Nearly 70 years ago, Robert Moses took a sledgehammer to the Bronx, severing New York City’s only mainland borough and poisoning our neighborhoods for his Cross Bronx Expressway. The highway has harmed our constituents every day since.

Now, against our community’s wishes, state officials are about to expand the Cross Bronx. Construction is scheduled to start this year and last into the next decade, bringing endless congestion and toxic pollution 50 feet closer to public housing tenants, students, park goers, and more than 64,000 local residents living along the corridor.

Decades after the highway first tore through our borough, children here still battle the worst asthma rates nationwide. Why should the state risk our community’s health when we so obviously know better? Before officials magnify Moses’ worst mistake, we have a moral obligation to protect residents and change course.

Upstate, New York is already leading the nation in highway removal. Rochester has completed one demolition and is working on another. Syracuse is dismantling I-81, an injustice on par with the Cross Bronx. Albany and Buffalo have their own plans underway. Meanwhile, in the middle of the nation’s public transit capital, the same engineers want to expand the shadow of the Cross Bronx, using maintenance and safety standards as convenient covers while further dividing and sickening communities.

Bronxites know the reality on the ground better than anyone. NYCHA Bronx River Houses Tenant Association President Norma Saunders just warned that Cross Bronx pollution is killing residents, including families like Tiffane Thorpe’s, two of whose three kids have asthma and breathe toxic air daily. With few vacancies and sky-high rents, Thorpe cannot afford to move. Saunders recently invited the governor to visit these families and consider safer alternatives.

Instead, officials continue to dress up the dangers of an expansion. They expect us to believe a bigger Cross Bronx will enhance “safety,” while risking the health of tens of thousands of residents caught up in the highway’s web of destruction.

The Cross Bronx obviously needs extensive repairs. But state officials should be equally focused on solutions that mitigate traffic and pollution. Standard bridge repairs would allow us to accomplish this goal without expanding the highway’s environmental footprint or hurting Bronxites. It would also free us up to invest in future-forward transit alternatives: safer walking and biking paths, blue highways to move goods and trucks off our roads, and countless community priorities identified during the Reimagine the Cross Bronx Expressway study.

Simultaneously, the state Department of Transportation is neglecting one of the borough’s biggest transit obstacles: Bronxites still can’t get around town because of the very highway they want to expand. Most families get by without a car, with nearly 75% of residents living on Tremont Ave. lacking car access. Crosstown transit involves a slow, unreliable bus ride. Mayor Mamdani is addressing this with plans to speed up service on Fordham Road and improve transit for Tremont. But state leaders need to do right by us, too, not sacrifice the Bronx for out-of-state drivers’ convenience.

Being sandwiched between suburbs doesn’t make Bronx children any less deserving of clean air or safe places to learn and play. Officials have a duty to right the wrongs of the past, not repeat them.

There’s still time to chart a new path forward before contractors break out the heavy machinery. We just need the state to listen. 

Rivera represents parts of the Bronx in the state Senate and chairs the Senate Health Committee. Septimo represents parts of the Bronx in the state Assembly.

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