The report determined that a six-lane tunnel with improved community connections at street level will best meet the project’s goals and should be studied further. It now allows the New York State Department of Transportation to start the formal environmental assessment and preliminary design process.
Announcing completion of the report, Governor Kathy Hochul said the project was “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to correct an egregious planning failure of the past and give the residents of East Buffalo the connection to one another and to green space they have been deprived of for far too long”.
Constructed during the 1950s and 1960s, the Kensington Expressway replaced what had been a grand, tree-lined boulevard with a below-grade highway that severed the connection between the surrounding neighborhoods. Governor Hochul has allocated US$1bn for the project, which will include replacing bridges with the new tunnel to reconnect the east-west neighborhoods across the depressed section of the Kensington Expressway corridor in East Buffalo.
