'Interborough Express' for Brooklyn and Queens Moves Step Forward

When Gov. Kathy Hochul delivered her first State of the State address this month, she vowed to advance a transportation project that has been bandied about for decades: a public transit connection between Brooklyn and Queens that she called the Interborough Express.

On Thursday, Ms. Hochul moved a step closer to realizing her vision for a link that would fill significant gaps in New York’s Manhattan-focused transit system and provide easier, faster travel to hundreds of thousands of low-income residents and people of color.

“We’re going to give people more time for their jobs, their families, their lives and make the connections that are necessary,” she said at a news conference in Brooklyn, where she announced that a feasibility study had been completed that would allow the project to move to its next phase.

The Interborough Express — as conceived by Ms. Hochul and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which would build and operate it — would put a new transit line along an existing 14-mile rail line that runs from Bay Ridge in Brooklyn to Jackson Heights in Queens.

There are still many details to be ironed out. The transportation authority has not determined whether it will use a conventional rail, a light rail or a rapid-bus system, and will not do so until it gathers public feedback and conducts an environmental review.

Without a clear plan, Janno Lieber, the authority’s chair and chief executive, would only estimate the cost in the “single-digit billions.” He declined to give a full timeline, saying that construction, when it begins, would likely take “three to five years.” How the project would be financed is also unclear.

But should the Interborough Express proceed as envisioned, the project would mark a significant transformation for the city’s transit network, which since its inception more than a century ago has focused primarily on shuttling commuters into business districts in Manhattan.

The region’s latest transit projects have reinforced this blueprint. The subway’s most recent extensions — a new station at the Hudson Yards mega-development on the Far West Side and the Second Avenue subway on the Upper East Side — have focused on better facilitating access to office hubs in Manhattan. The next spur of the Second Avenue subway would extend to East Harlem.

Construction is underway to connect the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal, helping some riders avoid a subway transfer to reach the East Side. Another project on the Metro-North Railroad will bring passengers to Pennsylvania Station and add four new stations in the Bronx that will give residents there better access to Manhattan and to the city’s northern suburbs.

But as the populations of Brooklyn and Queens boomed and employers migrated out of Manhattan, the traditional commuting patterns have changed. The shift has been further highlighted by the pandemic: ridership has rebounded far more quickly at stations outside Midtown and Lower Manhattan, New York’s main business districts.

Brooklyn and Queens have seen robust job growth in technology, hospitality and air travel, said Tom Wright, the president of the Regional Plan Association, an urban policy group.

But the city’s transit infrastructure has yet to reflect the change. Of the subway’s 22 lines, just one, the G train, does not travel into Manhattan and instead goes directly between Brooklyn and Queens. In many cases, residents of one borough looking to go to the other face lengthy subway journeys through Manhattan or bus trips along traffic-choked roads.

“For 100 years, our transit system has taken people in and out of Manhattan,” Mr. Wright said. “This is the first potentially fixed rail transit project that doesn’t need to connect to Manhattan.”

The Interborough Express would run along a rail line that is currently used for freight trips to Long Island. It has not carried passengers since 1924, and it is currently used for only three freight trips a day.

Proposals for using the existing infrastructure have been promoted for decades, including by the Regional Plan Association, which sought to have the transit link extended to the Bronx along the line being used for the Metro-North expansion.

“We always prioritized doing Brooklyn and Queens first,” Mr. Wright said. “Our hope is that there is still a possible extension or connection to the Bronx.”

Ms. Hochul has said that building along the freight line would allow the Interborough Express to be finished faster and at a lower cost than starting from scratch. On Thursday, she said the ongoing Metro-North expansion would likely crowd the tracks needed to extend the Interborough Express to the Bronx.

The route would bring additional transit options to parts of Brooklyn and Queens that are unserved or underserved by the existing subway, bus and rail system, including many low-income neighborhoods where people do not have cars.

According to the feasibility study, more than 900,000 people live within a half-mile of the new transit corridor. Of those, about 70 percent are people of color, about half live in households with no cars, and about one-third live in households whose income is below 150 percent of the federal poverty line.

“This is a fundamental equity issue,” Mr. Lieber said. “Communities — disproportionately low-income and communities of color, who are not in the middle of our transit system — will be connected.”

The study also found that 260,000 jobs exist in the area that would be most immediately served by the Interborough Express. But the new transit line would also link up with 17 subway lines, providing better access to jobs across the region. It could also ease congestion: About half of commutes made between Brooklyn and Queens in the area near the new transit line are made by car, the study said.

The feasibility study — which was commissioned in 2020, before Ms. Hochul’s tenure — estimated that as many as 88,000 people could ride the new transit line each weekday. The transportation authority is aiming to have service run every five minutes during peak commuting hours.

In the areas along the proposed transit line, “there are more people in Brooklyn and Queens together who are going to jobs in their borough or into the other of the two boroughs than there are crossing the East River,” Mr. Lieber said. “We have to adjust our transportation system to deal with that.”

Ana Ley contributed reporting.