By Forum Staff
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Wednesday announced it is beginning the environmental review process for the forthcoming Interborough Express under the State Environmental Quality Review Act.
Governor Kathy Hochul announced in August that the project had entered the preliminary engineering and design phase.
To kick off environmental review, there will be a series of three public meetings that will explain the scope of the project and the review process. The first will be held Wednesday, Oct. 29, at Brooklyn College. A second meeting will be held Thursday, Nov. 6 at Christ the King High School in Middle Village. A virtual meeting will be held Wednesday, Nov. 12. Members of the public interested in attending can register at mta.info/project/interborough-express.
The environmental review process will run concurrent to the ongoing preliminary design and engineering phase of the project kicked off in August. Following public outreach, the SEQRA process will produce a Draft Scoping Document, and ultimately, a draft Environmental Impact Statement on the project. This process will assess potential significant environmental benefits and impacts of the IBX project.
According to the Hochul administration, the IBX is a generational transit investment that will connect nearly 900,000 New Yorkers in underserved areas of Queens and Brooklyn to the subway, bus and Long Island Rail Road. The project is also projected to significantly reduce travel times between the two boroughs, with an end-to-end run time of 32 minutes along an existing 14-mile freight line owned by the MTA and CSX Corp.
In August, the MTA Board authorized the selection of a joint venture between Jacobs and HDR, who will oversee the design and engineering phase of the IBX. Project design, which got underway this summer, focuses on a light rail system design. This was determined to offer the best service to riders at the best value to the MTA, with about 70 percent of projected IBX riders expected to transfer within the MTA system. The project design work includes communications and signal design, vehicle design, track design, station design, among other components.
Once the design process is completed, the next step will ultimately create 19 stations that connect with 17 different subway lines, 50 bus routes and two LIRR stations. The IBX will be the first new end-to-end rapid transit built entirely within NYC since the IND Crosstown Line, now called the G, which fully opened in 1937. IBX stations in Queens will be the first new transit stations built since the Archer Avenue extension of the E, J, and Z lines to Jamaica in 1988.
The current project design phase is funded mainly through $45 million secured by Hochul in the State’s 2025 budget and the MTA’s 2025-2029 Capital Plan. The total estimated cost of the IBX project is $5.5 billion, with 50 percent of the total funding for the project secured by Hochul in the MTA’s 2025-2029 Capital Plan.
“Beginning environmental review is yet another statement of intent that in New York, we don’t just talk about major infrastructure projects, we build them,” Hochul said.
