



The State Comptroller’s Office states that forty-four percent of all Queens, New York subway stations are damaged or in severe disrepair. The office says that Queens has the highest percent of damaged and worn out subway stations in all of New York City. Sixty-five percent of all of New York City subway platform edges are in disrepair, which is a near 20 percent increase from 2010. The Sunnyside Post says that only 26 New York City subway stations are in “perfect” condition, though it is hard to imagine even one station in “okay” condition and there are 81 subway stations in Queens.

Roosevelt Island and Jamaica Center subway stations are the newest stations built in the borough. However, the two stations were opened in 1989, and though Queens subway stations had repairs since no new stations were enacted in thirty years and the population of the borough has increased by one million residents since 1990. Which is on its own roughly the population of a city like San Francisco. Great Neck, Bayside, Whitestone, and Riverdale are all neighborhoods with no subway service, however, the MTA has put in place public buses in these areas of Queens. In fact, most of Northern and Eastern Queens are what city newspapers and the MTA refer to as “transit deserts”. These are dozens of neighborhoods that have a lack of or no subway links.

As I had recently broken my leg, I found how inaccessible New York’s transportation is for people with physical disabilities. I painfully slid one foot in front of the other on a wet Tribeca subway staircase and wondered how much harder it was for Americans in wheelchairs to get around the city on the subway. The Queens Eagle says “Sunnyside, Woodhaven, and Astoria all boast access to various subway lines, but those transit options are little help to many residents with disabilities. Not a single subway station complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act in the three Queens neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods are not unique. More than 70 percent of Queens subway stations are inaccessible to people with disabilities, according to the MTA’s own guide to accessible transit options.”

The Patch says “People are fleeing Queens more than any other borough in New York City, according to the latest census data. Queens shrank by 17,959 residents between July 2017 and the same date in 2018”, and although all of New York has been shrinking in size recently it is unknown whether New York City’s gut-wrenching transportation has something to do with this. Only Staten Island has seen an increase in about 600-700 residents.

The Brooklyn Eagle says the MTA is looking for solutions, to countless problems in city subways.

“The MTA says it will begin studying a plan to bring passenger trains back to the Bay Ridge Branch, a stretch of Long Island Railroad-owned, above-ground tracks between Bay Ridge and Queens that’s been moving only freight for the past 95 years. The branch runs from Fresh Pond Yards in Ridgewood, through East New York, Flatbush, Midwood, and Bensonhurst, then ends in Bay Ridge. The line carried passengers from its opening in 1876 until 1924. If the branch were to reopen to commuters, it would be the first step toward realizing the larger Triboro RX plan, a 24-mile rail line first proposed in 1996 by urban research nonprofit the Regional Plan Association. The Triboro would loop around the city through a patchwork of existing rail, which passenger trains would share with freight trains.” However, for now this remains just a discussion which like most city transportation plans will take half a century to complete.

The recent building of an elevator in a Forest Hills Subway Station took about three years to finish. This week, the MTA has been working to fix broken MetroCard payment machines in the same location, though, the problem was fixed this weekend.

Two out of the ten most dangerous NYC subway stations are located in Queens. NYsubway.com says “New York City can be a dangerous place and crime from the above-ground will often extend into the NYC Subway.” On Saturday, a man was stabbed in a Queens subway station. The two most dangerous stations the paper states are the Broad Channel Station and the Forest Hills Continental Avenue Station. “As the comptroller notes in his report, NYC Transit has made significant strides at station repairs systemwide thanks to a station maintenance program that focuses on addressing individual components with serious defects,” said MTA spokesperson Tim Minton.

A week ago metal pieces from an elevated Queens station fell onto a cab.

This April, the MTA has announced plans to modernize Queens buses as it has already done for both Manhattan and is doing for the Bronx. The average speed of city buses in the borough is only eight miles per hour. A passenger named Ben Turner says “Given what’s happened on 14th Street in Manhattan, [we need] more ‘bus only’ routes entirely. Especially in areas like Kissena in Downtown Flushing, which serves multiple bus routes, and Main Street and other areas where it could work”, the passenger says.

The President of NYC Transit Andy Byford says "What is needed isn’t mere tinkering, a few tweaks here and there. What must happen is sustained investment on a massive scale if we are to deliver New Yorkers the service they deserve and the transit system this city and state need."

The MTA plans to create a state-of-the-art signal system on five subway lines that run through Queens. Make fifty new subway stations accessible to people with physical disabilities, and repair 150 stations. They plan to launch 650 new subway cars across the city and reimagine the bus network in all five boroughs during the next half-decade. The MTA says “We are doing more in the next five years then we’ve done in the past forty.”