Once upon a time, the original IRT stations were short. They didn’t span the distances they do now, and it made some modicum of sense to pack stations into Downtown Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. With rapidly increasing ridership in the 1940s and 1950s though, New York City realized it did not have the capacity to run trains long enough to meet service demands nor did it have platforms long enough to accomodate the maddening crowd. So they expanded.
Throughout the city, a decade or so the IND overbuilt to accommodate everyone who could ever ride the subway, the original IRT platforms were expanded to fit ten-car trains and many more people. As a casualty of the expansion program, some stations — 18th and Worth Sts. on the East Side, 91st St. on the West Side — were shuttered due to their proximity to nearby stops, but with more spacious platforms and long trains, those closures were a necessary trade-off.
Today, ridership has once again approached levels that warranted such an expansion. While the automobile and the general state of decay saw ridership drop from the late 1950s to a nadir in the 1980s, the MTA has seen a steep growth in usage over the recent years. That growth has not been confined to weekdays either, as historical ridership patterns have dictated, and now authority officials are trying to find ways to alleviate overcrowding along certain lines at all times of the day.
Yesterday, MTA Chairman Joe Lhota went to Albany to talk transit funding, and he spoke about a rough idea to expand subway stations in order to keep pace with demand. It is doubtful that trains would be lengthened, but the authority can make some access improvements to stations, particularly along the overcrowded L line, that could improve service. These little changes could go a long way toward improving the transit experience.
Pete Donohue of The Daily News had a bit more:
With the subways bursting at the seams, the MTA needs to expand stations in the century-old system, authority Chairman Joseph Lhota said Thursday. Lhota singled out the L line as an example of an overcrowded route that requires alterations to accommodate a meteoric rise in ridership due to industrial areas transforming into bustling residential neighborhoods. “Today, it’s the fastest growing line,” he said.
Stations in neighborhoods like Williamsburg were built with just one or two entrances, “whereas if we knew it was going to be residential as it is today, we would have three or four entrances,” Lhota said. “So, you’re seeing tremendous crowding on stations that are unbelievably narrow. We’re going to have to spend capital programs to expand those stations.”
It’s fairly easy to see where the MTA could include station entrances along the L. In Manhattan, a back entrance at the First Ave. stop that better serves Avenue A and points east would help alleviate uneven boarding patterns while cutting down commute times to the subway. In Brooklyn, stations east of Lorimer St. generally have but one entrance that leads to passenger bunching along the station. Even outside of the L, I see such behavior at 7th Ave. on the Brighton Line (which has a shuttered second entrance) and Grand Army Plaza. New entrances would help better disperse the crowds.
Of course, there is one giant problem: These types of system expansion plans cost money, and money is something the MTA has little of. The current capital plan doesn’t allow for such construction efforts, and the MTA may have to satisfy ADA requirements if it starts work on some of these stations. Thus, adding new entrances would not come cheap.
Still, it’s an idea worth considering. Better station access won’t help increase the frequency of trains or allow for longer car sets, but straphanger distribution can help ease the loads. Maybe those back cars wouldn’t be so empty if they were closer to the station entrance points.
84 comments
Expanding the BMT eastern division platforms to accommodate 600 foot trains would be pretty great. I think at some point in the future they’ll simply have to do it, though when is a mystery. In some cases, I believe there are actual serious logistical problems regarding platform expansion on the Els there.
And now with the married four-car sets specifically for the BMT Eastern Division, you’d have to do something funky like with the Flushing line – maybe stick another two-car set in there. Then again, this is probably so many years out that it’s probably not an issue.
The BMT Eastern Division stations will never be lengthened. The problem is not the elevated stations, but the underground ones. Look at the construction mess everywhere along Second Avenue where they are building stations today. Now imagine that mess at the site of every BMT Eastern Division underground station. It’s a project that would make the Second Avenue Subway look cheap.
Adding station entrances (as Lhota has proposed), building tail tracks at the terminals, and getting full value out of CBTC, are about all that can be done to expand capacity along that line.
It would most certainly not ever by any stretch of the imagination look like the Second Avenue Subway cost-wise. We’re talking about excavating something less than a block for each station – in some cases perhaps the length of a Brooklyn railroad apartment. The value of land that would need to be condemned, if any, is well south of the value of such properties on Second Avenue.
Of course, that doesn’t rule out track curvature or other engineering factors making it impossible, or at least not worth the trouble.
Ummm, no. It’s true that any particular SAS station is far more expensive than a lengthened BMT Eastern Division Station.
But the SAS, at the moment, is adding just three new stations (and modifying a fourth). To get the benefit of station lengthening on the BMT Eastern Division, you have to lengthen every station. I will let you do the math, to see how many stations that is.
