ASTORIA, QUEENS - New York City leaders are gearing up to spend billions of federal dollars on infrastructure projects, possibly including a subway line between south Brooklyn and Astoria.
President Joe Biden is planning to sign his recently-passed $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law on Monday; a monumental investment which will grant New York billions in funding to fix crumbling subways, tunnels, bridges, rail lines, and airports.
The Bay Ridge branch, a subway linking Brooklyn and Queens without veering into Manhattan, could be among those projects, the MTA's acting chairman Janno Lieber said at a meeting on Wednesday, where city leaders discussed the infrastructure bill's impact on NYC.
The MTA is hoping to receive $10 billion from Biden's infrastructure bill, which it plans to spend on making subway stations accessible, buying electric busses, and completing signal modernization.
A chunk of the money will also go to financing "mega-projects" like extending the Second Avenue Subway to East Harlem and creating Penn Station access for Metro North, according to Lieber.
"It's all going to be accelerated because of this" federal funding, Lieber said of how the billions could benefit the MTA's big-ticket projects.
Another project Lieber mentioned on Wednesday is the Bay Ridge branch, a 16-mile long subway that was first proposed in 1996 as a way to link Brooklyn and Queens.
The subway would build upon existing freight train tracks and serve riders in transit-starved neighborhoods like East Flatbush, Brownsville, and Maspeth. Half of the 76,000 daily riders on the line would be people who don't typically ride the subway, some modeling shows
"This project is hugely exciting-partly because it is based on the concept of squeezing more out of our already existing infrastructure so we don't always have to build new subway lines from scratch," said Lieber in 2020, when the MTA was studying the feasibility of the project, Gothamist reported.
Notably, one of the major obstacles of building the line in 2020 was funding, which Biden's infrastructure bill would address.
And, with the train's path going through northwest Queens, some locals are dreaming of extending the line even farther than Astoria.
"Could this also be extended to LaGuardia Airport?" tweeted NYC-based journalist Steven Kastenbaum, alluding to the idea of expanding the subway to the airport in lieu of former Governor Andrew Cuomo's now-defunct AirTrain plan.