New York City’s subway is massive.
With more than 470 stations across four boroughs,
it’s really good at getting people in and out of Manhattan.
But there’s a problem.
A lot of people don’t actually need to go into Manhattan.
And it’s really hard to get to where they do need to go.
Say you live here, in East Bushwick and you work here in Midwood.
It’s a little over 6 miles away, so it's going to take you a couple hours to walk,
45 minutes to cycle or 30 minutes to drive.
But, if you want to go by subway, it would take you an hour.
And you’d have to go all the way into Manhattan and back out again.
Despite millions of people living and working in New York City’s outer boroughs,
there’s no subway line that really connects them.
At least, not yet.
Enter the Interborough Express. It’s the MTA’s latest idea for a new subway
line to connect Brooklyn and Queens via an abandoned freight railway.
This could change a lot of people's lives. But building in New York is
never easy. And there’s still loads to do before it becomes reality.
When the subway was being designed, it was being designed to get people
off the streets where the primary public transportation system was horse-drawn,
back in the later part of the 19th Century. And that meant it was a different kind of pollution
in New York City, and it's been described that people were very often knee deep in it.
Yikes.
The most densely populated part of the city at the time was lower Manhattan. So,
when the subway network grew, the lines expanded from Manhattan to the outer boroughs.
In the mornings, Manhattan acts like a heart and draws in the workers from their
homes in the surrounding areas. The streets become filled with workers and shoppers.
Then in the evenings, the workers go home again and the business section becomes a ghost city.
So the city ended up with a system that looks like this.
A bunch of radial lines coming out from Manhattan to the outer boroughs,
and not a lot of circumferential lines actually connecting the rest of the city.
It’s not just New York that followed this blueprint. Chicago, Washington DC
and Stockholm all have metro networks that radiate out from their central business district.
Places like Moscow have literally built a ring line to connect their outer boroughs,
but in New York, the system is still centered around Manhattan.
Enter Jeffrey Zupan
I’m a senior fellow for transportation at the Regional Plan Association.
and Kate Slevin.
I’m executive vice president of Regional Plan Association.
Jeffrey began advocating for an interborough subway line in New York back in the 90s,
when he helped write this report.
Kate is still advocating for it today.
Triboro RX was the original name of the project. The idea was to
look at all the underused or abandoned rights of way that were in both in the
city and the surrounding suburbs and try to make better use of them for public transit.
We had a lot of proposals in the Region at Risk and some of them hit the mark
right away and some didn't. And I have to say the Triboro RX was not was not among
those that were even talked about, I would say, for 10 or 15 years.
Twenty six years later, that proposal is being revived as the Interborough Express.
If you’re having deja vu right now, then you could be thinking of any number of New York
City transit projects that were proposed, planned, started and stopped for decades.
Remember the Second Avenue subway that took nearly a century to complete?
For everyone’s sake, let’s hope this project moves a little faster.
I am so excited here today to announce that we have finished the feasibility study. See,
I said make it happen fast and it’s fast. I told you, I’m impatient.
We've gotten a lot more interest in improving transit in the outer boroughs than you had
in the 90s because people have seen the job growth. Recently during COVID, we saw some
of the neighbourhoods in the outer boroughs that would be served by the Interborough line.
They still had tons of people going to work throughout the whole entire pandemic,
and there was increased desire to improve public transit for them.
The Interborough Express would run 14 miles from Bay Ridge,
Brooklyn to Jackson Heights, Queens in 40 minutes or less.
It would break New York’s pattern of subway lines radiating out from
Manhattan- stretching across two of the city’s outer boroughs and
intersecting with up to 17 existing subway lines leading into Manhattan.
The MTA says the Interborough Express would serve up to 88,000
riders a day and could shave more than half an hour off peoples commutes.
Now, that could make a big difference to people who have traditionally been underserved by public
transit. 7 in 10 are people of colour and 3 in 10 live significantly below the poverty line.
And as Manhattan becomes more and more expensive,
many people and businesses are leaving the city for the outer boroughs like Brooklyn and Queens.
In fact, since the Great Recession,
roughly half of New York City’s job growth has happened in the outer boroughs.
And the area around the Interborough Express is expected to add tens of
thousands of new residents and jobs over the next 25 years.
We're largely relying on a very old system that doesn't provide some of the connections that we
need today. And so we're kind of playing a game of catch up in some ways to provide those vital
connections and catch up with the population growth we've seen.
The construction of the line itself presents an interesting opportunity.
There’s already a rail line in place called the Bay Ridge Branch.
It opened in 1876 as a passenger service line,
but was shut down in 1924 because there weren’t as many tourists going to Manhattan Beach.
Now, the Bay Ridge Branch is used to transport just one round-trip
freight train per day, on average.
The idea for the Interborough Express
is to repurpose the underused line to add commuter service,
while also building up the existing freight services alongside it.
Since most of the route is already built, this project
should cost much less than building an entire new subway line from scratch.
That’ll be a huge selling point as the project seeks funding.
New York City subway construction is some of the most expensive in the world.
Sadly, it’s not as easy as just adding passenger carriages to the existing track.
There’s a long list of engineering challenges the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will face.
They’ll have to manoeuvre a fuel pipeline that serves LaGuardia and JFK Airports.
Elevated segments of the new route would need to navigate road traffic and other subway lines.
And there might not be enough vertical space for a
new passenger line to weave through some of the existing underpasses.
To make things even more complicated,
the air rights above part of the existing route have been sold or leased to private developers.
That would mean the MTA needs to construct new viaducts or tunnels
to avoid the existing properties - and all of that means more time and money.
There are still a lot of question marks around how the Interborough Express would actually work.
It’s not yet decided which mode of transit the line would be
serviced by – conventional rail, light rail or bus rapid transit.
And it’s unclear how the project will be financed. The MTA chairman estimated the
cost would be ‘single digit billions’ and take 3-5 years of construction.
The plan is also missing a key part of the RPA’s original Triboro RX
proposal – the connection with the Bronx.
Some Bronx residents have said they’re left out of the Interborough Express idea.
And State Senator Jessica Ramos has called on the governor to connect that borough too.
I mean, they have to start somewhere,
right? They're not going to build the whole 22 mile corridor. It
makes sense to start in Brooklyn and Queens for a bunch of different reasons.
One, The MTA actually owns the right of way there, so you know,
it would just be easier to do a project there.
Two, the Bronx is getting a big transit project called Penn Access, which will bring the metro north into Penn Station
and that would be along the same line as the Bronx portion of the Triboro.
First, you start with Brooklyn and Queens and we'll see what happens.
There’s a way to go before the Interborough Express becomes a reality.
But it’s a rare opportunity to take something old and make it new again.
And in a city with some of the biggest stations and more subway lines than you can keep track of,
one the most impactful projects might be sitting right in front of us, just waiting to be built.
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