Most New Yorkers know that the Second Avenue Subway is being completed in phases. They may not care about accessing the Upper East Side themselves (a la Phase I), but they understand that the city’s end goal is a line running the full length of Manhattan and potentially continuing into other boroughs. The media explains this to them and they tell their friends.

The BQX, however, is billed both by the city and the media as a one-off project. This is absurd. First, light rail typically begins with single trunk line and is then expanded (see Planned Light Rail Systems). Second, planning additional phases now, even in name only, would help reduce cynicism and promote the line’s construction.

Here are a few useful BQX spur ideas to generate excitement among New Yorkers:

• Over the Queensborough Bridge into Manhattan
• East into Bushwick, paralleling the L train corridor
• North to LaGuardia airport / East Elmhurst

Each of the above proposals relieves pressure and creates redundancy where existing, overburdened transit lines and roadways are concerned. We also should be talking about how one successful light rail line has the potential to spur the development of others. Vision42 and West Shore Light Rail, New York’s other active light rail proposals, ought to be better known.

The BQX has been met with extreme cynicism in the blogosphere (see Does New York City really need the BQX? and In latest plan, the BQX is shorter, underfunded and over 10 years away). The criticisms are not incorrect. New York, however, is in desperate need of a “Second System” and the transit-literate among us ought to play an educative role, to help New Yorkers dream and build the ‘art of the possible.’ Would Seattle ever have made it to their current light rail expansion if they hadn’t built their messily bus tunnel  first? Just like Phase I of the Second Avenue Subway, the BQX will be over-budget but the city will learn from its mistakes and improve procedures before building spurs, extensions, and additional lines.