And yes, you are correct that in many places you would find curvature issues, grade issues, and stations where you cannot expand without intruding upon the foundations and basements of adjacent buildings.
The SAS, because it does not exist yet, had quite a bit of flexibility in choosing where to put stations. The BMT Eastern Division does not have that flexibility: they are where they are.
Lengthening every station by 100′ – hell, let’s say 200′ for the sake of argument – is going to be more expensive than ~30 blocks bored subway track? If it costs $10M a pop that’s $250M for 25 stations. That’s probably way more than it needs to cost in many cases, though there may be engineering challenges to warrant such costs in a few cases.
The best example today is probably the lengthening of Bleecker St (6). Multiple that by two (both sides of a station) and then by 10.5 (number of underground stations – Wilson is 50/50).
Although, many of the L-Train station are in comparatively desolate areas unlike NoHo.
Then of course there are the above-ground stations.
I don’t think that’s a very good comparison except perhaps in Manhattan.
Side platforms should often be genuinely easy to extend.
No, they are not. It’s often quite difficult, for minimal benefit. It would be comparatively easy in cases where there is nothing in the way, but there is usually something in the way. And remember, you have to lengthen every station before you get any benefit.
Incidentally, I was not saying that it would be less expensive than the Second Avenue Subway. I was merely saying that it is extremely expensive (more than some folks seem to realize), and once people realized that, projects with far greater benefit, like the SAS, would seem a whole lot more attractive — bearing in mind that there isn’t enough money to do every worthy big project, so every one you do means there are others you cannot.
When there are two parallel tracks without curvature, it’s generally going to be easy if there isn’t an issue with support columns or something. I think you and I agree most of the expense will be in the exceptions.
Now you’re confusing me. Above you said, “It’s a project that would make the Second Avenue Subway look cheap,” which is what I was disputing. I’m guessing you mean something along the lines of, it will be a lot of buck for very little bang compared to the SAS?
Anyway, I don’t really buy this station extension idea is a good one. I probably agree with you that it’s not the best use of scarce resources, but I do think you’re probably over-stating the costs, but perhaps not understating the relative benefits. I’d also be concerned that even if we get excess station capacity we might just be slowing the trains down by creating more/sharper track curves.
But then, I guess the services are largely slower than they need to be, and nobody is really talking about fixing that.
Im curious about how the stations were actually lengthened, and what the comparable costs are today, due to the Central Subway situation in San Francisco, where the 1 billion a mile subway is being built with stations for 3 car trains.
On the L, the biggest capacity increase would come from adding a few tens of meters to the west of 8th Avenue, much more so than adding the same few tens of meters to every station. If they still expect a meteoric ridership rise then they should start by expanding 8th Avenue and also future-proofing it so that it’d still have reasonable-length tail tracks (that’s 50 meters, maximum) even with longer trains.
I think Lhota’s proposal is to add entrances, not to lengthen stations. You are right about the benefits of lengthening Eighth Avenue, but he is not suggesting that other stations be lengthened either.
Just for those who don’t know, Alon isn’t proposing expanding the 8th Avenue Station. He is proposing extending tracks beyond the station, so trains could enter and leave the station faster, increasing capacity.
Bad news Alon. When they rebuilt Broadway Junction they didn’t do it in a way that allowed the station to be used as a terminal, and the terminal in Canarsie also has capacity issues.
So does the yard, and additional service would require more trains.
Sure, but,
1. The capacity issues at 8th are currently the constraining factor.
2. Canarsie is above-ground, i.e. easier to modify.
3. Rolling stock is cheaper than concrete pouring, especially but not only in New York.
Canarsie abuts a busy urban street at grade, IIRC. (I haven’t been there in 8 years and am too lazy to open Google Maps. Someone can correct me if I’m wrong.)
However, would either of these alternatives work?
• turn some trains at Myrtle (an O or P Train?). Most of the crowding is between Union Square and Dekalb anyway.
• build a short branch to a new, preferably modern, terminal. Could be anywhere between Myrtle and Canarsie, but might even make the most sense south of Halsey, where it wouldn’t be disruptive to the surface.
Couldn’t Myrtle-Wyckoff be used as a terminal? There is a pocket track south of the station that could be used to turn trains to increase capacity. Broadway Junction would be a more logical terminal, though.
I could and used to be, but there is only room to turn one train. I guess they could follow the BMT pattern and run some trains just from there to 8th Avenue.
Bottom line, in a $zillon project they should have built the tail tracks, even though this would have meant shutting down tearing up the block from 8th to 9th for a few years.
For a few years? They can do it in a few weeks probably. That it takes a few years is bureaucratic nonsense.
