Mamdani Budget Could Tank Queens Subway Expansion He Once Supported

Transit activists in Queens are calling foul on Mayor Mamdani for appearing to turn his back on a long-shot subway extension in Queens that he rallied for as an Assembly member and hyped up as recently as last summer.

Mamdani’s budget has money for a competing project to turn the right of way into a park akin to the High Line in Manhattan, a proposal known as the Queensway, according to Andrew Lynch, a proponent of the QueensLink proposal to revive service on a long-dormant MTA right of way through south and central Queens.

Per a line item that Lynch found, the mayor budgeted just over $43 million set aside for building the park. That lines up closely with former Mayor Eric Adams’s promise to give $35 million to design and build the first piece of the linear park — a segment known as the Metropolitan Hub.

“Looks like Mayor Mamdani is proposing to keep funding the Queensway’s Metro Hub,” Lynch, who’s been central to the design ideas of the rail project, posted on Bluesky on Sunday. “As designed, this will block future reactivation of the LIRR Rockaway Branch.”

The Metro Hub is just a single piece of the proposed Queensway between Metropolitan Avenue and Union Turnpike. QueensLink supporters maintain that if any piece of the park gets built, it would add another political and logistical obstacle to the MTA and city reactivating it for mass transit.

Adams Deputy Mayor Meera Joshi insisted building the Queensway wouldn’t preclude building QueensLink, but the city’s most recent designs of the Metropolitan Hub show the park pretty firmly entrenched in areas that train project would have to subsume. Any addition of transit on the route may require shutting down the park, at least temporarily.

QueenLink supporters have long made the case that the right of way could support both transit and parkland — but only if the city built the greenway with both ideas in mind.

Lynch shared a mock up of a tweaked design that he said would be more compatible with a future train project by orienting the park park slightly to the east:

QueensLink would reactivate the dormant Rockaway Beach Branch that used to carry Long Island Rail Road trains, giving the right of way to a new subway line that supporters say would carry 75,000 riders per day. The project would reroute the M train south from the 63 Drive-Rego Park stop down to Rockaway Park-Beach 116 Street in Rockaway, providing transfers to the J train, A train and JFK AirTrain.

Including money to build the Queensway in his budget is an awkward look for Mamdani, who spoke at a rally in support of QueensLink in 2023 and called it “very important to me” in an interview with the Queens Eagle on the mayoral campaign trail last July.

At the. 2023 event, the then-Assembly member touted the QueensLink as both a transit project and a good way to fight the climate crisis.

“The fight for public transit is a fight for making sure that every single New Yorker has their God-given right to go around every single borough of this city,” Mamdani said at the time.

“This is a fight of immense importance. If we want to know how to combat the climate crisis, we need to build out right rail at every possible place in this city. QueensLink offers us the possibility of giving up to 50,000 New Yorkers an option to take public transit.”

QueensLink supporters hope the new mayor will call an audible on the current project.

“There’s a lot of stuff that was a holdover from [Mayor] Adams, and it’s possible that was just one line item that he didn’t see and didn’t understand what it was,” Lynch said. “So I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that this is just something that he wasn’t thinking about because he’s been dealing with other things.”

Still, the biggest impediment to the train is the state-run MTA, which has kept its distance from the proposal for the last decade. MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber has never ruled out doing the project, but has not embraced the idea.

Transit officials agreed to study the rail reactivation concept in 2016, but didn’t actually release the finished study until 2019. QueensLink boosters released their own study that suggested the MTA purposefully inflated the project’s price-tag with non-construction costs to make the whole thing look ridiculously infeasible.

The MTA agreed to look at QueensLink again in its recent 20-Year Needs Assessment, which pegged the cost at $5.9 billion and forecasted half the ridership as advocates.

City Hall did not return a request for comment.