Opinion: The BQE is 75 years old. It’s time to tear it down.

What New Yorker has not experienced the joy of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, a congested 11.7-mile expressway from post-industrial Brooklyn to Queens. The frustration of driving on the BQE is matched only by the frustration of walking under it, a sad rite of passage for those who live along the corridor. The sidewalks beneath the roadway are dark, dirty, and covered in bird droppings. As the BQE passes 75 miles, it is time to tear it down and invest in next-generation infrastructure.

Brooklyn’s Navy Yard neighborhood was once a thriving enclave for immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. But today, it’s a mess of concrete and poorly designed sidewalks. As you walk toward the Manhattan Bridge, there’s an overgrown lot next to an exit ramp for the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. That’s where 31-33-35 Sands Street once stood, buildings that belonged to my great-grandparents, Pietro and Rosolina Tomao. Like thousands of other immigrant families, they were displaced to build Robert Moses’ concrete dreams—people replaced by highways, a vital legacy of New York’s car-based transportation system.

In 1947, a series of lawsuits were held in New York City in which homeowners along the proposed BQE route challenged Moses’s appraisals of their homes. The city attorney argued that Pietro, my great-grandfather, lacked the construction expertise to do much of the work he claimed he had done. My great-grandfather had invested thousands of dollars in the Sands Street properties, but the city refused to take those improvements into account when assessing the value of the home.

“I do anything. When you’re a worker, you do everything,” Pietro said, according to a digitized transcript of the hearing. After a lengthy exchange, the city attorney grew frustrated: “Your Honor can see from the witness that he doesn’t know the English language very well.” The court ruled in favor of the city.

The same was true for many other immigrant homeowners and business owners in the neighborhood. Their land was expropriated at low prices, and neighborhoods were forced to build highways for private vehicles. The city’s priorities were clear: evict residents as quickly as possible, for as little money as possible. In total, 250,000 New Yorkers were displaced under Moses.

By canceling congestion pricing, policymakers are cementing Moses’ legacy of displacement and transportation inequality, freezing New York’s transportation in time. Congestion pricing would have expanded transit into outer boroughs, reduced the number of vehicles entering Manhattan by 17 percent, and reduced the need for outdated infrastructure like the BQE. MTA projects like the Interborough Express, connecting southern Brooklyn to Queens, are likely shelved indefinitely.

Despite the unprecedented resources of the federal infrastructure bill to eliminate urban renewal-era highways, New York City spends 90 percent of its federal budget on road infrastructure. Mayor Eric Adams has even proposed expanding the BQE or perhaps rebuilding it, effectively reversing the course of New York City transportation policy. Lawmakers have forgotten that the long arm of transportation inequality has resonated for decades. In 1956, six Williamsburg children were killed while playing near a BQE construction site when excavation sandbars collapsed on them. A New York Times article covering the deaths noted that “the highway’s route runs through a densely populated residential area[that]is teeming with children.” Angry residents planned to protest the construction site “to emphasize that if there had been playgrounds and parks in the area, the deaths could have been avoided.” What was clear in 1956 remains clear today: New York City needs to focus on people, not cars. Of New York City’s 51 council districts, the neighborhoods that border the BQE often rank the lowest in environmental, health, and mobility terms. District 33, which encompasses Williamsburg and Greenpoint, is the seventh-most polluted of the city’s 51 council districts. The 38th District, anchored by Sunset Park, has the eighth-largest permeable area in the city and ranks last in bus lanes, with exactly zero. These outcomes are deeply rooted in the creation of the BQE itself.

For 80 years, New York’s urban planning policy has emphasized traffic congestion over livable communities. Freeways have decimated dozens of New York City neighborhoods, from the Bronx to Brooklyn. That’s the central lesson of the BQE: Freeways don’t create communities, people do. My family’s displacement shows just one of the costs of this ideology. Even today, we’re paying the price for the era of freeway clearance in shoddy transit, pollution, and growing inequality. Maintaining the status quo isn’t worth it. Building a transportation system that puts people, not cars, at the center means replacing the BQE with transit.