BY RICK HORAN | news@queensledger.com
New Yorkers are complaining about “top-down” overreach in Washington, DC, but let’s take a moment to consider who’s pulling the strings here in our own city. As the country approaches its 250th birthday, it seems like a good time for some introspection.
In 2012, the Trust for Public Land (TPL) teamed up with a group calling themselves The Friends of Queensway. They falsely claimed that Queens no longer needed the Rockaway Beach Branch (RBB) for transit and wanted the city to build a park on it. When transit advocates caught wind of this counterproductive plan, the seeds for QueensLink’s rails and trails project were sown.
Our small volunteer group believed that once elected representatives were made aware of this threat to the borough’s only north-south rail corridor, they would do what was necessary to restore the rail service the city had taken away in 1962.
Despite Queens’ need for better transit, Queensway obtained over $1 million in funding from the governor and a state senator, disproportionate to its public support. Why weren’t city and state representatives working to improve public transit for their constituents instead of funding a park that would block it?
Things began to make sense when we learned that the head of a large New York lobbying firm was also the founder of The Friends of Queensway. Maybe years of donations, deals, and ol’ boy networks, the lifeblood of lobbyists and politicians, were finally paying off for Queensway.
What do people want? Senator Addabbo asked his constituents that question. Their response was 3:1 in favor of transit over parks. QueensLink includes both.
Even the Trust for Public Land (TPL), Queensway’s deep-pocketed partner, had a man on the inside. The NYC Parks Commissioner at the time formally endorsed TPL and Queensway in an official request for a New York State grant. The commissioner forgot to mention he had already accepted a senior post at TPL that would begin in two months’ time. The letter did disclose that he had asked DCAS to transfer control of the rail corridor to Parks.
In 2018, the Governor sandbagged the results of the MTA’s RBB reactivation study, causing it to miss the 2020-2024 Capital Plan while doubling its build cost and discounting its benefits.
In September 2022, our last mayor, no stranger to deal-making, announced $35 million in public funding would be used to build Queensway, Phase 1, called Met Hub Park. He claimed it was a park-poor area, yet it’s adjacent to the massive Forest Park. He also promised it wouldn’t block reactivation.
Our new mayor, a former QueensLink supporter, confirmed that the park would have to be ripped up to add rail. Still, he’s keeping $43 million in the budget to build the park project he once opposed. Why?
As the corridor’s legal owner, the city should be working with the state-controlled MTA to reactivate the line; instead, it seems intent on undermining it. These actions demonstrate why politicians, with a few exceptions, who have short-term horizons and competing interests, cannot make sound, long-term infrastructure decisions. A better system would have public transit users driving these planning decisions.
The city blames the MTA for failing to prioritize reactivation, and the MTA blames the city for blocking reactivation with a transit-blocking park. Sadly, they’re both right. The city should just sell the transit corridor to the MTA so the finger-pointing can stop, and Queens residents can finally get the transit and parks they deserve.
Without the benefit of public input or environmental and economic studies, federal representatives added $117.8 million for Phase 2, a 9-acre “Forest Park Pass,” fully within Forest Park. Thankfully, $112 million was rescinded, for now.
The QueensLink Initial Business Case analyzes both the costs and benefits of reconnecting South Queens with the rest of the borough and bringing the G train back to Forest Hills, which serves 75,000 daily riders.
The MTA is getting much better at building new infrastructure and confirmed that the RBB reactivation will be included in their next Comparative Evaluation. We also look forward to collaborating with them on a USDOT/NYSDOT-funded, $500k QueensLink study, expected to begin this fall.
Queens deserves better transit and parks, but they must be designed together; building the park first just gets in the way. We challenge city, state, and federal representatives to work together on behalf of the people they were elected to serve to ensure that QueensLink’s integrated subway and parks project is included in the MTA’s 2030 – 2034 Capital Plan.
Congestion pricing was supposed to help fund new outer-borough infrastructure, so motorists had a viable, public transit alternative to driving. Instead, the city is again denying Queens the rail transit that it wrongly took away all those years ago. Is this the kind of city we want to live in?
Rick Horan is the executive director of QueensLink. Rick has been a public transit advocate since commuting from Rockaway to midtown Manhattan in the 1980s. He led a successful effort to improve A Train and shuttle service in the mid ‘90s. In 2015 Rick founded QueensRail Corporation, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit to advocate for reactivating the Rockaway Beach Branch.
