For roughly a century, New Yorkers have floated the same fantasy: a train that connects Brooklyn and Queens directly, without dragging you into Manhattan and back out. The Interborough Express, the MTA’s 14-mile light rail along an existing freight line, is the version of that dream that is actually getting built, and as of this month it is grinding through the least glamorous and most consequential phase of all: environmental review and design.
The numbers are real now, not aspirational. The IBX would run 19 stations from Bay Ridge to Jackson Heights, connecting with 17 subway lines, 50 bus routes and two LIRR stations along the way, a single ride that today can mean two trains and the better part of an hour. The price tag is $5.5 billion, and Governor Hochul has secured half of it in the MTA’s 2025-2029 capital plan, which is the difference between a study and a project.
The part neighbors are actually watching is smaller and closer to home. After community input, the MTA is now prioritizing tunneling the line beneath Metropolitan Avenue rather than running it at street level, a real concession in the stretch through Ridgewood and Middle Village where the freight cut and the surface streets collide. How much of the route goes under, over or alongside existing tracks is being settled right now, in design rooms and community board briefings, not at a ribbon cutting.
The question that makes people nervous is property. The MTA says the line mostly fits inside the right-of-way it and the freight railroad CSX already own, and that the private property it would need to take is expected to be minimal. “Minimal” is not “none,” though, and the agency has been clear that the full picture, which parcels, how many and where, will not be public until the Draft Environmental Impact Statement comes out. That document is due this fall, and it is the one to actually read.
The schedule is a multi-year grind. Design runs into late 2027, the draft environmental statement opens for public comment in the fall, and construction is further out still. That is slow, but it is the speed of a thing that is genuinely happening rather than being studied to death. For the eastern-Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods the line would serve, places the subway map tends to treat as the end of the line, the IBX is the rare megaproject pointed at them instead of at Manhattan.
The leverage point is that fall comment period. When the MTA releases the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, anyone in the corridor can submit comments on the route, the stations, the tunneling and the property questions, and the project’s official page at mta.info posts the meeting schedule and the documents as they drop. If the IBX runs past your neighborhood, the design being argued over right now is the version you will ride, or live next to, for the next 50 years.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily archive
