There’s no easy way to make the seven-mile trip from my apartment in Brooklyn to the Middle Village neighborhood in Queens. When I made this journey recently, I took a subway ride into Manhattan on the B train, followed by a transfer to the M, which took me back across the East River and deep into Queens. At the end of the line, 13 stops later, I hopped out at Middle Village station and squeezed on to a packed Q54 bus. With a mob of riders waiting at the curb, it took a full two minutes to board. After we got underway, the last mile of my journey was a 15-minute crawl through stop-and-go traffic.

My destination was a community meeting where planners from New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority were talking about a project, known as the Interborough Express, that would make this trip and many others much easier and faster.

Running within an existing freight rail trench that traverses Brooklyn and Queens, the IBX would be New York City’s first entirely new transit line in decades. The $5.5 billion project will cut across central Brooklyn before heading north through Queens neighborhoods that now sit far from subway stations. Along its 14-mile route, the line will intersect with 17 subway lines, 51 bus routes, and a Long Island Rail Road station. The line’s Brooklyn terminus, at Brooklyn Army Terminal, will be steps from a New York City ferry dock. Its Queens terminus, in Jackson Heights, is the major hub for bus connections to La Guardia Airport.

For those who live and work in neighborhoods along the route, the IBX will effectively shrink distances between places that now feel far away. Many journeys across Brooklyn and Queens will be slashed in half or even more, as travelers will no longer be obliged to take trains into Manhattan and then transfer. The connections to other subway and railroad lines will also give hundreds of thousands of people quicker trips to job centers in Midtown and other traditional business districts.

“It’s an exceptionally good project in terms of how many people it will serve and how effective it will be at reducing commute times and giving people a faster ride,” said Kate Slevin, executive vice president at the Regional Plan Association, a century-old urban planning advocacy organization that has been pushing the idea for decades.

But that doesn’t mean that residents of the two boroughs are universally welcoming the new train. The prospect of a surge in development along the line appears to be the biggest concern for neighbors as the MTA shares its plans at community meetings like the one I attended in Middle Village. Combined with NYC’s “City of Yes” upzoning initiative, which is aimed at encouraging more dense multistory residential construction around transit stations, the IBX could usher in a more urban future for the suburban parts of Brooklyn and Queens — an exciting prospect for some, a scary one for others.

There’s also a vocal contingent of transit advocates who are finding fault in the details of the project’s design — pushing for higher-frequency automated trains, for example, and better transfers to existing subway and railroad stations. But those features stand to bring conflicts with the transit operator union and add upfront costs. On top of that, the IBX is trying to make headway in a perilous political environment, as the prospect of getting federal support has dimmed since President Donald Trump’s return to White House. His administration has repeatedly threatened to withhold funds for transportation projects in parts of the US with Democratic leadership.

Despite the many question marks, Slevin is eager to see the city push ahead with a major transit expansion after decades of minimal growth to the system. “It’s beyond just providing connectivity and access for folks,” she said. “It’s also about creating a workforce that knows how to get these things done and having the talent here in the city to allow us to build big and exciting projects.”

Outer Boroughs Rising

When the IBX first emerged — in the Regional Plan Association’s Third Regional Plan, published in 1996 — it was a “Triboro Express” that connected Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx entirely on existing railroad rights of way. The concept languished for years until the RPA published its Fourth Regional Plan in 2017. As Slevin and her RPA colleagues promoted the idea, they linked the Triboro Express to another idea gaining momentum with New York lawmakers — a congestion charge that would toll drivers entering Manhattan’s central business district to help fund future transit investments.

“We crisscrossed the boroughs talking about both the Triboro and congestion pricing as a solution to some of the woes we’re facing, and the Triboro as one of the potential exciting projects that could materialize with more transit dollars,” Slevin said.

The state legislation that paved the way for congestion pricing passed in 2019. As the toll inched toward reality, so too did the outer borough transit project. (The Triboro concept was whittled down to the two boroughs when the Bronx tracks were slated to be used for another rail service, Metro North Railroad’s Penn Station Access.)

Since taking office in 2021, Governor Kathy Hochul has become a champion of the IBX, making it a high priority at the state-run MTA. At the start of 2025, Hochul initiated congestion pricing after an extended delay, providing a significant source of funding for the IBX and the rest of the MTA’s capital investment plan. In October, the MTA officially launched its 18-month environmental review process for the IBX. Concurrently, the project is also in the first few months of its two-year design process. Construction could begin by the end of the decade, with an opening some time in the 2030s.

