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“Despite decades of harm, the Department of Transportation is pushing a plan to widen the Cross Bronx by adding another highway structure over the Bronx River and Starlight Park, doubling down on the already blatant environmental injustice.”
When America’s environmental first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, championed the Highway Beautification Act in 1965, she understood something fundamental about American infrastructure: roads should serve as a conduit for people, not just cars.
Her yearly drives from Texas to Washington D.C. took her through junkyards filled with abandoned cars and blighted, urban spaces, a sight that remains familiar to New Yorkers today. Her fight to counter the concrete brutality of highways and preserve the natural environment wasn’t just about “beautification,” as many suggested, but about improving Americans’ quality of life.
Today, as the New York State Department of Transportation pushes to expand the Cross Bronx Expressway, it is betraying that vision and the Bronx communities already choking on the highway’s pollution. This National Highway Day urges us to commit to transportation alternatives that nourish Bronx communities, instead of poisoning them.
The great outdoors have long been under attack, paved over and trodden via the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act which birthed the nation’s interstate system. Situated along Interstate 95, the Cross Bronx Expressway is a product of this legacy. Under Robert Moses, the Cross Bronx carved through working-class neighborhoods of color in the 1950s, displacing thousands, severing neighborhoods, and leaving behind a legacy of asthma, heart disease, and premature death.
It remains one of the most congested roadways and toxic polluters in the nation, sickening residents along the Bronx River, including more than 3,000 at the adjacent public housing complex Bronx River Houses. Now, despite decades of harm, the Department of Transportation is pushing a plan to widen the Cross Bronx by adding another highway structure over the Bronx River and Starlight Park, doubling down on the already blatant environmental injustice.
This cannot happen. Instead of expanding the Cross Bronx Expressway—a monument to racist urban planning—the DOT must follow through with a version of its second, safer proposal for the Cross Bronx: standard bridge repairs with improvements that the community has long been calling for, reducing traffic by rerouting trucks and cars not headed to the area using regional highways. And if DOT really wants to center our community’s priorities, it will explore options that increase connectivity on the east and west portions of the Cross Bronx, move forward with improvements to the 174th Street Bridge, and support future-looking solutions like “Blue Highways” that reduce traffic on local highways.
Bronx residents have already voiced our concerns: we want bridge repairs without expansion. We want to reduce traffic, not build a new road that will only increase it. We want more green space, not a new highway that towers over a park where children play on two playgrounds, already breathing in too much pollution. And we want our neighborhoods reconnected, not further severed.
NYSDOT knows this—the agency was a partner in the Reimagine the Cross Bronx Expressway report, a community-designed blueprint which outlines real solutions for reducing traffic while improving air quality and green space, and reconnecting our neighborhoods. But their new proposal does the exact opposite.
As Lady Bird Johnson knew way back in the 60s, highway “beautification” wasn’t just that, “it involves much more,” she said. “Clean water, clean air, clean roadsides…and preservation of valued old landmarks as well as great parks and wilderness areas. To me…beautification means our total concern for the physical and human quality we pass on to our children and the future.”
To unnecessarily expand the Cross Bronx Expressway at the expense of clean water, clean air, and our parks wouldn’t just go against her legacy. It would endanger our quality of life in the Bronx— something which too often hinges on the baseless decisions of people hundreds of miles away, with little regard for community input.
This National Highway Day, let’s heed the lessons of the past and commit to a healthier, safer transportation system that connects our communities while preserving our natural spaces. Gov. Kathy Hochul and DOT have a choice: they can rubber-stamp another highway-sized road and spend taxpayer money to further endanger Bronx communities, or halt this expansion, conduct a full environmental review of the plan, and finally listen to the Bronx.
Siddhartha Sánchez is the executive director of Bronx River Alliance, which works to protect, improve and restore the Bronx River corridor. Jaqi Cohen is the director of climate & equity policy at Tri-State Transportation Campaign, which promotes sustainable transportation, equitable planning policies and practices, and strong communities in the New York City metro area.