Fumigation rules make Myrtle-Wyckoff problematic. It takes more than 2 minutes to do and that constrains line capacity during peak hrs.
If not Broadway Junction, why not Atlantic Ave? There is space for another 2 tracks, layup tracks and a platform that aren’t in use.
There is also the option of running 9 car (60′ each) trains. it would be slightly longer (540′ vs 536′) than 8 car (67′) Standard trains that the BMT used to run on the BMT Eastern Division. All the doors should open onto the platform. They could run them with 4 and 5 car sets mated together (ABBA-ABBBA).
It is used as a terminal for some rush hour trains. But using it too much starves the outer end of the line. Already, the overcrowding on the inbound train behind each short-turning train is especially bad.
Broadway Junction can be used as a terminal, but only when no trains are running through to Canarsie. That’s obviously of no use during rush hours.
As I’ve said elsewhere, Lhota is speaking about overcrowding at station exits, not overcrowding on trains.
Overcrowding on trains can be solved by increasing rush hour service from 17 tph to 20 tph, or a bit more if ridership continues to grow. Both terminals can easily handle more than 20 tph in their current configurations.
“In Brooklyn, stations west of Lorimer St. generally have but one entrance that leads to passenger bunching along the station.”
I think you mean east, right? Because Bedford and Lorimer both have two exits (Lorimer in theory a few more).
In many cases it’s just the pathetic size of street stairs that are causing the problems. At Bedford, for example, you can get to the mezzanine reasonably well but then the real backup occurs at the 2.5-person-wide stairs that effectively become a one-person-wide staircase with people also entering the station.
In some cases these stairwells are actually built double-wide about halfway up, apparently some kind of future proofing in case the building ever came down above them to allow for a wider staircase to be built.
All that needs to be done in many cases is to widen the sidewalk above the entrance (at Bedford this means removing a few parking spaces) and then widen the stairs.
I honestly know of no system in the world that relies on such tiny stairwells.*
*OK, I’ve seen a couple in London, but those are usually combined with much larger entrances elsewhere in the stations.
I thought the goal of spending over $500 million for CBTC on the L line was to add substantial rush hour service to the L line which would solve the crowded platform problems.
No, the goal of CBTC was to replace the old life-expired signals that had been in service since the line opened in the 1920’s. If morning rush trains are currently at 116% of guidelines with 17 tph (source – see page 4 of the embedded document), then three additional trains will bring loads below 100%. There’s no need for more than that (unless, of course, ridership continues to grow).
In other words, just make it “seem like” there is more capacity. Massive capital construction sleight of hand. I don’t think so.
Distributing riders along the platform does increase effective capacity. Full trains are slower in part because waiting riders have to scramble along the platform looking for an open car once the train arrives. If waiting passengers were more spread out, this effect would be diminished and full trains could run a little faster. Presto! New capacity.
Sure, it’s several orders of magnitude less benefit than actually running more trains. But it’s also an order of magnitude cheaper.
Read the Daily News article. Lhota is specifically discussing station capacity, not train capacity. It’s a problem in many places, not just the L, that’s been largely unaddressed for far too long.
One of the things I’ve found odd about this site is the number of commentators who are opposed to the Fulton Street transit center. This is exactly the sort of station expansion and renovation that Lhota is talking about. If you were given a budget devoted to station overhaul in 2000 and were told to draw up a list of which stations should be overhauled, in order of priority, doing something about the Fulton Street maze would have been on the top of most people’s list.
I accept that there is no money at all to do this, but I think my station, the 59th Street/ Lexington Station, should be high on the priority list. Its one of the more heavily trafficked stations in the system, and in my experience somewhat worse than usual for getting around, because the connections between the 4/5, the N/R/Q, and the 6 were jerry-rigged from what had been separate systems. Long, narrow stairwells that always seem to feature some elderly lady loaded down with bags from Bloomingdales, and no access for disabled people at all (hence the elderly ladies clogging the narrow stairwells all the time), plus only a handful of ways to get between the uptown and downtown IRT tracks. I tend to treat the complex as a bunch of separate stations, so for example if I want to use the downtown IRT I will walk a block further and cross two avenues instead just heading to the closest entrance and trying to navigate the station. I treated the Fulton Street station the same way.
And as long as we are dreaming, and assuming you can deal with the UES NIMBYs, they could put in tunnels to connect to the 63rd and Lexington Avenue station, the tram, and since we are dreaming, the T line on 2nd and 57th Street.
The general opposition here with regard to Fulton Street about the costs, not the improvements the transit center is bringing. Most(?) of the costs are in a completely useless headhouse portion of the station and don’t help riders one bit. Beyond that, there may be some disagreement about whether Fulton Street is more meritorious than other potential improvements, but either way it’s hard to argue Fulton Street is being done correctly.
