NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) -- Since the late 2010s, it’s been clear that the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a key arterial for freight and car traffic in New York City, is in danger of collapsing. Chunks of concrete have been crumbling off the “triple cantilever” — a 1.5-mile-long three-level pile-up of highway decks in Brooklyn conjured up by infamous city planner Robert Moses in 1948.
A study in 2019 fingered a culprit: huge tractor-trailers and heavy trucks. About 13,000 freight vehicles rumble into New York City on the BQE every day. A tenth of them are 18-wheelers weighing more than 40 tons — some, almost double that. That’s far heavier than the mid-century vehicles it was designed for.
In 2019, a panel of experts gathered to wrestle with two options for reconstructing the structure: add more lanes, or shrink it. (The panel preferred the latter.) Visions clashed at public meetings, then City Hall opted for a third solution: Engineers argued they they could extend the expiration date by another 20 years. Since then, a new $5 billion plan to entirely replace the stacked structure has emerged, but it relies on federal dollars that have yet to materialize.
One immediate fix did emerge from the saga. In 2021, the state authorized the city’s Department of Transportation to use what’s known as “weigh-in-motion” technology that can photograph and automatically ticket truck scofflaws. It was the first US city to ever do so.
Four years later, the $650 fines that the devices dole out have amounted to a rare success story. The number of overweight trucks is down 60% in the northbound lanes, which the pilot was limited to. About 8,000 overweight trucks a month — or up to 20,000, if you count both directions — dropped to a little more than 3,000. The results proved convincing to lawmakers upstate: In May, Albany renewed and expanded authorization for five more years, allowing NYCDOT to go after heavy loads on nine sites they oversee, including the BQE’s southbound lane. (Six other locations statewide are also now eligible.)
“Overweight trucks cause costly wear-and-tear on our roadways and we all pay the price through expensive repairs to our infrastructure,” said NYCDOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez. “We are proud to be the first city in the nation to use weigh-in-motion technology to crack down on overweight vehicles.”
While little noticed outside of hardcore transportation circles, the emergence of weigh-in-motion systems (or WIM to industry types) is timely, experts say. Municipalities across the US are struggling to shore up aging bridges and highways at a time of waning federal support, raising difficult questions about the costs of maintaining urban infrastructure and policing its use. And the sheer tonnage of commercial freight on roadways is on the rise, as trucks haul more than 70% of the goods that are shipped within the US. That’s forcing more cities to reckon with the toll they take on urban roads — and the people who live nearby.
Scaling Up
The tech itself isn’t new: If you’ve ever seen a weigh station along the side of a highway, where trucks can pull over for inspection, that’s WIM in action.
The unique thing New York City did was pair existing truck-scale technology with a ticketing arm. To do that, it had to prove that the set-up was precise enough to directly fine users. Thankfully, it had a track record: New York City operates one of the largest automated enforcement operations in the world, in the form of more than 2,000 speed- and red-light cameras.
“Typically most cities are strapped to protect their structures, and the focus always is, ‘What can we do with our maintenance? When should we time things?’” said Tanvi Pandya, a NYCDOT executive who oversees the BQE work. “This is the first time we’re saying, ‘Well, we should look at the loading on these structures and the extent that people are abusing them.’”
Historically, enforcing truck weight limits in an urban environment has been difficult, Pandya said. “This technology takes that out of the mix.”
Why is weighing trucks so important? The average semi clocks in around 10,000 pounds, and that’s without any cargo; loaded tractor trailers can be eight or ten times heavier. The Federal Highway Administration sets a 80,000 pound limit for trucks using the interstate system, but maximum weight limits vary by state, with special permits for things like fire trucks, trucks carrying prefab housing, or construction equipment. Loads of states have exemptions, some reaching up to 150,000 pounds. That’s a lot of pressure bearing down on the concrete, asphalt and steel that hold up roads and bridges.
But big trucks burden the urban environment beyond their weight, too. They’re a literal outsized danger to street safety, with less of an ability to brake quickly or see other road users in blind spots. And along with our Amazon packages, they bring a prodigious amount of pollution — in terms of diesel emissions, dust from brake and tire wear, and noise.
In an effort to keep truck traffic away from populated areas, cities often develop a network meant to contain bigger vehicles to main commercial corridors or industrial areas. New York City’s truck route network was established in the 1970s, and a bill passed by the City Council in 2023 mandated an update. Little has happened since.
But as in other US cities, there is little enforcement of overweight or wayward trucks. Every day, I watch tractor-trailers try to squeeze down my narrow residential road in Queens. Some drivers likely don’t even realize the violation — they’re just following a route on Google Maps or Waze. But I’ve attended meetings where police officials also appeared to be unaware that the city even had designated truck routes.
This lack of enforcement casts a wide shadow over the city’s effort to modernize that network. Hank Gutman, a former NYCDOT commissioner, said that overweight trucks typically only get in trouble when they get stuck and police arrive at the scene. And it’s been this way, he argues, for decades. “This is why WIM is a huge breakthrough,” he said when we spoke. “To me, it’s a no-brainer.”
