In a system with more than 300 bus routes, direct service between Brooklyn and Queens is squeezed into two narrow corridors — a legacy of borough-by-borough network planning that two ongoing redesigns and the Mamdani-Hochul Better Buses plan have not changed.
A rider in Jackson Heights or Corona who needs to reach Crown Heights or Flatbush by bus is not missing a hidden route. The route does not exist.
Brooklyn and Queens share roughly ten miles of boundary, but direct bus service between their interiors runs in only two places. The northern corridor — the Ridgewood and Bushwick borderland — carries the B13 (Spring Creek through Glendale and Ridgewood into Bushwick) and the B20 (Spring Creek to Ridgewood), plus several Queens-designated routes that straddle the same seam. In the southeastern corridor, the B15 runs from Bedford-Stuyvesant to JFK Airport in Queens, logging 2.4 million riders in 2025, and the Q8 connects Jamaica to East New York and Spring Creek in Brooklyn.
Between those two corridors sits most of central Queens: Sunnyside, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Corona, Forest Hills. None of them have a direct bus to central or northern Brooklyn.
Three forces explain the gap. The MTA's bus network descended from borough-based streetcar franchises — Brooklyn's routes carry a "B," Queens' routes a "Q" — and the agency has largely planned within those borders ever since. Jamaica Bay is a physical barrier that severs southern Queens from southern Brooklyn entirely. And the street grids of the two boroughs meet at mismatched angles, with no clean through-avenue to carry a route.
The MTA's December 2022 Brooklyn Bus Network Redesign proposed changes to the B13 and B20 but did not add cross-borough links. The Mamdani-Hochul Better Buses plan, released July 8, commits the MTA to 20% speed gains on 50 existing corridors and system-wide all-door boarding by 2027. A direct Jackson Heights–to–Crown Heights route is not one of those corridors. Riders making that trip still transfer through the subway — or don't make it at all.
