I often find myself taking the city’s B division trains — the lettered lines — from Brooklyn to Manhattan on the weekends, and I always assumed that trains ran on with a ten-minute headway. Today, we learn that the trains were supposed to arrive every eight minutes during the weekend, but because of construction and maintenance generally ran every ten minutes anyway. Now, New York City Transit is making the 10-minute B-division weekend headways official. Beginning in August, the MTA schedules will reflect this change. Officials say it will allow for “better management of train traffic.” One day, I hope to report on an increase of service instead of a decrease. A straphanger can dream.
B division weekend headways officially set to 10 minutes
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At least there are some recent extensions… Long 5-to-Brooklyn hours and G to Church Ave.
I love all these service cuts despite saying they’ve been saved. 10 minute headways, G never going to Queens Blvd, station agent cuts, some 1 trains end at 137th St during rush hour. What’s next? Are they going to cut E and F train rush hour service? Oh wait…
8 minutes?? That’s a laugh. More like 15 to 20 for the R train on the weekends. I remember when I lived in SF (in 1997), there was huge stink about the fact that the schedules were basically useless. They had just switched from specifying every trip to instead saying stuff like “every 10 minutes”–you know, like NYC has always done, at least the 12 years I’ve lived here. And there were tons of missed trips and delays, just like here. I wonder why there hasn’t been a big stink about it here. The big difference is that New Yorkers don’t look at schedules–because they expect frequent service. If that’s not true any more, well… what then.
I agree with the comments above. So far these “cuts” have been the MTA eliminating some sort of imaginary service they never provided in favor of what, for them, is normal service. Trains no longer going to stations they haven’t stopped at in decades, fifteen minute waits for trains where the actual wait is fifteen to twenty minutes and so on.
Either someone in MTA management is delusional, or the organization is so used to lying to the public that they always claim the level of service is higher than it actually is even when cutting service. So maybe cutting service from eight minutes to ten minutes is some sort of code for cutting it from ten minutes to fifteen minutes.
The eight-minute headways will be returning at the end of August.
Thanks for blogging about this. But you got two major points incorrect. First, the schedule change is THIS SUNDAY. Starting this Sunday, the B Div is officially going to 10-minute headways on weekends, but it’s not a service cut because due to construction and repairs, most of the lines were already running at 10-minute or longer headways.
Secondly, in August, the schedules will be returned to 8-minutes headways on weekends, just like today, as per the legislature’s demands. However, again, due to construction projects and track work, in reality the trains will not run on 8-minute headways, and will instead run on 10-minute or worse headways just like today.
So basically the legislature is forcing NYCT to run inefficiently by forcing them to have to write up special schedules for every weekend that will result in 10-minute or worse headways, when instead they could have just had 10-minute headways by default and thus no special schedules would have to be written and implemented thus saving time and energy in the management part of NYCT that everyone loves to complain about.
It’s truly ridiculous. NYCT should have been allowed to make the change to 10-minute headways, and leave it there, as it would have saved time and evergy and money, and resulted in more efficient operation of trains on weekends.
I find it a bit odd that the R is already scheduled to run every 10 minutes between 9AM and 3:30PM on weekdays–a time that I am pretty certain is more busy than the weekends when it is scheduled to run every 8 minutes all day until 5:30PM. Since we all know that 10 minutes on the weekends is closer to reality, they might as well just schedule it permanently–and stick to it.
This is simply because it needs to share the queens corridor with the V on the week days and not on the weekends. If the V and R both run at 10 minute headways there will be a train every 5 minutes on the local stops in queens.
Also in Lower Manhattan-on weekdays, the R and W share the load, but on weekends it’s just the R.
But if you look at the current schedules, that’s the way headways seem to be set up on much of the B Division-8 minutes on weekends but 10 minutes on weekday middays. I’m not sure how ridership compares-I wouldnt be surprise if it’s higher on weekends.
THe problem on weekends, from what I gather, is that when there’s construction going on, the 8 minute headway is a bit too intense, so service on some lines is cut to 12 or eliminated entirely. Hence the original plan (being implemented this weekend) to shift from 8 to 10-it will give better service to the lines that until now have gone to 12 minutes,bring the actual service more in line with the published schedules, and presumably save money for the agency (I assume that crews get paid at a minimum for the jobs they’ve picked, and if service is reduced on the weekend,then many of them probably don’t work as much as they’re paid to).
But on paper this is a service cut, so the state legislature protested, and I guess it’s going back to the old way in August. Yay.
Or at least that’s what the Daily News article says. This article says something totally different. Who’s right?
Well, I don’t think of the shares because I have only one 1 line available to me: the R. I suppose all of us (un)lucky enough to live along these stubs face the same situation.
I think the R is one of the lines that gets cut from 8 minutes to 12 minutes whenever there’s any weekend work in Queens or anywhere else along the line. With this change, you’ll get 10 whether or not there’s work going on. So this change should benefit most people who depend on the R. That is, until August, when it’s undone.
incidentally, the MTA web site seems to have most of the new schedules posted, including the R.