Brooklyn, NY – BQE Tunnel Vision: State Eyes Activist’s Wacky Idea For Fix

Brooklyn, NY – It’s pie in the sky — deep under the heart of Brooklyn.

The crumbling Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is such a traffic-snarled nightmare that state transportation officials are looking at one resident’s wild plan to bore a tunnel from Sunset Park to the Navy Yard.

The 3.5-mile tunnel — devised by a Cobble Hill activist with no engineering background — is one of several pipe-dream ideas that have come from the state Department of Transportation’s effort to include the public in planning the wide-scale makeover of the BQE.

The tunnel would be twice as long as the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, which is the largest underwater vehicular tunnel in North America.

While the department has its own five options for what is currently budgeted as a $254 million BQE makeover — three of which involve digging tunnels roughly underneath the existing roadway — they are required to solicit residents’ ideas as part of the public review process.

Five groups submitted their own ideas for a tunnel at a community meeting a month ago, including the one that would begin as the BQE turns north at Park Avenue, cutting underneath Fort Greene, Boerum Hill, Park Slope and Gowanus, and meeting up with the expressway again at Third Avenue to the south.

“It may be a pipe dream but some tunnel should seriously be on the table as an alternative” to the existing system, said Brooklyn Heights Association Executive Director Judy Stanton.

But she pointed out that the 3.5-mile tunnel plan is “premature.”

The resident who conceived the idea, Roy Sloane, a community board member who runs a Brooklyn advertising agency, said he has “no idea” whether the DOT will give any credence to his plan.

The ideas now have to be studied by the DOT, which will determine if they advance to the next round. Three options will ultimately be considered.

“We’re going to begin screening the alternatives in November, in anticipation of selecting three that will be carried forward into the environmental study that starts early next year,” said DOT spokesman Adam Levine.

Construction on the potentially landscape-altering rehab won’t begin until about 2020.

The agency is considering ways to widen lanes, lengthen ramps and renovate the decrepit roadway between Atlantic Avenue and Sands Street, including the two-level portion that runs under the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade.

The most stunning of the DOT’s plans include three options for tunnels:

* One would begin around Navy Street, with tubes cutting under Hicks Street and Willow Place.

* Another would follow along the BQE’s current footprint, beginning at Navy Street and ending around Kane Street.

* A third would begin slightly north of the current BQE, and eventually plunge into the East River until returning to land around Joralemon Street.