Over the past five years, as I’ve written about various attitudes toward the New York City subway system, I’ve often said that the city could not thrive without its transit network. We are more prone toward dwelling on the negatives and griping about delayed trains or crowded commutes than we are to sit back and appreciate what we have. Every now and then, though, a story somewhere drives home that point, and this week, Crain’s New York hosts such a tale.
The story from Crain’s isn’t exactly one of praise for the MTA. In fact, it focuses on just the opposite: After a fall of shuttle buses and service diversions, Williamsburg business owners are fed up with MTA weekends because the lack of trains is having a serious impact on their respective bottom lines. Adrianne Pasquarelli has the story:
William Norton spent the days leading up to the crucial Black Friday shopping weekend taping up flyers and composing an email blast to the 7,000 patrons of Peachfrog, his Williamsburg, Brooklyn-based store. But after ringing up 120 transactions that Friday, sales plummeted on Small Business Saturday and again on Sunday—the same days the neighborhood’s primary link with Manhattan, the L train, was shut down for maintenance. “Nobody was here,” said Mr. Norton, who sells an eclectic mix of apparel, shoes and antiques. “I lost 80% of my business, compared with last year.”
Weekend ridership on the L has jumped 141% since 1998, largely because it is the only line serving the heart of increasingly trendy Williamsburg. The problem nowadays is that all too frequently, that lifeline has been cut, inconveniencing residents and battering local businesses. What’s more, even when the L is up and running, the waiting time between trains is long and the cars overcrowded.
Since July, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has completely or partially shut down service on the L on a dozen weekends. The weekend after Black Friday was the worst, though. Merchants reported that business slumped 20% to 80% from last year’s levels. In response, they’ve begun meeting with community leaders and reaching out to local politicians and the MTA to figure out alternatives. “We’re not crazy people,” said Felice Kirby, co-owner of Teddy’s Bar and Grill on North Eighth Street and Berry Avenue. “We know they have work to do, and we want people to get to work on weekdays, but we count, too—there’s an imbalance.”
Slow sales are only half the problem. Without an easy lifeline to Manhattan, employees have found it onerous to commute to work from far-away locales, and residents can’t stray too far afield from the neighborhoods for fear of being left without a ride home.
Pasquarelli, meanwhile, hits upon only half of the problem. While she focuses on the L train’s woes, service changes have sidelined the G as well. The IND Crosstown line has either been running in sections or not at all, and those in Park Slope and Boerum Hill who want to reach Williamsburg on the weekends cannot. On more than one occasion this fall, I’ve had to change weekend plans when subway service changes made a trip to Williamsburg from Park Slope impractical. At times, without the Q, L, G or Manhattan-bound IRT local service, I had no easy transit route north.
So here we see how the subway rules our lives, our city and our economy. Without subway service, business slumps by 60 percent points. Although Williamsburg enjoys a ferry stop, Pasquarelli notes it carried just 5500 passengers last weekend as compared with 38,000 at Bedford Ave. alone on a typical weekend. So as suburban representatives take aim at MTA funding mechanisms, remember that the city cannot survive without its subway, let alone thrive.
23 comments
In some ways, I’m almost looking forward to the massive work disruptions that subway work is causing. My theory about New York transit is that it’s will continue to degrade* for the next 10 or 20 years, until it will be so far gone that radical options – like canceling all capital projects and putting them back out to bid at one-fifth the cost, or unilateral abrogation of all union contracts and the ensuing strike – will become politically palatable.
*I don’t mean that fewer trains will run than run today, but the expected level of service will be much higher, both because of technological advances elsewhere and higher ridership.
Neither of the radical options will be that much of an improvement. The low operating costs in e.g. Japan are the result of decades of continuous improvement, with an emphasis on healthy business culture. Reduction in the amount of manpower required to achieve something is literally economic growth. It can be rapid sometimes (e.g. JNR’s shedding of labor in the 1980s), but it can’t be done overnight. In particular, the kind of strikebreakers the MTA could get on short notice would be poorly trained, and take a long while to achieve the same standards that we see in cities with well-run subway systems.
Radical change in capital construction could be done more successfully, yes. The contractors would need to be replaced (not a huge problem), good managers would need to be hired (takes a while, but less than to build infrastructure), etc. The main problem there would be improving the quality of governance to ensure tight oversight of consultants, contractors, and so on. Good government is again a type of economic growth.
A couple years ago I wrote a 10 page paper for my HS junior year history class on the history of the subway and it made me realize something. Even though i curse out the MTA on an almost daily basis The NYC subway is truly a marvel and one of the greatest things about this city. This city could not function without our subway. Say what you want about horrible service, missing connections, MTA greed and corruption, or how much cleaner other systems are. Without the subway this city could not function which truly makes ours the best in the world.
i live on the G in bed-stuy, so i have learned to not expect much from this line. but, the service disruptions the last six months are a complete freak show. i have resorted to doing something i prefer not to do: drive to locations on weekends that should be easily accessible by subway.
i realize that the city is completely falling apart and is in desperate need of repair, but these prolonged outages seem to be a worse option that short-term complete shutdowns.
it’s REALLY frustrating.
There’s a bit of irony in that one of the things that made Williamsburg ripe for gentrification in a low-cost way was the crappy subway service on both the 14th Street and Willie B lines in past years (I can still remember back in the 70s when the L used to single-track between Third and Eighth avenues on weekends, not because the MTA was doing any preventive maintenance — this was the 70s after all — but because it was easier to store the spare train sets on the Eighth Avenue-bound track than to bring them back to ENY). The same thing applied to the rolling stock, since other than a few new R-42s, the Eastern Division went 45 years living on only hand-me-down rail cars that were deemed no longer suitable to use on the IND or the BMT’s Southern Division routes. Until the R-143s and the R-160s, trains in the latter half of the 20th Century went to the J/L/M/Z lines to die as much as to serve people living along those routes.
