New York Is Trying to Build Something Good for Once

In the past several decades, New York has spent, or is in the process of spending, many tens of billions of dollars on mass transportation projects that haven’t made getting around the city any better. 

There’s the Second Avenue Subway, a spur just two blocks east from an existing subway line, that cost $4.5 billion and some $300,000 per new subway rider, plus Phase II which is going to extend that spur northward for an even higher cost and lower likelihood of attracting new riders. There’s East Side Access, an $11 billion boondoggle that has been in the works since the 1990s, all so that Long Island commuters can arrive in Manhattan at Grand Central instead of Penn Station; the two are about a 15-minute walk apart. There’s Moynihan Train Hall, a $1.6 billion temple to modern mediocrity that doesn’t even make for a very good train hall. And, if not for a completely unrelated scandal forcing the only person who liked the LaGuardia AirTrain from office, New York would have gotten a $2.1 billion useless airport connector. Overall, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Port Authority, the city, the state, and federal agencies have spent tens of billions of dollars on new transportation construction in the city that hasn’t actually changed or improved the way people in America's largest city get around at all, a monumental feat of poor planning, institutional inertia, and bureaucratic failure that has condemned New York to a laughing stock on the global transportation landscape.

So when Governor Kathy Hochul proposed an actually good transportation project during her State of the State speech, I thought it would be the first and last time New Yorkers heard about it from an official source. After all, that’s not the kind of thing we do here. 

But on Thursday, the MTA released a feasibility study for the Interborough Express, or IBX. It is a damned good idea, the kind of project that could truly transform the way many New Yorkers get around. It is not the type of project that will save people five or ten minutes. It’s the kind of project that will suddenly link transit deserts to the rest of the city, that will cut commute times in half, and that will give fast, convenient options for trips that previously only made sense in cars. And it won’t cost tens of billions of dollars. 

The IBX would run along an underutilized freight rail line that sweeps across southern Brooklyn and eastern Queens, from Bay Ridge to Jackson Heights, a trip of about 14 miles. Currently, that line only carries three freight trains per day, even though it runs through many vibrant neighborhoods that are otherwise a pain to get around, or get to, from most of the city. Most fortuitously, the line also crosses 17 (!) subway lines, so it would connect neighborhoods not only to each other, but also to the existing subway system. 

Adding another transit line between Brooklyn and Queens is one of New York’s greatest transportation needs. There is only one subway line, the G, that directly connects them. All others run through Manhattan. Even the bus system doesn’t really connect the boroughs, because the bus lines are largely segregated by borough, so few lines run between the two. This is an antiquated, silly idea for how New Yorkers get around. Especially in recent decades, travel patterns in Brooklyn and Queens have gradually but drastically changed, with more people seeking to go between these boroughs rather than simply to and from Manhattan. 

The only semi-serious proposal in my lifetime to better connect these boroughs was former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s half-gassed idea for a streetcar, called the Brooklyn Queens Connector or the BQX, but that had the distinctive drawbacks of being an above-ground parallel line to the G that would get stuck in traffic. By contrast, the IBX is something totally new, complementing the existing system rather than overlapping with it. 

And because this routing uses an existing rail line, it should come at a much cheaper price tag than New York transportation projects typically do. Which is to say, it will still cost several billion dollars, but not tens of billions of dollars. For perspective, the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway attracted some 14,000 additional riders per day, whereas the MTA is projecting about 80,000 daily riders on the IBX; given the relative dearth of good public transit in those neighborhoods, it is likely many of those trips are currently not taken via public transit. Considering New York is used to building rail lines at a few billion dollars per mile, a 14-mile, transformative transportation project for less than the cost of the two phases of the Second Avenue subway is, by New York standards, a bargain. 

That isn’t to say everything about this project is settled. In fact, pretty much nothing is. There is no timeline for construction, but even the most optimistic future would put us several years away from the first shovels in the ground. And I still have some questions about what’s been proposed so far. The study doesn’t have much to say at all about cost. Even though there’s no reason to believe the cost will be astronomical, never question New York’s ability to find a way to make things inordinately expensive. The cost of this project will be something to watch.

A key decision the MTA will have to make is what type of transit corridor this is going to be. The feasibility study provides three options. The first is “conventional rail,” commuter rail-sized trains but with modern, European-like designs approved by the Federal Railroad Administration in 2018 that look more like subway cars. The second is light rail, which are smaller, narrower trains used in many cities around the U.S. The third is Bus Rapid Transit, or BRT, which combines light rail-like stations with bus operation on dedicated roads. The MTA says they will decide which to use after conducting public outreach and further study, but a BRT system, while the cheapest, would likely struggle to keep up with projected ridership.

For some reason, the MTA contends that a trip on the IBX would take six minutes longer with the “conventional rail” option than light rail due to longer dwell times at stations. This is puzzling because elsewhere in the study it describes the conventional rail cars as “configured similarly to subway cars, allowing for faster boarding and alighting as well as more standing room on trains, and trains would operate at transit-level frequencies.” While this is a puzzling inconsistency, I was pleasantly surprised to see the MTA acknowledge the 2018 FRA rule change at all, since it otherwise hasn’t in any of its train purchases since.

Another potential downside of this proposal is it modified pre-existing “Triborough Express” ideas to leave the Bronx out, because the MTA is concerned about maintaining good service over the Hell’s Gate Bridge which connects Queens and the Bronx and has much higher traffic volumes than the freight line along the IBX. If nothing else, including Hell’s Gate in the project would make Amtrak a functional partner, and the agency has a reputation for being notoriously difficult to work with. 

But my biggest worry about the IBX does not have to do with any of the specs or details of the plan. My concern is the IBX is yet another vacant campaign promise from a politician trying to get elected. Hochul is running for election this year. There is nothing wrong with courting voters with good ideas. Some would argue that is the entire point of a democracy. The worry is, if elected, she will no longer be motivated to see the project out. Or, if she doesn’t, whoever does will view the IBX as a “Hochul idea” and dismiss it for petty political reasons. I hope none of this happens, and whoever is governor come 2023 pushes the MTA to make the IBX real. I’ve read a lot about how New York City used to build good things. It sounds nice. I’d like to experience that for myself for a change.