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In the last decade, city and MTA officials made major improvements to bus service on Woodhaven and Cross Bay Boulevards, speeding up commutes between the Rockaway Peninsula and the Queens mainland. But getting to and from the Rockaways with these upgraded buses still takes too long. The Rockaways needs QueensLink, and I hope that Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani advances in this direction.
QueensLink is one of two competing proposals for how to reactivate abandoned train tracks on the Rockaway Beach Branch, which parallels Woodhaven Boulevard and Cross Bay Boulevard from Rego Park in Central Queens all the way into the Rockaways — a corridor currently served by the Q53 Select Bus Service, which connects to several train lines in Elmhurst. But only the segment north of Ozone Park (near the Rockaway Boulevard subway station) is abandoned; the MTA runs the A train on the rest, connecting riders to Brooklyn, the west side of Manhattan and uptown.
The route of the deactivated section of the Rockaway Branch in Queens.Map via QueenLink
The QueensLink proposal would bring subway service (along with a bike-friendly greenway) onto the abandoned segment through Forest Park; the subway would then merge into the Queens Boulevard line, creating the first north/south subway line through a substantial chunk of Queens. Mayor Adams's administration started to move forward with a competing "Highline-style" greenway-only plan — until Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pulled $117 million of federal funding from the project. The city put another $14 million into the first phase of the project this fall — from Metropolitan Avenue to Union Turnpike —and plans to start work in late 2026.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, however, suports QueensLink, having said this summer that the proposal "will continue to be important to me." This presents a tremendous opportunity for the city to correct its course and push the state and MTA to get on board with bringing mass transit to the unused right of way.
The Rockaways has a population of 124,000, but according to the MTA, just over 9,000 riders take the A train to and from the Rockaways each day. This is a number low enough to be worth replacing with more frequent buses and more bus lanes, thus abandoning the entire Rockaway Beach Branch south of Howard Beach-JFK Airport, the last stop on the Queens mainland before crossing Jamaica Bay.
A recent experience gave me a glimpse of what that would be like — not good. When the MTA shut down A train service from Howard Beach into the Rockaways for a reconstruction project, offering cross-bay riders bound for Broad Channel and the Rockaway a free shuttle bus instead. A free shuttle train also ran on the island between Mott Avenue and Beach 116th Street.
On Wednesday, April 2, with free time on my way home during the evening rush, I decided to detour into the Rockaways (just for fun). My shuttle bus ride was miserable due to congestion on Cross Bay Boulevard, which has no bus lanes. Before COVID, I regularly rode this segment during the middle of the day, and it never got stuck in traffic on this part of the route, so it came as a surprise to me when my bus (and the buses running behind and ahead of us) got clogged up by congestion on Rockaway Boulevard.
A map of the possible QueensLink layout.Graphic: Vanshookenraggen
That’s without mentioning how my ride on the Q109 bus had started: The "bus stop" area to board these shuttle buses was inside the JFK Airport parking lot, accessible from an emergency exit from the Manhattan-bound subway platform at Howard Beach-JFK Airport. This may have made sense from a logistical standpoint, thanks to lots of unused parking spaces the MTA could repurpose for storing buses, but it was terrible from a routing standpoint for the Q109. The only way the bus could leave the area and head towards Broad Channel was to backtrack all the way to Lefferts Boulevard and double back on Conduit Avenue.
And shortly before reaching the arterial that gets us to the Rockaways (Cross Bay Boulevard), we hit congestion, having to wait in a queue behind left-turning drivers trying to merge into the same backed-up traffic on the boulevard itself. At that point during the ride, enough time had passed that during normal A train service, I would’ve already been at Beach 67 St, the first stop in the Rockaways. But on this bus, I hadn't made any progress — in fact I had gone backwards.
This is why I disagree with a frequently made argument that bus rapid transit is enough for the corridor. I understand that QueensWay proponents want to avoid the train proposal's longer timeline and the additional expense of rebuilding the abandoned segment for train service, and instead go for the option that will deliver some benefit to surrounding communities sooner.
Yet Superstorm Sandy wrecked most of the existing train line in 2012, and MTA still thought it was worthy to invest in it and has been doing so ever since, without ever considering shutting it down permanently as an option. If it made sense to do this for 9,000 train riders a decade ago, doesn't it make sense for 14,087 weekday bus riders today?
Even with their existing subway service, Rockaways residents face some of the longest commutes in the city, and the existing Select Bus Service doesn't seem to have made a substantial dent in that, despite the city's nearly half-billion dollar investment in the corridor. Even with high quality bus lanes, the crowded Q53 still takes upwards of 70 minutes to run most of its route between Rockaway Park and Jackson Height. In contrast, a subway from Rockaway Park on QueensLink would reach 42 St-Bryant Park in Manhattan in the same amount of time.
Making buses even faster with protected bus lanes on the entire route is certainly an option, but there are benefits that can only come from train service. For one, reliability on the Queens Boulevard local subway line — a line many Q52 and Q53 riders transfer to anyway! — would improve by diverting some train traffic off the last stop at Forest Hills-71st Avenue.
QueensLink also makes sense fiscally: existing assets would be better utilized for a one-time capital expenditure, and infrastructure (including any additional trains needed) lasts longer before needing replacement. In contrast, buses and roads need to be replaced and repaved more often, and more bus drivers need to be paid to gain an increase in capacity. Rather than disproportionately allocating a lot of resources towards a single bus corridor, I'd rather see the overall transit network improved by bolstering connecting buses like the Q22, Q24, Q51, and perhaps the Q89 with a reroute connecting Rochdale Village to Ozone Park.
Ignore the noise, the residents of Queens — especially the Rockaways — need another train line.
