Is the BQX – the proposed new streetcar along the Queens and Brooklyn waterfronts – a good idea? It depends. If the streetcar really can pay for itself as promised, it’s a great idea – and could teach the MTA how to build and run transit. If it can’t pay for itself, though, it’s a different story. The streetcar is not the city’s biggest transportation need. It doesn’t even crack the top three.
While the lack of a streetcar isn’t an emergency, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work – and work well.
“The streetcar is not the city’s biggest transportation need. It doesn’t even crack the top three.”
The 16-mile line would run from Astoria to Sunset Park, through Long Island City, Williamsburg, and 10 other Queens and Brooklyn neighborhoods.
These neighborhoods have borne much of the brunt of the city’s population growth over the past two decades. Sunset Park and Windsor Terrace have grown by 22 percent in the past two decades. Williamsburg and Greenpoint have grown by 11 percent. Long Island City has added thousands of apartments, and is adding thousands more.
Connecting dense areas to each other and seeing what happens is urban planning 101. More people could live in Queens and work in Brooklyn; more people could live in Brooklyn and go out to dinner with friends in Queens. Tourists, too, could take the ferry from Manhattan and view the waterfront by rail. The streetcar’s boosters – developers in Queens and Brooklyn – predict that 50,000 people would use the line every day.
Some critics have slammed the BQX because of who its potential customers are: the people who live in the “luxury apartments” the developers are building.
But this argument – and the prejudice against millennials and newcomers – is distasteful. “Luxury” renters and condo buyers are not millionaires and billionaires; they are two-income families who have professional jobs but can’t afford Manhattan. It is not a crazy idea that people who pay high taxes get some sort of actual service in return for those taxes.
Plus, not everyone near the waterfront is rich. Ten percent of the city’s public housing is nearby. The streetcar would serve poor and middle-income New Yorkers, too.
Moreover, the funding mechanism and management of the streetcar is intriguing.
Rather than have the MTA or the city do it, the city envisions having the private sector do it. The streetcar company is considering calling for global bids to build and run the project. If bidders proved that they could do it on time and on budget – and maybe under time and budget – the result would be a good lesson for the MTA and the city itself. The structure would be more like Citibike: well-paid union workers would staff it, but they wouldn’t get the public-sector retirement benefits that are keeping the MTA and the city from investing in other important projects.
Supporters of the streetcar say that the project would pay for itself. Land values around it would increase even more than they otherwise would have, throwing off $4 billion in future tax dollars, more than enough to build the $2.5 billion project and run it for $26 million annually.
Backers often cite the example of the Hudson Yards, where the Bloomberg administration built the 7 Line extension by borrowing $2.6 billion against future tax revenues from Far West Side development.
But that is not a great example.
It is an enduring myth that the city did not pay for the 7 Line extension. Yes, the investors who fronted the money will someday be repaid from future tax revenues. But in the meantime, the city is footing the bill. The city legally agreed to make interest payments on the debt. Over a decade, city taxpayers – not Far West Side taxpayers – have made $201.2 million in such payments.
Streetcar supporters should find investors who will be comfortable not taking any government guarantees. Lenders could structure the deal so that they could wait until the streetcar was up and running to begin to recoup their investment – and wait until later, too, to receive interest.
If investors are doubtful that sufficient tax revenues will materialize, then we should be doubtful, too. That’s because the problem with a city guarantee is that we have to think about what other projects the city’s credit rating could have supported.
The streetcar idea doesn’t compete with the city and state having to finish projects it has already started, including East Side Access, which will bring the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central, and the Second Avenue Subway.
We need, too, to keep adding capacity on existing subway lines, which carry far more people than the streetcar will.
However, if all streetcar backers need is the city’s streets and their own customers’ tax and fare money, they should go for it – and have fun doing it.
This piece originally appeared at City & State's New York Slant
This piece originally appeared in City & State's NY Slant