On Sunday, the western parts of Brooklyn will celebrate 2010 by getting a new bus route. Technically, it’s the break up of the old B61 into the B61 and B62, and while some travelers will have to make a new transfer, others will find a slow and crowded route faster and less packed.
“After careful study, we are dividing one long, cumbersome route into two shorter routes which will be easier to supervise and more manageable to operate,” Transit President Thomas Prendergast said in a statement this afternoon. “We made this decision in response to concerns from customers and community organizations who have long complained about this route’s lack of reliability. Both of the new services are projected to be more reliable than the single route they are replacing.”
The change, originally announced in July, will see the 9.7-mile route linking Red Hook to Queens Plaza split in Downtown Brooklyn. The B61 will run from Ikea to Smith and Livingston Sts. in Downtown Brooklyn while the B62 will run from Boerum Place and Livingston St. to Queens Plaza via the Williamsburge Bridge Plaza Bus Terminal. Transit says the new route will allow a dispatcher to better monitor the popular route.
“We recognize that there are rapidly growing new residential areas along the Williamsburg waterfront,” added Prendergast. “The B62 will also provide convenient bus and subway connections for these customers to the Williamsburg Bridge Plaza transit hub which is served by six bus routes and the Marcy Avenue subway station.”
The B61 in its current incarnation serves approximately 18,500 riders on weekdays, 10,800 on Saturdays and 7400 on Sundays. The new routing should help the bus avoid the heavy congestion in Downtown Brooklyn that often slows the bus to a crawl.
6 comments
I still think they should have had more overlap, with the B61 going all the way from Red Hook to Williamsburg.
That’s wishful thinking in an era of service cuts.
The overlap you propose would be over the part of the route with the least ridership.
I wish they’d run it a bit further through Downtown Brooklyn. As it is, it doesn’t even really make it to the Jay Street station, which is where I’d transfer from the subway to the bus when I took the B61 regularly. But at least the Red Hook section should be fairly reliable now.
It would be nice if both routes turned onto Fulton St and terminated at Flatbush so it would be easier to catch the BMQR trains
It’s hard to comment on this without tons more data to examine, or personal experience… but I find the topic interesting anyway 🙂
I noticed in Wikipedia that the 70s saw a large number of route consolidations (e.g. the B34 was absorbed by the B1). I wonder if that was done for budget or reliability reasons. I suspect the former, given that it was, well, the 70s.