The Brooklyn Queens Expressway

How Do You Know When a Highway Has Jumped the Shark?

I received my driver’s license in the winter of my 17th year.  I was still living at home in Queens, but had just started dating a girl from my high school who lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (we have been together ever since, surely the subject of a more meaningful and longer future essay – love you, baby doll!).  Driving the family car—a 1984 Pontiac Phoenix—back and forth between Brooklyn and Queens, I was essentially forced to learn to drive on what was at the time a ramshackle dilapidated husk of an inner city highway called the BQE, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. 

Today, I’m proud to report that, over 30 years later, the BQE is… a million times worse.  Wait.  Did I say “proud?”  I mean saddened.  Horrified, in fact.  Completely horrified. There’s no hope for any of us.   

You see, after my baby doll and I got married and decided to live in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the rest of my family, and many of my friends, still lived in Queens.  And still do.  That means that, for my entire adult life, I have been driving on the BQE—there or back—like Prometheus getting his liver eaten every day by an eagle.  Ca Caw!

The distance between zip code 11209 (Bay Ridge, Brooklyn) and 11379 (Middle Village, Queens) is 15.5 miles.  The distance between the Earth and the Moon is 238,900 miles.  I’m not saying that these trips are comparable, but let’s just say Ed Harris pumps his fist in triumph every time I make it to my destination.       

Somewhere in the middle of my adult life, for a period of about three years I had a job in Whitestone, Queens, so I would find myself on the BQE every day during rush hour.  Did you know that it is possible to scream at the top of your lungs that a highway can “go fuck itself in the ass?”  Drivers in traffic say the Darndest Things. 

But alas, those halcyon days of merely levying profanity-laced rants at an inanimate roadway are over.  In recent months that base level of frustration has been replaced with a pot of boiling rage, but at least now there is some human consciousness on the other end of the anger.  I will explain.     

Right smack in the middle of the BQE there is a section called the Triple Cantilever, which is that part of the BQE where you ride along the side of a stone wall with the best views of downtown Manhattan right across the East River.  There is always heavy traffic approaching this section of the highway, from both sides, because you may notice that the highway—which generally runs in three lanes in each direction—at that part narrows to two lanes in each direction.  The background story is that that this section of the BQE is pretty close to crumbling down, and has been for years, so public officials have committed to replacing that section with a non-crumbling version of the same highway.  In the meantime, and for the last two years, what was always three lanes has been reduced to two lanes, and they divert the traffic so that those two lanes run as close to the stone retaining wall as possible.  It’s the same thing as making sure your kids ride their matchbox cars as close to one side of the Lego city to make sure it all doesn’t break apart.  So far this all makes sense, as I don’t want to end up in the East River while driving to Grandma’s house.    

To recap, from the starting point of a structurally suspect highway with too many cars on it, there is now an intentional bottleneck that adds at least an extra 15 minutes of traffic in each direction. So, for example, last month, my family piled into the family SUV to visit Grandma and take her out for Mother’s Day.  It took us 1 hour and 35 minutes to travel those 15 miles, which is pretty much par for the course.  Or, as they say at Disney World, 95 minutes.  By the way, Walt Disney can go fuck himself for that bullshit. 

I can guarantee as a matter of mathematical and scientific certainty that I will be dead by the time that section of the BQE is fully replaced.  I can also guarantee as a matter of mathematical and scientific certainty – times one million – that I will be very an-gry in the interim. 

I’m not mad because the highway is crumbling down and therefore reasonable but inconvenient measures need to be taken to avoid catastrophe.  I’m mad because… and I almost can’t get the words out.  I’m mad because there is a cadre of influential New York City politicians who have been loudly pushing for the new and improved section of the BQE, whenever that is posthumously completed, to remain at two lanes in each direction.  Even though it will no longer be in danger of collapsing, even though they can build it however they want, they just want it to be narrower.  Forever.

What.  The.  Fuck.