Many details remain to be worked out, but in January 2023 the MTA decided that the project will use light rail trains, which are shorter and accelerate faster than the heavy rail equipment used by the New York City subway. The light rail trains will travel alongside a new dedicated freight track, which currently hosts a service dubbed the “pizza and beer train” for bringing flour and kegs to Long Island restaurants. There’s also a pipeline through much of the right-of-way that supplies jet fuel to New York’s airports, which will likely need to be moved.

The project reflects Brooklyn and Queens’ evolution from low-slung residential and industrial areas to cities in their own right. The boroughs “have grown up a lot in the last couple of decades and come into their own, as opposed to just being bedroom communities of Manhattan,” said Stijn van Nieuwerburgh, a professor of real estate and finance at Columbia Business School. “Part of having a multipolar city is to have all these employment centers all over, but people need to be able to get to their jobs and ideally not with a car.”

Under the Microscope

The IBX is also the first major transit project in New York to have its entire design and planning process scrutinized by a new generation of transit advocacy groups like the Effective Transit Alliance and the Transit Costs Project. Unlike older advocacy organizations, which focused on good urban planning or the needs of riders, these entities are laser-focused on the technical minutiae of transit design, construction and operations. Already, they appear to have influenced aspects of the project.

For example, the MTA’s initial plans called for a short section where the train would run on the street to get around a corner of All Faiths Cemetery in Queens as a cost-saving measure. But, in a report entitled “515 Feet from Greatness,” the Effective Transit Alliance argued that this street-running section would slow down service and constrain ridership.

“Let’s not be penny-wise and pound-foolish,” said Blair Lorenzo, the group’s executive director. “These small technical decisions matter for the long term.”

Eventually, the MTA changed direction, announcing that it would tunnel under the cemetery after all. Following the change, the projected travel time for the 14-mile route was revised down from 39 minutes to 32 minutes. Ridership projections grew by 50,000 daily passengers, to 160,000 riders per day. At a December event, MTA Chairman Janno Lieber amended these figures even further, saying the travel time will be a “30 minute ride end to end,” with a projected ridership of “over 200,000.” (An MTA spokesperson later clarified that Lieber was “rounding,” and that the previous travel time and ridership projections still stand.)

Another reason Lorenzo and like-minded advocates fought for the tunnel is that keeping the train off surface streets creates the potential for automating the line. “Our biggest point by far is to push them towards automated light metro,” a technology similar to the JFK Airtrain, Lorenzo said.

“With automated technology, you can run every 90 seconds,” said Eric Goldwyn, a professor of urban planning at New York University and the director of the Transit Costs Project. The MTA currently plans to run trains on the line at five-minute frequencies during peak times. “You could have shorter trains and smaller stations, so some of your capital costs could shrink potentially, and you could provide much more robust service,” Goldwyn said.

The MTA has signaled its openness to automating this line, with officials describing it as a “high capacity light metro,” rather than light rail in public appearances. But that concept will be in jeopardy if Hochul signs a bill, passed by the state legislature and supported by transit labor unions, that would require two-person operation on all MTA trains. The governor has until the end of the year to sign, veto or amend the bill.

Transit advocates are also looking closely at the quality of the many transfers along the line. Getting to the Roosevelt Avenue subway station at the Queens terminus, for example, will require traversing several hundred feet. Will the MTA have transferring riders walk along surface streets, or construct an elevated walkway with escalators and moving sidewalks? Similar questions attend several other important transfer points.

The MTA appears to be paying attention to these concerns as well, moving the planned Broadway Junction station closer to the Long Island Rail Road station and several nearby subway lines.

According to IBX project planner Jordan Smith, the changes at Broadway Junction and All Faiths Cemetery came in response to a combination of outside feedback and the MTA’s own internal assessments. “We’re looking at both the community’s feedback and also what makes a better project,” he said.

As for whether the train will be automated, Smith said it’s too early in the planning process for a firm answer. “That’s more of an operations question, I think, and we haven’t really crossed that threshold,” he said. “Nothing we’ve done would preclude that but we haven’t made any decisions yet.”