So the problem isn’t new, just amplified by the fact that even as service has improved, it hasn’t been able to keep up with the people moving to Williamsburg, because there were opportunities therer due to past shoddy service that made other outer borough locations more attractive. As far as the current situation, the MTA really should implement weekend M service at least to 57th Street and possibly shuttle bus service between the L stations in Williamsburg and their nearest equivalent on the Broadway-Brooklyn line when the line is disrupted by weekend construction. That wouldn’t help the businesses in the area, but it at least would show the agency recognizes the problem.
They did have weekend M service over the weekend. It’s the only way I would have gotten out of my home in Bushwick. Or my roommate to his job in Manhattan. I actually wish they would have weekend M service to 57th every weekend. It makes it much easier to get to the LES, SoHo and NoHo. It’s just nice to have options. But taking down the L between Manhattan and Brooklyn over this past weekend seems to have been a really bad decision. I’m not sure how the MTA can fix this problem as there isn’t basic redundancy between the two boroughs in that part of town. Build a pedestrian/bike bridge at 14th Street?
Actually what should have happened and perhaps there’s no BID or Main Street program in Williamsburg to do this kind of thing, but there should have been coordination between the MTA, the neighborhood and the Ferry service. Knowing that the weekend was big for shoppers there should have been increased promotion of the ferry service (perhaps it could have been free?) as as unique (read: required) way to shop in Williamsburg during the holiday weekend.
If there’s enough new residential growth in the Long Island City area over the next couple of years, it might make sense for the MTA to run M service weekends from Metropolitan to Queens Plaza. That way you’d have the line serving gentrifying neighborhoods in both northeast Brooklyn and Southeast Queens, and have a safety valve weekend service not just for the L when it’s shut down, but also an extra option into Manhattan when 7 service is disrupted that wouldn’t be as crowded as the E is by the time it reaches Court Square/23rd Ely (and with the impending CBTC infrastructure work on the Flushing Line, you’ve got to figure there are going to be a lot of Steinway Tunnel shutdowns coming over the next several years).
Er, make that northwest Brooklyn and southwest Queens. I had a geographical loss of direction in the last post.
To offer a minor correction, having the G out as well is actually about 1/5 of the problem for Williamsburg, not half. 😉
But, on a recent weekend, both the L AND G were out at the SAME TIME, and thus there were literally no trains for miles (J & 7). If you look at a map and say, oh c’mon the J is right there, but it is not. The streets in Williamsburg crook and twist, so it is rarely a straight line to walk the extra distance, plus it is just plain far when you have to walk it going AND coming.
There is no substitute for the L. Running the M may help some riders, but it is not a replacement. Maybe buses that actually duplicate the route from Manhattan to Brooklyn could help. Have buses leave from 8 Ave, 6 Ave, Union Sq, 1 Av and serve Bedford, Lorimer, Graham and at least Grand. Then having the M running as well, connecting with shuttle buses at Myrtle Wyckoff for Jefferson through B’way Junction (or Rockaway Parkway).
It seems that the real answer is going to be to shut the line down overnight as is being planned on other routes. The hipster drunkards will just need to stagger home a different way.
The problem is that the shuttle buses could become very unreliable going over the Williamsburg Bridge. In that case, you’re better off running more (M) service and hoping for the best (And boost up service on the buses that connect the (L) and (M), like the B62, which passes between Bedford Avenue and Marcy Avenue)
Of course it would highly unreliable, with traffic on 14 St., Ave A and the Willy B, but clearly business is way off in Williamsburg with the current replacement services, so it is fair to say that the current replacement services are marginally effective.
Looking at John-2’s comment, it occurred to me that the gentrification of Williamsburg happened during a sweet spot when there was actually decent L train service.
If you like the gentrification and hypergentrification of the city in the last two decades, realize that it is fragile because the underlying governance problems have never been solved.
Welcome acknowledgement that it’s not just “commuters” one should be concerned with. Not that New York television media is averse to broadly describing all subway riders as “commuters,” a misnomer even applied to Metro-North, LIRR, or NJT, but far more egregious when applied to subway travel.
I’ve never understood why they don’t extend the J train to Broad Street on weekends for the Fulton St connections. Especially given high weekend ridership/crowds on the L train, wouldn’t you want folks going to the 2/3 or to the A/C to be able to take the J as well? How much money does the MTA actually save on keeping those two stops closed and turning the trains at Chambers?
The J and L are what, a half mile from each other between Lorimer/Hewes? If the MTA invested in the J I think you’d see more people who live between the two taking it, and of course higher property values along the line.
.7 miles walking
http://maps.google.com/maps?sa.....&z=16
And a very short bike ride. I thought bike riding was all the rage in Brooklyn?
So is bike theft
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Sounds like the L could benefit if the MTA’s impending trial of multi-night line shutdowns works well, especially once CBTC is done and most of the work is standard maintenance.
CBTC isn’t done unfortunately. They still have to resignal the line again…because of a lack of replacement parts for the current Siemens system. The 7 should, in theory, not have this issue as the MTA have gone with Thales for CBTC signalling there instead of Siemens and their “whoops, we no longer make your almost brand new product” service.
I’m no fan of Siemens, but what you say is nonsense – the line doesn’t need to be resignaled again. (If a particular part is no longer available, then that part might need to be replaced with something new, but not the entire signal system.)
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