“How on earth can they take this position?,” one might ask. The first answer is because they don’t like the BQE.  For example, City Councilman Lincoln Restler, who will be played by Patton Oswalt in his future biopic, says that the BQE from the day it was constructed has displaced and separated low income communities and, because of the traffic, is bad for the already compromised health of many of his constituents.  Okay, even if you agree with this, do you know what makes that problem much much worse?  When the cars and trucks go really really slow up top and then get off the BQE because they can’t go forward anymore and therefore drive through and clog the streets in those same communities.  And by the way, it is also very bad for the health of me, as well as anyone else, rich or poor, black or white, who needs to drive literally anywhere.   

Yes, many of these politicians hate the BQE because there is apparently a lot of racist baggage from the time the city planner Robert Moses built all the highways across the city.  Robert Moses was a bad guy, it seems.  I’m certainly not going to read the 1300 page The Power Broker to get the complete picture, however, which is a book most people purchase solely for the purpose of appearing serious.  As I have no interest in appearing serious, because I am not, I do not own that book.    

As much as I genuinely appreciate personal hatred for an inanimate object, and believe me, I loathe the BQE from the street as well as from the highway, right now the issue at hand is not whether we should tear down the BQE, the issue is whether that particular section of the BQE, once rebuilt, will go back to being three lanes or not. 

Here is the non-ideological argument from New York Magazine for why some believe it should be permanently reduced to two lanes.    

It’s well known — except, it seems, among highway-happy politicians — that widening a congested road creates a wider, equally congested road. The more lanes you build, the more they fill up. The converse is true, too.  A landmark 2002 article by a group of British researchers (Sally Cairns, Stephen Atkins, and Phil Goodwin), called “Disappearing Traffic: The Story So Far,” documented what happens when urban roads go away: so do drivers. That conclusion has been confirmed many times, and it’s not really a mystery. Traffic, like water, flows where it can, filling up available channels until it’s diverted into other routes or drivers decide they’d rather walk or take the subway.  

Here is the problem with that logic applied here, even if the underpinnings are true in other contexts.  If the “converse is true, too,” namely that if you reduce or narrow roadways, the “drivers go away,” clearly this has NOT happened on the BQE!  Not even close. We as a society have the benefit of several years of hard data on what happens when you narrow that section of the highway from three to two lanes: it creates a fuckload of permanent traffic.  Traffic that has not only not gone away, it’s only gotten worse. 

How do I know it’s gotten worse?  It also happens to be the same answer to the opening question of “how do you know when a highway has jumped the shark?”  

Last week, I once again coerced my family into the car for a social function, this time to go to a graduation party.  Where was the graduation party?  Well, Middle Village, Queens, of course, zip code 11379, 15.5 miles away.  As we sat stranded in the intentionally-inflicted traffic leading up to the narrowing of the highway, we all noticed a human figure on the side of the highway.  Was it a ghost?  A vagrant?  A person experiencing being-on-the-fucking-highway-ness?

Nope.  It was a woman selling mangoes.  Not on an off-ramp with a traffic light at the end, mind you, but in the MIDDLE OF THE HIGHWAY.  And let me tell you, they were selling like hotcakes.  Apparently, the secret way to warm a suicidal motorist’s heart is with fresh fruit.  Does Lincoln Restler own stock in the mango operation? At least that would make sense.     

In eight years when they finish fixing the triple cantilever section of the BQE and I’m long dead, I fully expect there to be a line of small shops lining each side of the BQE, selling not only mangoes, of course, but maybe offering other artisanal wares and trinkets and even massages and piercings.  Like mall kiosks.  Because I assure you the cars are not going anywhere.    

Given the current state of affairs, as well as my existential pessimism that this will get better in my lifetime, I’m afraid now might finally be the time.  I know it’s difficult, but sorry, mom. I know you might live another 25 years, and I sincerely hope you do, but now is probably the best time to say goodbye.  I’m just not driving to Queens anymore.   

Unless of course I have a sudden craving for mangoes.

CORRECTION – this post inadvertently refers to the referenced politicians as displaying “human consciousness.”  After reviewing the details, that is clearly not the case.