State officials really dig a plan to replace Brooklyn’s crumbling Gowanus Expressway with a tunnel.
Department of Transportation officials told The Post yesterday the agency has agreed on a subterranean route along the waterfront after reviewing 46 underground proposals – most of them running further inland – over the past five years.
Funding and other considerations will determine whether the below-grade highway ever gets built. The 3.5-mile, seven-lane tunnel would cost $12.8 billion.
But civic groups throughout western Brooklyn have long hoped that most of the crumbling current elevated structure will be torn down.
A series of public forums on the new plan begins tonight at 6:30 p.m., at 166A 22nd St. near the Gowanus in Brooklyn.
The other, far-less-costly options, include rehabilitating the constantly under-repairs expressway – built in the 1940s – or repairing the Gowanus and adding a two-lane viaduct over the existing structure to handle more volume.
DOT cost estimates from 2001 are about $1.7 billion and $2.3 billion, respectively, for those options, adjusted for inflation.
All three proposals will be studied in the project’s environmental review process, which won’t be completed until 2010.
Construction would begin a year later, and a tunnel could take nine years to build, officials said.