New Subway Lines Should Stretch Into Parts Of Queens, Report Says

QUEENS, NY -- In a recent citywide report full of suggestions to make New Yorkers' lives better, access to public transportation ranked a top priority - particularly in transit desserts like Northern and Central Queens.

The Regional Plan Association, a New York-based nonprofit, spent the last five years asking roughly 4,000 people from the tri-state what they need most from the region, and what it lacks. The result was "The Fourth Regional Plan," a list of 61 suggestions to combat what the report found were the area's biggest challenges: Transportation, economic opportunity, affordable housing and its response to climate change.

For Queens residents in particular, transportation remains among the city's biggest woes, with many of the borough's neighborhoods out of the subway system's reach. The RPA noted that disparity in its report, which claimed that while less than two-thirds of the citywide population lives in walking distance of a subway, fewer than four in 10 Queens residents can walk to a subway from their home.

"The region needs to invest in new large-scale projects to modernize and extend the subways and regional rail networks," the report summary states.

Two public transportation proposals in the report aim to reach current transit deserts in North and Central Queens. The first is a regional railway, dubbed the Trans Regional Express, that would provide more subway-like services and fares in Queens stops along the Long Island Rail Road and add eight new stations in Elmhurst, Corona, Rego Park, Rochdale, Laurelton and South Jamaica.

The other, dubbed the Triboro Line, would connect various pieces of the subway system between Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan in a 24-mile line along existing freight rail tracks from Sunset Park in Brooklyn to Co Op City in the Bronx. The Triboro would provide service to places like Middle Village and Glendale, the RPA said.

The plan also proposed adding new subway lines or extending current ones to fill other transportation gaps in Queens. It posed a new 3.7-mile line alone Northern Boulevard line, running from 36th Street to Willets Point, that would serve Jackson Heights, North Corona, North Flushing, Mitchell-Linden and College Point.

A proposed 5.7- mile Jewel Avenue Line would extend R and M trains from the Queens Boulevard line to Pomonok and Fresh Meadows in Central Queens and connect the posed Trans Regional Express to the LIRR main line in Hollis and Queens Village, according to the plan.

The plan also calls for a new station and and train yard north of Ditmars Boulevard along 20th Street in Astoria to keep up with dramatic population increases expected in neighborhood. The plan argued the new yard could allow the line to expand nearly a mile west toward East River into densely populated parts of Astoria that are currently far from a subway.

The report also calls for improvements to the JFK Airport in Jamaica. Suggestions to "expand and modernize" the airport include two additional runways, larger and more customer-friendly terminals and better transit access. The improvements, along with rearrangements to the Newark International Airport in New Jersey, would allow the region's airports to handle roughly 60 percent more passengers and reduce delays by 33 percent, the report claims.

The RPA could not immediately be reached for comment on the regional plan and its transportation proposals. Click here to read all 61 improvement suggestions in the nonprofit's full 376-page report.

Lead photo via Getty Images.