NY Daily News: Rails before trails in Queens

Working on a railroad

MONDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2013

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL

DEBBIE EGAN-CHIN/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Perfect place for a rail line, no?

At first blush, it sounds terrific: transforming a fallow old stretch of train tracks on the Rockaway Beach Branch of the LIRR into a park for families to enjoy.

But there may well be a better use for this resource: for trains. Call us old-fashioned, but some parts of New York City — and Queens especially — need reliable public transportation more desperately than they need public space.

You can’t blame activists for coming up with their vision for QueensWay. They saw the inspiring success of the High Line, which took a rusty industrial rail line in Manhattan and, with the help of lots of private initiative and money, transformed it into a fantastic gathering place.

This page was more than a cheerleader for that project; we were the first to float the idea.

An idealistic group of folks now wants to apply that template to a 3.5-mile stretch of the Rockaway Beach Branch, which ran from the main LIRR line at Rego Park out to the Rockaways from 1880 to 1962. Since service ended a half-century ago, those tracks have just sat there — attracting lots of weeds but not a single passenger.

Build another High Line, right?

Maybe not. It happens that the Rockaways (pop.: 130,000, and many more visitors) are starved for good, fast transit to Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and all the other places the railroad could take them.

So are Kennedy Airport (where 35,000 people work and 49 million travel in and out a year), Ozone Park, Hamilton Beach and Aqueduct race track and racino, all of which are near the rail line.

So, before going too far down the track of parkifying the path, it’s worth a serious look at whether it can be rescued and revitalized for its original use.

Unlike with the High Line, where the choice was demolition or repurposing, the Rockaway Beach Branch could carry passengers again. Nelson Rockefeller had a plan for just that in 1968. Ditto for Pat Moynihan decades later. Frankly, it would have made more sense for a one-seat JFK link than running an elevated line down the Van Wyck.

Assemblyman Phil Goldfeder has put together funding for an impartial study by experts at Queens College.

Smart move — and the first stop in what could be a very important journey.