The B.Q.E. Wasn’t Built for Delivery Trucks. Its Cracks Are Showing.

The city’s ferry service, which essentially shuts down at 10 p.m., could be deployed overnight, for example, to move packages, which would then be deposited at waterfront hubs and picked up by delivery people via mobile bins or cargo bikes.

While alternatives like this seem to excite officials at the conceptual level, they remain terminally slow to materialize. Some of this has to do with maddening issues around jurisdiction: cargo bikes, for example, are subject to size restrictions governed by the state, meaning that new legislation is required to put them toward any significant commercial application. 

The use of sensors to automatically ticket trucks in violation of weight limits — thousands of them passing through the B.Q.E. surpass the legal size — now seems closer to reality. Nevertheless, it has taken years after considerable structural damage to the highway, both the result of historically inadequate enforcement and the dangerous corrosion that comes from the mix of salt, water, concrete and rebar. Until Mr. Gutman ended the practice in 2021, salt had been applied to the B.Q.E. for 70 years, nearly every time it snowed. Waterproofing the cantilever would help, but that hasn’t happened yet either.

Since last fall, the Adams administration has devoted considerable energy to engaging Brooklyn communities adjacent to the B.Q.E. about its future, including those to the north and south of the cantilever, previously left out of the conversation and where in many cases asthma rates are quite high. In one sense, the B.Q.E. is its own leveler, blighting the lives of wealthy people in townhouses and less wealthy people in public housing, giving the city an opportunity, should it exercise it, to unite the communities Robert Moses sought to divide.

The Department of Transportation has already held more than 20 meetings with community groups and offered a dizzying number of proposals and conceits for a reimagined B.Q.E. that are often accompanied by pretty renderings of green space — “what architects call eyewash,” Michael Canter, himself an architect, told me. Proposals can be complex, difficult for laymen to understand and leave participants in these meetings feeling frustrated and confused.