South Queens, NY – Assemblywoman Stacey Pheffer Amato (D-South Queens) announced that she has written a letter to the federal Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Pete Buttigieg, requesting funding to rebuild and restore the Rockaway Beach Rail Line (RBRL). This funding would come from the American Jobs Plan, the $2 trillion plan to improve infrastructure proposed by the Biden administration, which set aside $85 billion for updating outdated public transportation.

“This transformative update to our transit system is much needed and long overdue,” Pheffer Amato said. “Rockaway has long been a transit desert, and our community deserves reliable and safe transportation. Restoring the RBRL would bring much-needed change to hundreds of thousands of people’s lives every day, and create thousands of jobs.”

Currently, the 130,000 residents of the Rockaway peninsula are served by one train line, the A train, leaving residents with a commute time to midtown Manhattan of approximately 1 hour and 10 minutes in each direction. The Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) conducted a feasibility study for this train line in 2019, considering two options. The first option included the RBRL as an extension of the A train to the Queens Boulevard line operated by New York City Transit (NYCT). The results of this option found that if NYCT reconstructed the line, travel time from Howard Beach to Manhattan would be 45 minutes and construction costs would be approximately $8 billion. The second option of the feasibility study included the LIRR operating the RBRL as a new line along its primary track. Travel time for the LIRR option from Howard Beach to Penn Station would be 25 minutes and cost $6 billion.