QueensLink: The Fight to Connect the World’s Borough

By: David Ramos, Class III

Photo Credit: Pexels

New York's largest, second most populous, and most diverse borough is divided and a nightmare to get across. The city with the biggest and busiest subway system in North America falls short of providing a North-South connection in Queens. Citizens of “The World’s Borough” are confined to taking crowded buses through traffic-filled streets down Woodhaven and Crossbay Boulevard. 

However, a long-abandoned railroad and a group known as “QueensLink” are providing a solution.

Transit in Queens Currently

To get from neighborhoods in the South of Queens to the North, you would need to either take the 11 mile long Woodhaven and Crossbay Boulevard or the Van Wyck Expressway. 

The only public transportation is the Q52 and Q53 SBS down the 8 lane Woodhaven and Crossbay. An MTA progress report from Fall 2018 states that the end to end travel time between the North end in Woodside and South end in The Rockaways by bus is 55-85 minutes. Since 60% of 400k residents within 15 minutes of the Woodhaven and Crossbay corridor commute by public transport, and 43% don't own a car, many people in Queens have only one option for transportation: slow, small buses that quickly become crowded when 30k people have to pack themselves onto those buses every single day.

Why should Queens be connected?

The North of Queens and the South both have plenty to offer to each other. North Queens has an abundance of the borough's hospitals, which the South is lacking. The South, however, offers its abundance of beaches.

Jeffrey Lliguicota, Class III student at TBLS, currently resides in Corona, Queens and says that to get to Rockaway Beach during the summer he has to “first take the 7 to 74th St and transfer to the Q53 bus. Then ride it until the very last stop which takes more than an hour.”

QueensLink

QueensLink is a group that plans to reactivate service in abandoned railroad tracks that almost perfectly align between the two congested roadways, to connect Queens. Their proposal involves diverting the M train from Woodhaven Boulevard Station under Queens Center Mall onto these tracks. Then it would go down 4 new proposed stations, one on Metropolitan Avenue, another in Jamaica to connect to the J train, another on Atlantic Avenue that involves the reopening of the long-closed LIRR Woodhaven station underground, and the last one in Liberty Avenue to connect to the A train. After that it would keep going South to serve the Rockaways.

Conclusion

Queens stands divided right now and its people face long commutes to get around it. However, with a subway straight down the middle of it, not only can the commutes be cut, but the borough overall will grow exponentially.