Build a Cross Brooklyn Tunnel

From NYCROADS
by Steve Anderson

Of all the boroughs in New York City, Brooklyn is the least served in limited-access highway mileage vis-à-vis population. Sometime in the future, the Cross Brooklyn Expressway proposal may be resurrected as an Interstate corridor for use by passenger cars and commercial traffic. The new Cross Brooklyn Expressway should utilize the right-of-way along Conduit Boulevard, Linden Boulevard and the LIRR Bay Ridge branch to the Gowanus Expressway (I-278). This project should be done in conjunction with the conversion (and completion) of the Nassau Expressway into a controlled-access facility, and possibly be integrated with the long-proposed plan for a rail tunnel between Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and Bayonne, New Jersey. Strong consideration should be given to its construction as a tunnel facility. (The Saunders-Herrenknecht proposal for the Tappan Zee and Oyster Bay-Rye tunnels, which calls for dual-level tunnels for vehicular and rail traffic, may serve as a model.)

Adopted from misc.transport.road

If New York City planning were more comprehensive with pursuing environmentally advanced designs for projects combining highways and rail, the discussion for this much needed Cross Bay Rail Tunnel to Brooklyn would include a vehicular link to New Jersey, with an eastern extension across Brooklyn to Kennedy Airport.

Like the Cross Brooklyn Expressway proposals of the 1960's, this would employ the right of way of the LIRR freight tracks. Unlike these earlier proposals, this new highway would be designed to not tower over neighborhoods, nor take lengthy swaths from existing neighborhoods, nor increase localized air pollution, nor even be something that could accurately be said as dividing Brooklyn locally. Rather than building a high viaduct over the railroad, or a below ground roadway lined with new buildings (at the expense of homes), build this Cross Brooklyn Expressway as an encased, multi-level, multi-model road tunnel with electrostatic precipitator filtration technology, built beneath a new linear park for much of its length.

This railroad corridor is wide at its western segment, approximately 250 feet wide with a single rail track, and its eastern segment traverses vast industrial areas. In contrast, the middle segment is only about 80 feet wide, and is immediately abutted by residential areas that may not permit widening. Indeed, this width is too narrow for a conventional expressway layout, thus requiring a multi-level underground facility. This would perhaps entail three separate decks, one deck for expanded passenger and freight rail service, and two decks for each expressway carriageway.

A full underground segment for this narrow middle segment, and the area along Linden Boulevard would be required for noise abatement.

The project should connect directly to a new Cross Harbor Railway/Highway Tunnel to I-78 in New Jersey, with new parallel roadways to at least the New Jersey Turnpike. Such a tunnel is currently planned, inexplicitly only with rail.

It would be perhaps the nation's most needed new evacuation route from a major metropolitan area, with the greatest re-use of existing industrialized right of way.

Cross Brooklyn Expressway right of way tour- Old NYC
Cross Harbor - Cross Brooklyn Tunnel (non-multi-model rail only version)

A Beholden Doctrine

From Urban Transport.org

Unfortunately, about 1975, politicians and planners began to embrace the idea that we were in an "era of limits" - the notion that there were "smarter solutions," that "we can't just keep on building more roads," that "transportation demand management" could help wean Californians off their irrational "love affair with the automobile" and into "modern, efficient, high-capacity mass transit."

Then-governor Jerry Brown's aides openly proclaimed, "Our job is to pry John Q. Public out of his car (and) to make life miserable for the single motorist."

http://www.urbantransport.org/sole.pdf

Jerry Brown, pictured above on the front cover of an April 23, 1979 issue of Newsweek magazine with the singer Linda Ronstadt, about mid way through his 1975-1983 service as Governor of the State of California; he has a long political career including service as Mayor of Oakland from 1998 to 2006, and in 2007 is California Attorney General. In 1976, 1980 and 1992 he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nominations, and in 1982 was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate.

Jerry Brown- Wikipedia

(excerpt)

Brown was born in San Francisco, the only son of former San Francisco lawyer, District attorney and later Democratic governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown Sr. He graduated from St. Ignatius High School and studied at Santa Clara University. In 1958, he entered Sacred Heart Novitiate, a Jesuit seminary, intending to become a Catholic priest.

A Sampling of Attitudes Towards D.C. I-95

Whatever happened to the idea of additional evacuation routes?

Shortly after the events of September 11, 2001, there was talk about constructing additional evacuation routes within the U.S. to better serve the evacuation for major metropolitan areas in a future emergency event.

Yet within all of the 100s of billions of $$ spent since on the war in Iraq and with over-sightless surveilling the general public, there is nothing for new evacuation routes- particularly from such metropolises as Washington, D.C., and New York City/Long Island.

Logical projects would include:

I-287 Long Island Sound Bridge/Tunnel, either a full tunnel, or a bridge with tunnel (cut and cover box with full lanes and shoulders to mitigate the highway at the shore areas) to a Route 135 re-signed and improved as I-287

I-78 Cross Harbor-Brooklyn Highway-Railway Tunnel towards JFK Airport , preferably with an eastern extension along the Sunrise Highway corridor

Lincoln Tunnel 4th Tube
Midtown Manhattan 3rd Tube
Holland Tunnel Parallel Tubes

Northern and Eastern Washington, D.C. radial highways, in particular, the I-95 Grand Arc Mall Tunnel

Homeland Security Goal Better Served by Reviving I-70S through NW Washington DC- Mark Robinowitz

Envirofraud - unscrupulous road haters

Posted Sat, 2007-09-15 12:42 at TollRoads

http://www.tollroad snews.com/ node/3136

Air pollution scaremongering long been used by environmental groups to block the road building needed to alleviate congestion - even though the resulting stop-&-go and idling traffic worsens emissions. In many US metro areas air quality data have been misused by environmentalists and their friends in the regulatory agencies to bar all lane additions - except for HOV lanes. And they are wastefully empty.

Their logic is that extra highway capacity will increase vehicle-miles traveled and applying average emissions/vehicle mile traveled (vmt) that means more total emissions and greater difficulty meeting air quality goals. Totally ignored in this logic are the benefits to emissions per vmt of managing traffic for free flow at moderate speed.

Anyone serious about air quality will see toll managed traffic lanes as being a contribution to cleaner air.

But most environmentalists are more stuck on fighting the car than they are on cleaning the air.

Maybe it's time the USDOT's congestion busters promoted some research to quantify the air quality results of:

(1) toll managed lanes,

(2) extra free capacity and

(3) congested constrained capacity.

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