The BQE is not built for vans. The cracks are visible.

For example, the city’s ferry service, which essentially stops at 10 p.m., could be deployed overnight to transport packages, which would then be dropped off at waterside hubs and picked up by delivery drivers using mobile bins or cargo bikes.

While such alternatives seem to captivate civil servants on a conceptual level, they remain terminally slow to take off. Some of this has to do with maddening issues around jurisdiction: Cargo bikes, for example, are subject to size restrictions set by the state, meaning new legislation is needed to move them toward significant commercial application.

Using sensors to automatically ticket trucks that violate weight limits – thousands going through BKE exceed legal size – now seems closer to reality. Nevertheless, it has taken years of significant structural damage to the highway, resulting both from historically inadequate enforcement and the dangerous corrosion that comes from the mix of salt, water, concrete, and rebar. Until Mr. Gutman ended the practice in 2021, salt had been applied to the BQE for 70 years, almost every time it snowed. Waterproofing the cantilever would help, but that hasn’t happened yet either.

Since last fall, the Adams administration has put a lot of effort into engaging Brooklyn communities alongside the BQE about the future, including those north and south of the cantilever, which were previously left out of the conversation and where, in many cases, asthma rates be quite high. In a way, the BQE is its own leveler, destroying the lives of wealthy people in mansions and less wealthy people in public housing, giving the city an opportunity, if it uses it, to unite the communities that Robert Moses tried to divide.

The Department of Transportation has already held more than 20 meetings with community groups and has come up with a dizzying number of proposals and conceits for a redesigned BQE that are often accompanied by beautiful displays of green space – “what architects call eyewash,” Michael Canter, himself a architect, told me. Proposals can be complex, difficult for lay people to understand and can leave participants in these meetings frustrated and confused.