Start Investing Along 3rd Avenue Now!

Planners are considering replacing the Gowanus Expressway with a tunnel, perhaps restoring 3rd Avenue to its former glory and rendering pointless hundreds of billboards:

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.

. . .

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.