing the broken thing" is certainly shared with that earlier effort, the Mamdani plan evades the De Blasio sticking point — that earlier plan would have redirected traffic onto the cantilever's top layer, a park called the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which the area's residents stood fiercely against. Not a revolutionary solution George Wirt/Shutterstock Local micromobility enthusiasts and fans of urban planning have derided the plan for its lack of innovation. They see the failure of the triple cantilever as fallout of a larger issue: The city's dependency on trucking for moving freight around, despite our limited road space. They're right in spirit, but the triple cantilever is a sort of New York City original sin. It's been so integral to shipping for so long that we've long lost the political will to dig new tunnels or construct freight rail lines. The Cross Harbor Freight Tunnel, an idea that's been kicking around for over 100 years, is simply not happening within the next decade. The Mamdani administration's solution to the BQE is expensive, time-consuming, and doesn't address the fundamental issues with freight infrastructure that led us down this path in the first place. It's also likely the best option that's politically and economically viable, and it solves an issue that costs the city hundreds of millions of dollars each year — and prevents a complete collapse of the crumbling highway, which could cost a lot more than mere dollars.