By: Brendan Spiegel

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) is a vital route that thousands of drivers rely on each day. For years, community members and city leaders have discussed how to rehabilitate the highway. Now the city is preparing to move ahead with this ambitious project. So how do you rebuild an essential highway while keeping it open for traffic? In short, it takes a lot of careful planning and years of specialized work.

In 2029, repairs are expected to begin on BQE Central, the section of the BQE that curves through Brooklyn Heights and Downtown Brooklyn. It’s best known for its unique “triple cantilever” design, which stacks two levels of highway and a park on top of each other. Originally built in the 1950s, BQE Central was designed to support about 50,000 vehicles each day but now carries 130,000. Repairs over the years have kept the structure running safely as the city prepares for a more substantial rehabilitation. The NYC Department of Transportation expects this new project, which will take roughly a decade to complete, to extend BQE Central’s lifespan for another 40 years.

Although it’s not finalized, graphics released by the DOT show the city’s current plan: Workers will first build a temporary double-decker bypass highway to handle all of BQE Central’s normal traffic. The bypass will stand mostly level with the existing structure, while the current design also shows a Queens-bound bypass traveling over the existing BQE and the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. Once traffic is diverted to these bypass roads, repairs will begin on the existing highway.

“It needs to be done, but it's a very ambitious project,” said Adam Harkin, Vice-President of the New York City District Council of Carpenters. “It's a tremendous project and quite frankly an engineering marvel.”

Looking at previous highway repairs may give us a preview of the actual work that the BQE project will involve. According to both Harkin and Robert Hutzler, General Superintendent at heavy construction contractor Posillico, building this temporary highway will mainly involve three groups of carpenters: dockbuilders, timbermen, and heavy highway carpenters.

First, the dockbuilders will install temporary shoring, driving or drilling piles into the ground to support the new bypass road. Next, if there are any utilities within BQE Central’s roads—for example, power cables or sewer lines—timbermen need to relocate those to the bypass or replicate them. Heavy highway carpenters will then handle, in Harkin’s words, “bridge deck construction, temporary structural systems, and access and staging.” And once the repairs are done, all three groups will safely dismantle the bypass.

Building the bypass itself may actually be the most challenging part of the project.

“You have to be able to build enough superstructures underneath the bridges to sustain the weight of traffic,” said Carpenters Representative Shaun Murphy. “And that goes from 18-wheelers down to motorcycles.”

The plan to mimic BQE Central’s double-decker layout means that the bottom level will also have to sustain the weight of the upper level. Workers will build this while keeping traffic moving through Brooklyn’s tightly packed streets and the rest of the BQE.

Building a bypass both allows traffic to flow more smoothly while repairs are underway, and helps protect workers from passing vehicles.

Murphy said that the difficulty of the work is exactly why New York’s union carpenters and contractors are best-suited for the job, pointing to the extensive training union carpenters go through.

“The trade unions as a whole, and the carpenters specifically, are the most skilled, best-trained workforce in the United States,” Harkin said. He added that “When this goes ahead, it has real potential to be a major bridging, structural, concrete formwork, shoring, and foundation project all rolled into one.”

For Brooklyn’s residents and the drivers who rely on BQE Central, the rehabilitation will keep an essential route operating for decades to come.

“Whenever you see a road being worked on,” said Murphy, “you don’t see the amount of work that goes into it. We don't know how long or late these guys are working in the snow, or the rain, or the freezing cold…the amount of concrete, the amount of rebar, the amount of actual heavy lifting that went into completing this project.”