The Development Express

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the IBX is not the transit line itself, but its potential to reshape the surrounding neighborhoods. At the open house I attended in Middle Village, the meeting devolved into shouting about noise, development and the tunnel under All Faiths Cemetery. (Not all IBX project meetings have gone this way: At an October event I attended at Brooklyn College, the atmosphere was calm and the overwhelming majority of comments were positive.)

At the Middle Village meeting, I asked local resident Dorothy Werkmeister about her biggest concern about the project. “The amount of people it’s going to bring into the neighborhood,” she said.

Her worries echo those of local elected officials. Both outgoing City Councilmember Bob Holden, and his successor, Phil Wong, have connected the project to unwanted increases in housing development in Middle Village and surrounding neighborhoods.

Read more: Where New York City’s Zoning Reform Will Add Housing

The IBX route traces the borderland between urban, transit-oriented New York City and its more suburban and car-dependent fringes. The project creates the opportunity to extend that frontier, bringing more growth and transit ridership deeper into Brooklyn and Queens. This urban/suburban divide has also become a defining fault line in city politics. Commuting by transit was one of the biggest demographic cleavages in the November mayoral election, with Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani winning riders by 29 percentage points.

Even without a train, suburban-style neighborhoods like Middle Village are poised to see more development, thanks to the City of Yes rezoning initiative passed last year. A set of housing ballot measures passed by New York City voters in November could also create more housing opportunities in areas historically resistant to new construction.

Critics and supporters alike see the IBX as a potential prelude to more dramatic changes. Some advocates say the project needs to be coupled with major increases in housing density along the line in order to reach its full potential. The New York Building Congress, a construction industry trade group, released a report analyzing the current zoning along the route. It found that in areas within a half mile of a future station, roughly 20% of land is zoned industrial, 30% of land is zoned high-density residential, and 50% of land is zoned low-density residential.

The report recommends the city rezone the largely low-density areas around the line to accommodate about 83,000 additional homes — a level of density comparable to that of Brownstone Brooklyn, according to Carlo Casa, director of policy and research at the Building Congress. “It’s not turning the area into the Upper East Side — it’s a little more housing,” he said.

Increasing housing development along the line is essential for its success, Goldwyn of the Transit Costs Project insists.

“It doesn’t make sense to build high-capacity transit, at high costs, and then be like, we’re not going to derive any other types of benefits other than for the people that already live there,” he said. He believes ridership on the IBX could be significantly higher than current projections with more development and high-frequency automated trains.

Capturing Value

Whether or not the city rezones the land around the stations, it’s all but certain that owners of properties nearby will see significant windfalls once the IBX opens. That’s what happened with the city’s most recent major transit project, the Second Avenue subway expansion in Manhattan.

In a study he co-authored, van Nieuwerburgh, the Columbia Business School professor, found that the rise in real estate values for nearby properties attributable to the new subway was greater than the cost of constructing the subway itself. The city only recouped about a third of that increase through property tax revenues, and none of those funds were specifically earmarked for constructing the line that generated that value in the first place.

In the paper, van Nieuwerburgh and his colleagues advocate for the city and state to pursue “value capture” mechanisms that would allow government agencies to use some of that increase in value to fund projects like the IBX. “It’s a clean metric you can articulate to people,” he said. “Look, your property is worth X today. After this infrastructure, it will be worth X plus $50,000. We need $10,000 of that $50,000 extra value creation.”

Tapping alternative funding mechanisms like value capture could be essential, given the federal government’s current hostility to transit and all things New York City. So far, only half of the estimated $5.5 billion IBX project cost has been identified.

“It’s crucial to make these types of investments as a city,” van Nieuwerburgh said. “But we’ve got to pay for it.”

On my long walk back to the subway after the community meeting, I saw where some of that money could come from. A stone’s throw from the Middle Village station and a planned stop on the IBX stands the hangar-like superstructure of the Shops at Rentar Plaza. Long known as Metro Mall, it’s an icon of suburban Queens, a big-box-style shopping center crowned by a vast expanse of parking that doesn’t look like it belongs next to a busy New York City transit station — or two, as the case may be in a few years.

With the IBX, Metro Mall-to-Midtown suddenly becomes an easier commute. That’s a pretty valuable prospect for the mall’s owners, as well as the many people who might someday live in a new apartment building on its current parking lot.

If it proceeds, the IBX will surely transform how people get around Brooklyn and Queens. But just how transformative it will be may depend on what gets built around it.