A new/old train for Queens

Mayor de Blasio’s final Queens edition of “City Hall in your borough” kicks off today as he and his commissioners spend the week in the largest borough. In June 2017, a month before his first Queens sojourn, he was asked about the future of the 3.5 mile city-owned Rockaway Beach Branch of the LIRR, dormant since 1962, to either reactive transit service (QueensLink) or convert it to a linear park (QueensWay).

Said de Blasio back then, “we are closing in on our final decision. I want everything on the table. I will come back publicly with an assessment of the different options and the cost and we will move to a decision.” More than four years later, he’s still closing in and still silent, likely leaving it up to the next mayor to make the call. That call is an easy one: Put a train there with a fast, direct route from the Rockaways and JFK Airport to Midtown, benefiting 50,000 people a day.

We love linear parks on former railroad rights of way and were among the very first to urge the transformation of the High Line. But for transit-starved Queens, and especially for the even more transit-starved Rockaways, a new ride outweighs a new walk.

And it doesn’t have to be either/or, because of the 47 acres of the Rockaway Beach Branch’s fallow land from Ozone Park to Rego Park, more than 70% (33 acres), can be parkland alongside the renewed rail line, achieving the goals of both concepts.

After much pushing, the MTA finally commissioned a study on putting either subway or LIRR trains on the route and then sat on it for a year before releasing the laughable estimate in 2019 that it would cost $8.1 billion. A more reasonable review published this summer put the numbers at less than half that. And that includes New York’s super-inflated construction costs. Get those in line with the rest of the world and we can have a new train running.