Subways, buses and highways were meant to make movement faster and more convenient, but, in this country, it’s often incredibly difficult to travel by public transit. Even those major cities thought of as interconnected webs of subway lines and bus stops can possess vast transit deserts that can keep communities segregated. Without easy connections, two parts of the same place can feel more like distant planets than neighborhoods just a handful of miles apart.
In New York City, outer Brooklyn and outer Queens might as well be in different universes from each other. The city has a plan to change that: a light rail line that would repurpose freight tracks to make travel from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to Jackson Heights, Queens, take about 40 minutes and connect 17 different subway lines.
Whether the train will even be built at all depends in part on revenue from the city’s embattled congestion pricing plan. But, if realized, the Interborough Express, IBX for short, has the potential to bring together people who might otherwise never come in contact with one another.
The possibility of connecting all these places, though, feels more like an abstraction. For people like me and the photographer Tom Wilson, who live at opposite ends of the proposed route, the space that separates us feels especially unnavigable. So we set out to walk the entirety of the future line, all 14 miles of it, to see the neighborhoods it would link and meet the people who live in them. If the IBX ever arrives, what would happen to the space that keeps us apart?
We met in a parking lot behind the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park, and set off east with the sun in our eyes, beginning a 20-mile walk that would trace the rails as closely as possible while sticking to surface roads. By 8:37 a.m., we had already reached Eighth Avenue — one of the 19 proposed IBX stops and the heart of Sunset Park’s Chinatown. Food carts lining the sidewalks offered grilled meat and noodles. We waded through slow-moving passers-by and workers unloading crates of vegetables.