David Rosenstein's Blog

I’ve gotten interested in the weekend changes on the NYC subway. Some of the choices they have made, particularly in the past couple of months, are very interesting, some of which I think are creating a better service, and others creating a worse service. So I am going to look at the weekend service changes every week this year, and talk about what I like, what I dislike, and what I would change.

Let’s look at this week’s map:

There are two major things happening this weekend that affect most of the map, with a couple of smaller things I’ll point out.

59 St Switch Replacement

We unfortunately have the return of the switch replacement at 59 st. As a rider of the 1 line, this sucks and makes riding the line very not fun and overcrowded. However, these are some of the oldest and most important switches in the system so the work definitely needs to be done. The service pattern here mostly makes sense, although I do have a couple of nitpicks. First, in northern Manhattan, the shuttle bus system here seems pointlessly long, but upon further inspection, they are necessary. The switch layout around 125st makes it very poor to be a terminal.

Trains will have to terminate on the center tracks here, and to do so properly they would have to skip 135 st in at least one direction. And if they have to skip it, they have to run busses up there, so why not just run them all the way to 145 st and have the D end at a more proper terminal. I think this all makes sense. You could argue that trains should stop at 135 st in one direction but I think this is the most logical service pattern.

South of 59 st, however, I think we are losing out on some serious service here, mainly on 8th ave and Fulton st. Here’s what I want to do to solve it:

1. Run the C train! In Brooklyn, it would be exactly the same. In Manhattan, it will go through cranberry and run local like normal until W 4st, where it will switch to 6th ave local and end at 42 st, like the A train is doing in the existing plan. I think theres a case to run it to 96 st on 2nd ave like what the A train did last time this plan was run, especially because since the C has low frequencies, we likely wouldn’t need to boot the Q. However, I am not 100% sure about the possibility of that.
2. With the C train, lets change how the A train runs. First, it will now run express in Brooklyn. Fulton is a long line that deserves express service, especially for the Rockaway residents who are about to lose subway service for months. In Manhattan it will run normally, and at W 4 st, it will follow the E train to 8th Ave. From there, however, the A train will end at 34 st – Penn Station. For some god forsaken reason, there are like no switches on 8th Ave, which makes running alternate service here pretty bad. The only place between W 4 st and 59 st that a train could be turned around is the express tracks at 34 st Penn station, there’s nothing for the local tracks. I really think the MTA should build a set of switches to allow trains to turn around on the central tracks of 42 st – PABT, as this is a great ending spot for trains on a lot of service patterns, and would be a boom to 8th Ave service for weekends like this weekend.
3. If the C train is able to go to 96 st, I would like to run the D train on 6th ave express to 42nd St. 6th ave is busy this time of year, particularly with stuff at Rockefeller, so having an extra service here would be immensely helpful.

With this we are providing significantly more useful services to everyone involved here, and providing much more service on 6th ave, 8th ave, and Fulton, meaning that the pain of fixing Central Park West should have much lower effects on the parts of the system that aren’t even close to it.

Lexington Ave Services to Brooklyn

The second major difference to point out is the lack of Lexington Ave Service to Brooklyn. The main difference in service is that the 5 is running local and ending at Brooklyn Bridge City Hall, and the 4 is ending at Bowling Green. 4 service in Brooklyn is completly covered by the 3 (and the 5 already doesn’t run to Brooklyn on weekends) so nothing else needed to change for this. I think this is probably the best service pattern given trains cannot go through the Joralemon St tunnel. However I do question the timing of this service pattern. 7th Ave service is already being stretched due to CPW riders needing to shift onto the 1/2/3, so pushing even more riders onto 7th Ave by having no service to Lexington from the Brooklyn IRT tracks seems like poor planning to me. In addition, many D train riders will probably switch to the 4, but that switch is a lot worse if riders can’t go to Brooklyn. But given the lack of connectivity that the IRT has from the rest of the system (at least from an interlining perspective), this is probably the best alternative service pattern the MTA could run, I just wish it was run on a different day.

R Diversion in Brooklyn

The only other short term closure for this weekend is the R being suspended past 36 St. Instead it turns down West End and terminates at its first stop – 9 ave – using the center track. This is a great way to fix problems on the part of the R past 59 st. To serve the local stations between 36 and 59 st, the N runs local, although for some reason it only does that in the Coney Island bound direction. I wish I had a chance to ride this deviation so I could see exactly why this was the case, because I am a little stumped onto why that’s the case.

Skipped Stations on the 6

This one is pretty obvious. They are doing track work on the Pelham Bay Bound track on the 6, so they are running trains on the express middle track to allow that work to happen which means those stations are skipped. There really isn’t any alternative to this and this is where having that third track really helps with operations.

Misc. Skipped Stations

There are a couple of skipped stations throughout the system. These are mostly long term projects on stations. On the 7, 82 St and 111 St are closed in the Flushing bound direction. On the J, Cypress Hills and 86 St are closed in the Jamaica bound direction. And on the Q, Church Ave is closed in the Manhattan bound direction. These have been closed for a while and will continue to be closed so I won’t mention them in the future until something changes, but since this is the first one of these I wanted to mention them here.

Conclusion

Overall I think the MTA did a good job this weekend. 59st closing is hard to manage, as it basically runs the IND, and while I think they maybe could have done a little more, I’m not even sure the difference would be *that* much. I decided to make this series because last year there were some weeks that really baffled me. But for every week that baffles me, there are also ones that make a lot of sense, and this one definitely does.