Gutman and I were first in touch when I took to X to complain about trucks a few months ago. In 2019, Gutman, who lives next to the BQE in Brooklyn Heights, served on the panel tasked with figuring out its future. As NYCDOT commissioner in 2021, he oversaw the initial installation of the sensors. Gutman applauds the news of the statewide expansion. But he also added caution: It’s common where he lives, he says, to see trucks leave the BQE before the sensors begin, chug down local streets, and get back on after they end.
Truck drivers, meanwhile, are concerned about what they see as a gap between city and state regulations. “I know I’ve made a wrong turn driving near the border of Westchester and Bronx Counties before,” Trucking Association of New York spokesperson Gian Marco DeFilippis said in an email, citing city limits. “One wrong move and truck drivers go from compliant to not-compliant, even with a state permit.”
Before deploying WIM, the association wants the city to make it easier for drivers to follow the rules, which includes expediting the permitting process and offering a better means of appealing fines. Overweight trucks, after all, aren’t just taking a toll on the city’s aging infrastructure — they’re fixing it, hauling heavy construction equipment across the five boroughs.
“The City must do their part to uplift businesses like those in the trucking industry who share in the goal of improving our city and playing by the rules, while working to keep costs down for New Yorkers,” the association said in a statement to Bloomberg.
This gets at the larger question: Where are all the trucks supposed to go? About 90% of the goods that New York City residents buy are trucked in. So the highways we originally built for that — like the BQE — are now seeing more frequent and heavier traffic. And, historically, these thoroughfares were routed through major urban centers, dumping trucks all over street networks ill-suited for such enormous vehicles.
For Gutman, WIM is an advance, no doubt. But what’s really worth addressing is just how cities are supposed to coexist with the tractor-trailers that they depend on to survive. “It’s an imperfect solution if it’s not part of a more comprehensive plan to reduce our dependence on oversized trucks,” Gutman said. “The WIM thing has to fit into a larger vision for reimagining freight deliveries in our city.”
Fork in the Road
In a press release in May, NYCDOT officials attached a note of advocacy: With its newfound powers and other cities interested, “the need for national standards becomes more urgent.” Currently, none exist — and the agency, as the nation’s preeminent user, said it’d push for their inclusion in federal handbooks and guidelines.
The political lines around truck regulation enforcement are blurry. On one hand, auto-ticketing overweight trucks allows cities and states to improve safety and stretch maintenance dollars — all of which should hold bipartisan appeal. But the US is often allergic to automated enforcement, and their use has been increasingly politicized: Republican-dominated states like Texas have forbid local jurisdictions from installing speed cameras, and the Trump administration has attempted to block New York City’s implementation of its first-in-the-US congestion pricing policy, which charges most drivers $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street using cameras.
A useful case study comes from Norway, which is a major proponent of automated traffic enforcement. (It also has some of the safest roads in Europe.) According to Mark Talbot, CEO of the Norway-based traffic tech company Q-Free, the key to wide adoption is ensuring that the technology itself is widely trusted. “When you’re using the data captured at the point of measurement as the sole evidence to support a violation, that system has to be highly accurate and well-maintained,” said Talbot. “It also has to be vetted and approved.”
Talbot commended New York City’s transit planners for an exhaustive analysis of the pilot program. That transparency, he said, helps build confidence. “Once you have that belief and acceptance, it becomes a highly efficient way to drive compliance. Many truck drivers who are already compliant will welcome that. So it’s good for everybody — aside from just the fact that the roadway is better maintained and managed to have a longer, useful life.”
In New York City, their use on the BQE also summons another controversy. The expressway carved through 1950s Brooklyn like butter, destroying low-income communities; it’s long been a poster child for the movement urging the removal of urban highways. A chorus of voices want the city to rethink it entirely, not prolong its life with a new technological Band-Aid.
“We really need to acknowledge the harm that it has caused — and continues to cause,” said Kevin Garcia, a senior transportation planner with the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. Garcia helped form the BQE Environmental Justice Coalition and sits on the city’s Community Visioning Council, which, among other things, is offering ideas for the spaces underneath the roadway.
The BQE is one of the region’s largest contributors of air pollution, which disproportionately lands on the low-income communities of color who live nearby. Truck tailpipe emissions are a major culprit, Garcia argued, so anything that reduces their volume is a win. But the corridor remains a critical conduit for transporting freight into New York. “We need to figure out how we can reduce our dependency on trucks to move goods in and out of the city,” he said.
The city is making some inroads. Its “Blue Highways” initiative is working to shift some of that weight to the waterways. Cargo e-bikes and trikes, which are popular in Europe, have proliferated for local deliveries since they were legalized in 2024. And a program that offers specific parking spots where overweight trucks can offload deliveries onto smaller vehicles is being piloted in Manhattan. But these initiatives are still in their infancy. For the foreseeable future, the trucks that bring New Yorkers most of their goods will continue to rumble down the overburdened lanes of the BQE.
Environmental justice groups are advocating for a public-led redesign of the BQE, but its fate is markedly unclear. Garcia just hopes that whatever comes next can’t repeat past mistakes. “We want to make sure that the city is listening to the communities that live along the corridor,” said Garcia, “that are going to have to continue living with the BQE for the next five, ten or twenty years.”