“We had a lot of proposals in the Region at Risk and some of them hit the mark right away and some didn't,” Zupan said. In the report, senior transportation fellow Jeffrey Zupan advocated for the Triboro RX, a subway line to connect the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn using the existing Bay Ridge Branch freight route. The Regional Plan Association first proposed the idea for a subway line to connect New York City’s outer boroughs in a 1996 report called A Region at Risk. Places like Moscow have built a ring line to connect their outer boroughs, but in New York, the system is still centred around Manhattan.Ībove: Regional Plan Association's Triboro Express proposal. Image courtesy of RPA. Chicago, Washington DC and Stockholm all have metro networks that radiate out from the city’s central business district. It’s not just New York that followed this blueprint. The city ended up with a system of lines radiating out from Manhattan to the outer boroughs, but not a lot of circumferential lines connecting the rest of the city. So, when the network grew, the lines expanded from Manhattan to the outer boroughs. When the subway was first being designed, the most densely populated part of the city was lower Manhattan. But building in New York is never easy, and there’s still a lot to do before it becomes reality.Ībove: A render of the proposed Interborough Express. This could change a lot of people's lives. At least, not yet.Ĭue the Interborough Express, the MTA’s latest proposal for a new subway line to connect Brooklyn and Queens via an abandoned freight railway. Despite millions of people living and working in New York City’s outer boroughs, there’s no subway line that really connects them. But there’s a problem.Ī lot of people don’t actually need to go into Manhattan, and it’s really hard to get to where they do need to go. With more than 470 stations across four boroughs, it’s really good at getting people in and out of Manhattan.

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