You Gotta Believe the IBX Is Coming

It’s just before 10 on a Friday morning, the D train is hurtling toward Coney Island, and Governor Kathy Hochul is working the car, Tom Cruise style. She fist-bumps a first-year medical student who got on at Atlantic-Barclays, shakes hands with a salt-and-pepper-haired man who was staring at the governor and her aides, and tells another, similarly bewildered rider, “We’re going to have a great ride!” Janno Lieber, the MTA chairman and CEO who stands about a foot taller than the governor, is making rounds of his own just a few steps behind her, talking to people about where they’re headed. “You guys coming from Brooklyn?” he asks a couple. Hochul and Lieber, for their part, are headed to the border of Borough Park and Bensonhurst to announce that the Interborough Express is moving from the “planning” phase to the “active” phase of development. What that means is that the project now has an engineering team in place to design the light rail that’s supposed to take someone from Bay Ridge to Jackson Heights in about 30 minutes. As for when that someone might actually step foot on such a train? “We’d be spitballing now,” Hochul says. Perhaps before the Mets win their next World Series? “You gotta believe,” Lieber says.

When we arrive at the 62nd Street-New Utrecht Avenue stop, Hochul, Lieber, and their teams head toward the rocky freight corridor where a single-rail track line is surrounded by leafy trees. If everything goes according to plan, this will be the site of one of the IBX’s 19 stations. (A green New York & Atlantic Railway freight car parked on the track line said as much with giant signs affixed to its front and side reading “Future Home of the IBX.”) The idea for the interborough rail has been kicking around in one form or another for the better part of 30 years. Per Lieber, the governor got onboard the project shortly after she was elected. “She fastened on this project because of the time savings,” he says. For her part, Hochul adds, “I like to take the stalled projects, the ones that have been talked about, and bring them to life.” And, really, what’s not to like about the IBX? Despite being the two most populous boroughs in the city, it is still incredibly time-consuming, for the most part, to get from Brooklyn to Queens and vice versa. If you live in Gravesend and want to see your aunt in Middle Village or get tacos in Jackson Heights, you’re looking at an hour-plus commute and a detour through Manhattan. Lieber says his daughter, who lives in Williamsburg, has to go into Manhattan to take the train to see him and his wife in Flatbush. (I might suggest the G and walk to Atlantic transfer as an alternative, for what it’s worth.) “You’ve got thousands and thousands of people living in East Flatbush, and they don’t really have access to rail when you get past what we call ‘the junction,’ where the 2/5 ends,” Lieber says.

Hochul made the rounds on the train car, Tom Cruise-style, giving riders fist-bumps and shaking hands.
Photo: Susan Watts/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul

To create a more direct path, and bring transit to parts of the boroughs that desperately need it, the planned IBX will run 14 miles along an existing freight corridor owned by the Long Island Railroad and the rail company CSX to connect these parts of the city. For an OMNY swipe, the IBX is projected to move an estimated 165,000 daily riders in a tidy 32 minutes, with transfers to 17 subway lines, the LIRR, and 51 buses.

There’s also a housing component to the project, though not directly. A report released last month by the New York Building Congress estimated that the light rail could ultimately spur development of more than 70,000 new homes along the route over the course of a decade with the help of some land-use changes. The rail’s designated path winds through some of the city’s least dense areas — the swaths of one- and two-families in Maspeth and the manufacturing zones of Canarsie and East New York. According to Crain’s, developers are already eyeing sites near the rail’s proposed stations. (Rezonings are likely to face challenges in at least some of these neighborhoods, particularly the ones with City Council members who voted against the City of Yes.) “I absolutely need that done,” Hochul says of the new housing. The reasons are obvious enough at this point, but she’s also watching the shortage of affordable housing across the city condemn some of its youngest residents to an unspeakable fate: “They’re going to New Jersey,” she says. “Why? Because they built more housing. That’s it.”

While we’ve been led along about cross-borough transit before — like Bill de Blasio’s ill-fated Brooklyn-Queens Connector that would have shuttled riders from Red Hook to Astoria via streetcar — the IBX and its projected 2030s-ish timeline feels far more serious: For one, Hochul approved funding in April through the state budget that covered half of the IBX’s expected $5.5 billion price tag (the train cars are going to cost another $432 million). There’s also a line of city and state officials supporting the new rail. “Jackson Heights has some of the best food,” says Queens Borough President Donovard Richards Jr. during the press conference, “so we look forward to our Brooklyn people coming to spend their money.”

That said, it’s hard not to wonder what’s going to happen here given the backpedaling we’ve seen on other projects and still-unfulfilled promises with others, the recent sparring between New York and Washington over everything from congestion pricing to what a Real World alum from Wisconsin thinks about our subways, and the Trump administration trying to blow a hole in the MTA’s budget by withholding promised federal funds. Plus, there are utilities to be moved and bridges to be shored up along the path. It’s a simple idea but not exactly a simple project.

Kathryn Garcia, the governor’s director of state operations, is well aware. She says after the press conference that the state has been in federal court fighting the Trump administration’s efforts to withhold funds over congestion pricing. As for the IBX costs, there’s enough state funding earmarked to get shovels in the ground, but the state would welcome the federal government pitching in at some point: “We know that the money will be needed in the future, and we haven’t closed that door, because hopefully there will be a better federal administration in the future,” Garcia says.

As the press appearance winds down, Lieber, who called Hochul “the most impactful governor on transit since Nelson Rockefeller,” made an early exit. Hochul hung back for a few more questions from reporters and pictures with other officials. Eventually, she started packing it in too. The governor made it up the hill from the rail corridor, where a black Suburban was waiting to take her to eastern Queens. The train from here is a slog, after all.

Will we get to ride the IBX before the Mets win their next World Series? “You gotta believe,” Lieber says.
Photo: Matthew Sedacca