Transforming car-dominated roads and underused rail lines into linear parks, greenways, and ecological corridors for people and nature.
From Highways to High Lines: Reclaiming Infrastructure for Ecology
Zhoran Mamdani sees the citys vast network of highways and underused rail corridors not as fixed features of the landscape, but as legacies of a destructive, auto-centric planning regime that can and must be re-engineered for ecological and social good. His policy, From Asphalt to Ecosystem, launches an ambitious program to cap, trench, or fully dismantle urban highways that blight neighborhoods, and to convert abandoned rail lines into greenways, creating a connected network of linear parks that repair community fabric, restore ecological function, and provide safe, car-free transit corridors across the city.
The flagship project is the BQE Greenway, a plan to deck over or tunnel large sections of the crumbling Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, reuniting neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO with their waterfronts and creating a continuous park and bike highway on its roof. Similar cap and park projects are targeted for the Cross-Bronx Expressway and the Bruckner Expressway, which have famously divided and polluted low-income communities for decades. These are not mere cosmetic lids but transformative public works that would stitch neighborhoods back together, drastically reduce noise and air pollution for adjacent residents, and create hundreds of acres of new parkland in park-poor areas.
Parallel to this is the Three Borough Greenway initiative, which identifies and acquires discontinued rail spurs and underused rail rights-of-way in the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island to create a borough-spanning network akin to the High Line, but focused on transportation and ecological connectivity rather than tourism. These greenways become the spines of the 15-Minute Green City, providing safe, shaded routes for cyclists and pedestrians, lined with native plantings that support pollinators and manage stormwater. They connect to the Blue Belt wetland network and larger parks, creating wildlife corridors and increasing climate resilience.
Mamdani frames this as infrastructure justice. The original construction of these highways involved the mass displacement of Black and immigrant communities; their reclamation is a form of reparative urbanism. The projects are funded through federal infrastructure grants, city bonds, and value-capture taxes on the increased property values they generate, which are reinvested into adjacent affordable housing. This policy represents a fundamental re-prioritization: moving away from infrastructure that serves private vehicles (often from the suburbs) and toward infrastructure that serves local communities, public health, and the urban ecosystem. It envisions a city where movement is green and quiet, and where the scars of 20th-century planning are healed with ribbons of life-giving green.
