The Regional Plan Association has a really good suggestion – a plan, one might even say – for running a new mass transit rail line from southern Brooklyn through central Queens to the south and east Bronx. It is potentially much cheaper per mile than other projects, like the Second Avenue Subway, because it uses existing (and underused) rail rights-of-way.
The southernmost leg of this route is the South Brooklyn Railway, an old freight railroad built to connect the docks west of Brooklyn’s Second Avenue to the factories inland. A lot of the rest is the New York Connecting Railroad, built with Penn Station to allow trains from the northeast, and specifically Boston, access to that station.
The proposed rail line would greatly speed up travel between those three outer boroughs – and remember that the populations of Brooklyn and Queens are significantly larger than that of Manhattan, and the Bronx is right behind Manhattan – and would serve a number of areas that right now have limited mass transit options. Putting aside all that, and putting aside the environmental benefits of using rail for transpiration rather than cars or buses, rail is the only form of transportation that has the capacity to serve the city’s growth. New York has added approximately 1,200,000 since 1990 or, in other words, the number of residents in our growth exceeds the total population of all but nine cities in the country. There are simply too many people here for travel to function except by rail.
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