New York City transportation officials unveiled the latest set of plans for the under the Big Apple’s control. In addition to connecting the Brooklyn Promenade above the roadway with Brooklyn Bridge Park below, the city is proposing what it hopes will be seen as a simple and elegant design: a thinner stack of roadways under the Brooklyn promenade. Presently, the triple cantilever structure that skirts the edge of Brooklyn heights is staggered, with the Staten Island-bound lanes leaning out further from the promenade than the Queens-bound lanes above.
The new structure would tuck the Staten Island-bound lanes directly beneath the Queens-bound ones, while allowing for the wider lanes required by modern federal highway safety standards. “It’s a real engineering challenge,” Meera Joshi, the city’s deputy mayor for operations, said in a press briefing. “There are numerous physical infrastructure challenges — there’s [Department of Environmental Protection] sewer lines that run underneath, MTA infrastructure, and obviously you’re doing construction in the eye of the needle because you’re sandwiched in between a beautiful promenade and a beautiful park,” she said.
The road, which sees 130,000 vehicles — including 15,000 trucks — daily, has been . “It is safe,” Joshi said of the triple-cantilever. “It is the most highly monitored piece of bridge infrastructure we have in the city [and] we’ve done a lot of interim work on it.
” In order to stack the .
