jack

Last night I went to a meeting of the Richmond Hill Historical Society, most of which was given over to a presentation by another organization called Queenslink about their proposed project to revive an abandoned and overgrown train right-of-way (originally built in 1880 as the Rockaway Beach line of the LIRR, which ran until 1962), putting in a subway line (more precisely, extending the existing M subway line) with accompanying foot and bicycle trails. In this satellite map, the right-of-way is the green stripe running from Rego Park to Resorts World. The subway line would be underground in the Rego Park section, and above-ground (and cheaper) the rest of the way.

Sociological aside: the room was full of train geeks, reminiscent of the guy in the Monty Python sketch "It all happened on the 11.20 from Hainault to Redhill via Horsham and Reigate, calling at Carshalton Beeches, Malmesbury, Tooting Bec, and Croydon West". Naturally, most of them already knew in what year the line had been built, when it had been closed down, when the Richmond Hill LIRR station had closed down, when the G train stopped running to Forest Hills, etc. and were not shy about correcting every trivial misstatement anybody made.

This whole plan will of course require a few billion dollars, but oddly enough the biggest obstacle isn't elected officials unwilling to spend money but rather another organization called Queensway, whose proposed project is to revive the same abandoned and overgrown train right-of-way with foot and bicycle trails and recreational facilities ("the High Line of Queens"), but no mass transit. Notably, the Queensway project already has the approval of the current Mayor, Eric Adams, who's leaving office in three weeks. Now, Eric Adams appears to be a crook in bed with Donald Trump, and anything with his name on it is suspect, but that doesn't necessarily mean Queensway is a bad idea. However, the Queenslink people argue that once half a billion dollars has been spent building recreational facilities along the Queensway trails, it will be politically difficult to ever put in mass transit there. And building mass transit anywhere that isn't already a city-owned right of way requires the government taking people's homes and shops, which is also politically difficult.

One player with a vested interest in the project is Resorts World, a developer who's just received final approval to replace the Aqueduct horse-racing track in southern Queens with a casino, hotel, etc. There's still a lot of controversy about that project, but apparently it's going to happen. There's already a subway station at Aqueduct, but only for the A train, which runs through southern Queens and Brooklyn, through lower Manhattan, up the West Side to the northern tip of Manhattan; no straightforward way to get there from northern Queens, which Queenslink would provide. Resorts World has an incentive for as many people as possible to get to its facilities easily, so they may put some money into the project.

The New York City subway system, like most city mass-transit systems, makes it fairly easy to get from outlying areas to the densest business districts in the center of the city, but not at all easy to get from one outlying area to another: you generally have to go into the city center and switch to another line that goes out to where you want to go. One exception is the G train, the only line in the city that doesn't go into or through Manhattan at all: it runs from western Queens straight to southern Brooklyn. It used to run farther out in northern Queens until the early 2000's, and the Queenslink people claim that their project would enable the G train to be restored to where it used to go. After the meeting I asked one of them why this was, and one of the train geeks in the audience jumped in to explain. At present, four subway lines go to Forest Hills, two of them (the R and M) ending there, and the G line used to end there also. But Forest Hills doesn't have a turnaround facility (it takes a lot of space to turn around a 600-foot-long train), so any train that stops there has to go a little beyond the station, cross over two other tracks, and reverse direction before it can pick up passengers and head back towards Manhattan. Every train that does this maneuver takes a long time and blocks traffic on other lines. So the reasoning is that if the M train did that maneuver in Rockaway Beach rather than Forest Hills, there would be room for the G train to do it in Forest Hills again.

The M train is sorta weird in that it starts in Queens, goes through Manhattan and Brooklyn, and ends back in Queens less than three miles from its other end. We've often wondered why they don't just connect the two ends of the M train into a loop, which would provide another way to get from northern Queens to Brooklyn. Naturally, the same train-geek-in-the-audience explained that this is because (a) there's a cemetery in the way, where it's difficult to do underground construction, and (b) the two ends of the M line are basically perpendicular, subway trains can't make sharp turns, and there isn't room to get the two ends of the line lined up with one another.

As it turns out, there's another proposed project to connect Queens and Brooklyn: the Interborough Express, which would run 14 miles from western Brooklyn to north-central Queens along another abandoned and overgrown right-of-way. This project is farther along, with some design work done and environmental impact statements underway. It's farther west, so it wouldn't impact our lives as much as Queensway or Queenslink would.

I haven't heard from the Queensway people directly, and I like the idea of a walking-and-bicycle trail, but multi-mile-long straight-line transit routes already under city ownership are rare commodities, and it seems silly to have one and not use it for mass transit (as well as for pedestrian and bicycle trails).

As far as I can tell, Queensway has two advantages over Queenslink: it costs less money, and it provides a continuous pedestrian-and-bike trail (for about 3/4 mile south of Park Lane South, the right-of-way is too narrow to allow both an above-ground subway and pedestrian-and-bike trails, so the Queenslink people propose a parallel bike route a block away). But it seems to me that continuity is a sine qua non for mass transit, and a "nice-to-have" for trails (since there are plenty of other routes that pedestrians and bicyclists can legally take, just not as pleasant as a park).