Seeing the BQE After the Highway.
A visualization package for Off-Ramp NYC showing how Brooklyn and Queens could reclaim the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway corridor for transit, housing, green space, freight access, and connected neighborhoods.
Make the alternative legible before the default becomes inevitable.
The BQE debate is usually framed as an engineering liability: a failing structure, a price tag, and a repair sequence. The visual work reframes the same corridor as a public-choice problem. New York can spend heavily to rebuild an obsolete highway, or it can use the same moment to repair the neighborhoods the highway divided.
These renderings were produced to help Off-Ramp NYC show that highway removal is not an abstraction. It can be seen, tested, debated, and improved as a concrete urban proposition.
Replace capacity with access.
The premise is not simply fewer cars. It is better access through transit, freight management, walking, cycling, and land use.
Show the public realm.
The renderings foreground streets, parks, shade, housing frontage, and the everyday life that highway diagrams erase.
Keep the corridor specific.
Each image works from a recognizable BQE segment so the proposal stays tied to real places and real tradeoffs.
Not final design. Public evidence for a better choice.
The point is to change what people think is plausible.
Transportation fights are often won or lost before the public ever sees a real alternative. These images give the campaign a shared visual language: waterfront repair, neighborhood reconnection, transit priority, and green infrastructure in place of another generation of highway reconstruction.
Ten finished BQE replacement views.
How the visual argument was built.
The package translates highway-removal strategy into images that can travel across public meetings, social media, press coverage, and campaign pages without losing the underlying planning logic.
Locate
Choose BQE segments where the public-value tradeoff is legible: waterfront edges, downtown approaches, central cuts, and industrial corridors.
Replace
Swap the highway premise for a surface corridor that can carry transit, trucks, bikes, walking, trees, and neighborhood frontage.
Compose
Build images that feel like public evidence rather than fantasy renderings: recognizable places, plausible scale, visible tradeoffs.
Deploy
Use the visuals as campaign infrastructure, making the replacement path easier to discuss, critique, and improve.
Off-Ramp NYC carries the campaign. This page documents the visualization work.
Renderings and visual strategy by Liam Blank for Off-Ramp NYC. The case study is intended as a portfolio and process archive; campaign updates, coalition materials, and action items belong at Off-Ramp NYC.