How Battery Park City Authority Increased Costs of West Side Highway Tunnel

  

Textbook 101 case study of the elites' disrespect for civil infrastructure planning and design.

 

People opposed Robert Moses idea of modernizing the elevated West Side Highway.

 

People demanded a tunnel expressway replacement, within new rectangular box tunnels buried along the shoreline.  The World Trade Center project created an enormous amount of excavated material.  Hence its logical use for the initial phase of a planned landfill extension of western shoreline of Manhattan Island, south of 29th Street.  The tunnel would thus use the innermost strip of this new landfill.

 

 

Here are the initial planning, from the 1966 Lower Manhattan Study, showing this new rectangular box tunnel within the innermost portion of its new WTC-BPC landfill, before turning inland to parallel the existing bulkhead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note the improved geometry for the West Side Highway link with the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.

 

Note the space of the new landfill used for the new expressway tunnel, that bypasses West Street, avoiding a need to excavate while maintaining Brooklyn Battery Tunnel approach traffic.

 

Battery Park City Authority, established 1968 dictates ban on using any part if its landfill for expressway tunnel, mandating its relocation to within West Street- thus requiring an excavation with potential underground utility matters, while denying the improved geometry for the ramps into the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.

 

Such an excavation, together with the issues of underground utilities, made the southernmost portion of the future underground WSH more expensive to construct.  How much?  $300 million?  $600 million? $850 million?  Strange how we saw so little attention to this.

Where was any protest movement against the plans for the World Financial Center, and the other B.P.C. buildings facing inland?  Any demands to modify the plans to shift the eastern facing building line west to preserve the underground easement for a future West Side Highway Tunnel

 The 1974-1985 Westway project would be routinely bashed by supposed "fiscal conservatives" out to block wasteful government spending.

 

So, at anytime from 1968 onwards, where were the great protests about the BPCA blocking the use of its innermost landfill, by the multitude of "fiscal conservatives" that we subsequently saw bash the Westway project?