Every year come October 31, a few unruly folk have to ruin the fun for everyone. On Halloween night, as costumes become the norm, kids from around the city let their wild sides loose, and attacking city property seems to jump to the top of the agenda. Hooligans egg buses and descend upon innocent passengers. This year, as they’ve done in the past, the MTA wants to put a stop to it by cutting short some bus routes.
As both The Daily News reported yesterday, the MTA may temporarily cease service in areas prone to vandalism. According to Transit officials, bus service along the Bx 8 in Edgewater Park, the Bx 24 in Country Club and the B31 in Gerritsen Beach could all be reduced tonight. Teenagers in Gerritsen Beach, in particular, sparked a controversy last year when they were outed by a local blogger. “These areas have notoriously been problem areas,” Kevin Ortiz, a Transit spokesman, told The News. “It’s definitely a safety concern. We deploy this action plan to ensure employees and customers are provided with a safe environment when working or using our buses.”
Now, the MTA should make sure its riders and employees are safe throughout Halloween, but something about this plan to scale back service bothers me. Shouldn’t police presence be increased to ensure that public is maintained before Transit throws in the towel? Should we cut off bus service to those in some of the least transit-accessible areas in the city due to some bad eggs? Giving in isn’t the precedent I’d like to see established.
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NYC is very quickly slipping back to the bad-old-days of the 1970s and ’80s. Dirtier subways, more crowded buses, less transit funding, and now vandalism so bad they’re cutting back bus service to prevent it.
Looks like Mayor Giuliani’s windows are being broken again, and it’ll take a Mayor who knows what the score is in this town to fix them again. Unfortunately, Mr. Upper East Side billionaire is not that guy.
Not so sure that’s the right take on it. Transit actually usually cuts these bus routes on Halloween due to the hooliganism. I’m highlighting it now because I think it’s the wrong response.
This is only remotely connected to your topic, but this is annoying me so much I have to vent about it before I run into the street screaming.
It seems that when the MTA instituted the 2010 budget cuts, there was a lot more damage than they let on. Because where I go in the mornings can be accessed easier by bus than by subway and walking, I started taking buses from the Queens Center Mall toward western Queens around September of this year. What I’ve noticed is that the mall has become an unofficial terminus for bus routes that are supposed to continue.
For example, last week, the Elmhurst-bound Q53 that I was waiting for arrived at Queens Center Mall. Instead of continuing as a Q53, it discharged all passengers, changed into an Ozone Park-bound Q21 like a chameleon, and went around to the other side of Queens Blvd. to take on passengers. In other words, me and other Q53 riders got the shaft, as we had to wait for another bus, while my bus stop (and as I saw, other bus stops) got obscenely crowded.
It happened again this morning too, when the Q29 I was waiting for also did “the changeover” on me, and it seems to happen on a regular basis throughout the morning commute, on top of cutting the amount of buses running per hour, dispatching the buses in clusters, etc. and it only seems to get worse.
In short, my commute is turning into a cheap horror story, and I’m getting sick and tired of the MTA doing this nonsense more often than not. If this gets much worse, I might just say goodbye to transit and walk; at least I can rely on my own two feet.
Between 6:50 and 8:02, alternate northbound Q29’s terminate at Queens Center Mall (presumably because ridership south of the mall calls for more frequent service than ridership north of the mall):
http://www.mta.info/busco/schedules/q029cur.pdf
I don’t think any Q53’s are scheduled to terminate there, but it’s a fairly logical place for a dispatcher to make a swap like that, since there’s heavy turnover at the mall and north of that point the Q53 is paralleled by the subway. In fact, I wonder if that Q53 might have actually been a Q21 that a dispatcher further down the line instructed to make limited (Q53) stops to make up time. Setting the signs to Q53 would then make sense, so nobody would get on the bus trying to go to a local stop, but it would give false hope to anybody hoping to go past Queens Center.
This had nothing to do with last year’s service cuts.
Did you see the Gerritsen post for today? http://www.gerritsenbeach.net/.....n-is-here/
Sounds like a stronger NYPD presence, at the very least, is in the cards.
While I sympathize for the safety of MTA employees and bus riders, it seems that the MTA is starting to use anything as an excuse to suspend service and it’s the riders who ultimately suffer by being stranded.
It’s amazing that people are starving and yet some kids are able to throw eggs at a bus.