Maps: see how the Interborough Express could unlock new opportunities for New York City

In this article, mathematician and transit efficiency researcher Alon Levy discusses some of the impending changes with the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority's (MTA) plan to develop a cross-borough light rail line between Brooklyn and Queens. This project is called the Interborough Express (IBX). The MTA, the city, and the state all support the plan and it is expected to be operational in 2027, as long as enough funding from Biden's great Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) can be obtained. The IBX is projected to cost about $5.5 billion.

Currently, Brooklyn and Queens have very few direct rail connections: the G train very close to the East River (across from Manhattan) is the only one. Every other rail line goes into Manhattan and then back out to another borough. This model does not adequately serve many residents of Brooklyn and Queens. Many trains are overcrowded, and first traveling to Manhattan to get to another outer borough is often excessively indirect and time-consuming, leading people to drive unnecessarily. Unnecessary driving in New York ultimately contributes to fatalities, pollution, traffic, noise, stress, and all-around unpleasantness.

The IBX is intended to change that by expanding existing freight right-of-way to have enough capacity for passenger service between Brooklyn Army Terminal to Flatbush and then up to Roosevelt Avenue/Jackson Heights. Most of the route would be grade-separated from traffic, but a few small sections would run at street level. The line will have 19 stops and will connect with about 17 different subway lines as well as the Long Island Railroad. This would be New York's second non-radial line. The interconnections that would result from the IBX would really make the NYC subway into a true system rather than a collection of individual lines.

I was particularly interested in Levy's maps demonstrating the following:

• Change in the number of jobs accessible by transit around the new line: in some cases, it's 400,000 jobs or more now available to people living at a single point near a new station. Collectively, that's millions and millions of job opportunities. The map is VERY revealing. It shows just how important transit is to employment, and by extension how much more financially secure many New Yorkers would be if they didn't have to spend $10,000+ annually on a vehicle just to get to work.
• Current "drive alone ratio" around the IBX's planned route and elsewhere, i.e. how car-dependent different places in New York are. By extension, the map demonstrates how much easier it would be to live car-lite or car-free in these parts of Brooklyn and Queens with the new line. There are actually quite a few places in inner Queens and Brooklyn that, due to their lack of subways, have excessively high car use; there are plenty of bus services here, but any bus or car is always slower than a grade-separated train.

Cities are not nearly as monocentric as they were in the 1950s, when this radial rail paradigm gained a foothold. Because they are now much more polycentric, it's important to provide quick and easy access to areas without going through the region's core. The advantages are numerous: easing congestion in the city's busiest stations, providing more people with reliable transit access (not everyone can drive), and providing more opportunities to de-crowd overly expensive housing markets in New York.

To accompany the new line, the city must upzone land parcels within walking distance of each station. This is called Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) and can massively reduce car dependency while also alleviating the housing crisis. There is some research out there suggesting that the most "efficient" form of human habitation/land use/resource use involves several very high-density nodes distributed in a polycentric layout. The IBX, as a circumferential route, enables exactly that.

The IBX isn't without its problems. The Effective Transit Alliance (of which Levy is a contributing author) states unequivocally that "the current plan to run trains along the street near All Faiths Cemetery should be replaced with a fully grade separated alignment." They believe that having any at-grade sections which share traffic with automobiles will limit the true success of the line. I tend to agree that the alignment should be fully grade-separated (on principle), and given the ETA's analysis it would clearly not be as difficult in this case, financially or politically, as the MTA appears to think. Either way, the IBX will still be an amazing thing if built by 2027.