The New York State Dept. of Transportation is suspending plans to spend $900 million to upgrade some old highway bridges in the Bronx. The Cross Bronx Bridges Project would have updated five spans along one mile of the Cross Bronx Expressway, but an added plan to widen the six-lane road drew criticism from Bronx community organizations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Not being able to reach an agreement with local organizers about what the project should look like is why the state agency dropped it, according to a statement<\/a> the agency\u00a0released.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have always said that we understand that the bridges need to be repaired. The question is how to reduce the harm to the local environment and people who live here,\u201d according to a statement from the Bronx River Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the waterway. \u201cThat the state is instead choosing to blame the Bronx for its own unwillingness to meet our basic need for a healthy future feels like a bad re-run of the history that got us here in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n The state agency first suggested updating these structures in 2018. The five bridges were built between<\/a> 1947 and 1958 and are showing signs of their age<\/a>, with cracked concrete and deteriorating and impact-damaged steel.\u00a0<\/p>\n From early days, however, the state has wanted to widen<\/a> the portions of the expressway that the bridges support. More shoulder space and other changes to the \u201cnonconforming geometric design features\u201d of the CBE would help with crashes and congestion on the roadway, according to<\/a> a department report. The expressway is one of the busiest in the nation, carrying<\/a> as many as 150,000 vehicles a day through the South Bronx.\u00a0<\/p>\n Construction options have been gradually walked back by the NYSDOT over the last year. One proposed set of plans would have built an elevated traffic diversion structure parallel to the expressway, which would either get torn down and replaced with a narrower shared use pathway or would be turned into some combination of bus, bike, or pedestrian spaces. In August<\/a> and October<\/a> of 2025, the NYSDOT announced these plans were no longer on the table. \u201cThe feedback we received from the community made it clear that the use of a traffic diversion structure was a non-starter,\u201d Commissioner Dominguez said in a statement from the agency at the time. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n At the end of 2025, the state DOT came back\u00a0<\/a>with new options<\/a>, including versions with and without pedestrian or bike paths parallel to the expressway. Like earlier plans, these proposals also widened the CBE, either by 29 ft or 49 ft. In a comment<\/a> on these designs signed by 41 organizations including the Bronx River Alliance, the authors noted that NYSDOT hadn\u2019t been clear about how the widening would improve traffic or safety conditions and suggested that the changes might backfire. \u201cRecent experiences of highway widenings done in the name of \u201csafety shoulders,\u201d such as on the Bronx River Parkway, have had the opposite intended effect, with drivers aggressively using the new space for travel,\u201d they wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Bronx Council for Environmental Quality, an environmental nonprofit in the borough, was also disappointed in what it saw as a sub-par stormwater management plan. The organization also asked for possible green infrastructure or nature-based solutions to give the area more plant life or block some of the noise from the roadway. The southern Bronx has some of the highest rates of asthma<\/a> in the nation and tenants of the Bronx River Houses, a NYCHA complex near this mile-long stretch of the expressway, have shared<\/a> that residents keep their windows closed at all times because local air pollution is so bad. The council never saw its requests taken seriously. \u201cThey could have been much more imaginative about it,\u201d said Karen Argenti, the corresponding secretary for the council. \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe Cross Bronx Expressway 5 Bridges are still in dire need of rehabilitation,\u201d added Rafael Moure-Punnett, district manager for Bronx Community Board #6, in a statement. \u201cWe hope that NYSDOT will come back to work collaboratively with [the] community to discuss federal investment in our neighborhoods to address the negative impacts of the Cross Bronx Expressway on Bronx residents.\u201d In some form or other, the state will have to return to the topic, as it has committed<\/a> to monitoring the bridges and making repairs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The New York State Dept. of Transportation is suspending plans to spend $900 million to upgrade some old…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265504,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[102838,128,9,24,63,129,131,130],"class_list":["post-265503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bridge-replacement","tag-bronx","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}