A key trucking artery in New York is the site of a crackdown on overweight vehicles to help as the city figures out what to do with its failing infrastructure. Early reports say that the policy has significantly reduced the number of oversize vehicles on the road.
The highway in question is the cantilevered section of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, which runs from the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which connects Brooklyn to Staten Island all the way up to an area in northern Queens near LaGuardia Airport. The three-deck section in Brooklyn, which offers up a spectacular view of lower Manhattan and lower New York harbor, has been the subject of concern about its durability for several years.
In a prepared statement released this week, the city’s Department of Transportation said that the use of weigh-in-motion technology has led to a 64% drop in overweight vehicles traveling along the cantilevered section of the BQE during the seven months that the traffic has been monitored.
Trucks with three or more axles have a weight limit of 80,000 pounds, with lower limits for smaller vehicles.
The precise count cited by the New York City DOT is that in the seven months leading up to the start of enforcement, the WIM technology detected that a monthly average of 7,777 overweight trucks had driven on the key cantilevered section in the northbound direction, away from Staten Island and toward northern Queens.
But in the seven months that there has been automated enforcement of the weight limits, that has dropped to 2,769 overweight trucks per month on average.
The fine for violation of the weight limits is $650.
Overweight vehicles have not declined as a result of a concurrent drop in overall traffic. The DOT said that the overall number of vehicles on that section of road has not fallen, with the drop in overweight vehicles taking the share of too-heavy trucks down to 1.9% of all traffic in recent months from 6.3% before the automated enforcement began.
Now do it in a southerly direction
The plan now is to implement the same system southbound, for traffic headed to the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge by the end of this year. However, the start of southbound enforcement will follow what the city said would be a “well-publicized” 90-day warning period.
The section of the road is owned by New York City. The rest of the BQE in Brooklyn is owned by New York state. It is part of the interstate highway system, carrying the designation of Interstate 278.
Truck traffic on that section of road was estimated by New York City last year to be about 11,700 trucks per day. A spokesman for the city’s DOT provided that figure to FreightWaves last year when the city was rolling out the start of the process that kicked off with the 90-day warning period.
The question with that sort of decline is where are the trucks going instead. An obvious answer would be bypassing the cantilevered section by driving through local streets in Brooklyn. “We are working with the NYPD to enforce this on surrounding streets to prevent trucks from hopping off the BQE and back on again,” a spokeswoman told FreightWaves in an email.
A wider diversion could have trucks headed north in New Jersey on Interstate 95, or eastbound on Interstates 78 or 287, headed to the New York City area via Staten Island, to instead route themselves north to the George Washington Bridge and avoid the cantilevered section. But that would take the truck smack into what the annual American Transportation Research Institute survey says is the nation’s biggest bottleneck: the Fort Lee, New Jersey, area approaching the George Washington Bridge.
Long-term solution still needed
The overweight enforcement is not considered a solution to the problem of the aging cantilever structure. It is simply hoped that it can extend the life of the road beyond the roughly 20 years that engineers now say is its likely life span.
The DOE’s prepared statement announcing the results of the enforcement made that clear. For example, the statement quoted Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso as saying, “While we need to ensure that overweight trucks do not cause additional damage, it remains critical that we reimagine the BQE from top to bottom.”
Similarly, Jo Anne Simon, who represents the area in the New York State Assembly, said that the WIM program “will help extend the useful life of the BQE and give us time to reimagine the BQE as a 21st-century transportation corridor that reduces our reliance on polluting trucks and prioritizes climate justice.”
The enforcement program was adopted primarily because there was no agreement on what steps to take to fix the cantilevered section. One proposal that led to the neighborhood protesting vigorously would have temporarily converted the Brooklyn Heights promenade, now a beloved walking and sitting area that overlooks the harbor, into a temporary highway while the cantilevered sections below were rebuilt.
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