I think we have agreed that “around half” of the costs of Fulton St. are tied up in a mostly useless headhouse. That still leaves a whopping $700 million for making a confusing station slightly less confusing. It’s not nearly as clear-cut a benefit for the cost as, say, adding a staircase at Ave. A and 14th St. would be. That’s the opposition to Fulton St.
There will be capacity improvements at Fulton, which is good, but the cost is a bit outrageous. And with all that money being spent, the most confusing part of the complex – the need to go down to the A/C platform to get from one end to the other – still won’t be going away.
Actually, it will.
Part of the Fulton Street Mezzanine (running above the IND) is already in use, and the full thing will connect seamlessly with the new headhouse and the Dey Street connector to the BMT and PATH.
That mezzanine will only run between the 4/5 and the west side (northbound track) of the J/Z. A separate mezzanine will open soon(?) running between the east side (southbound track) of the J/Z and the 2/3. If you need to get from one mezzanine to the other, you will still have to go down to the A/C platform and back up.
That’s exactly how it was before the construction started, and it’s how it’s going to be when the construction ends.
I don’t have a problem with the MTA building a nice headhouse/mall over a major transit center. My problem is that this should have been combined with the PATH station and a shell for a future LIRR (or NJT?) should have been made with space dedicated for future circulation expansions. Building two multi-billion dollar train stations a block apart is an absurdity that could only happen in NYC. And although circulation is improved by the enhancements, there is no new train capacity or longer platforms.
“the connections between the 4/5, the N/R/Q, and the 6 were jerry-rigged from what had been separate systems”
It’s actually more ludicrous, because (even though the operation and maintenance of the B’way and Lex lines were leased out to the BRT/BMT and IRT) all three levels of platforms were designed and built at the same time under the purview of the Public Service Commission’s own engineers. The whole story can be found here. The long and the short of why N/R/W platform is so dangerously crowded is because the city decided to shoehorn a two-track station into a one-track space.
Not true. The lower level (IRT express) platforms didn’t open until 1962.
I’m curious why the city has seemed so overcrowded lately. The latest census data puts the population of the five boroughs at 8.2 million people, not much more than the 7.9 million that was reported at the 1970 census. Was the overcrowding as bad then? Maybe the city infrastructure can accommodate eight million people, and not that more, and one of the reasons for the 70s exodus was that the city had just gotten too overcrowded. But Manhattan has had a population of 2.5 million at some points.
Maybe people got fatter.
I think it’s a change in the way people live and work in a city. There is something in planning called day-part planning. It’s how you plan for the times of days and the types of uses. We are seeing that switch along the L for instance. But all over the city. People are not keeping traditional 9-5 schedules. Or 8-4. So there is an increase in congestion in general. Every time in DC, I’m amazed at how EMPTY their residential neighborhoods are during the day. Or even downtown and closer in. The question I always wonder is … where is EVERYONE? That’s a city who’s population has increased dramatically but those new people are often lawyers and government workers. And asssociated. They run on the schedule of the government: traditional hours. Regular lunch breaks. We also have a lot more tourists than DC — 50M a year (and they have a lot too but theirs rarely get out of the “Monumental Core” i.e. never leave the Mall.) We are blessed/cursed that our tourists want to see more than than just the center of the city.
Personally, I think it’s because of the recession/depression: because of how the economy is doing, people are moving closer and closer to where the jobs are at – the cities, especially New York.
Think about it: Of course there were always complaints about crowding, but were they so loud before the economic collapse?
Thanks for the responses to my question.
I suspect that part of the answer was that city really was overcrowded in 1970, and that is one reason why so many left. Improvements to or expansion of infrastructure stopped keeping up with population growth, and then people left until the population dropped back to the level that the infrastructure could handle. Then the city started growing again, back up to the 1970 figure.
The other part was discussed in one of the previous recent posts. People simply don’t behave as well in crowded areas as they used to, and this makes the overcrowding even worse.
A big chunk of NYC’s population in the 1970s-’80s was heading to Staten Island, where subway service in non-existent. The population on SI more than doubled from 1965-90, so even though NYC’s population was not much less than it is now, a few hundred thousand of those were people not using the subway (except for riders near South Ferry/Bowling Green). Islanders either drove or took MTA express buses, which have increased dramatically in the past 30 years.
Now, however, there’s a huge influx in Brooklyn and Queens (where residents were fleeing in the bad old days), and lines such as the “L” and “7” have seen huge growth with the same capacity as 1970. Therein lies the problem.
When Manhattan had 2.5 million people, they were poor immigrant families with tons of kids who didn’t commute very far. Practically all children walked to school and a ton of people walked to work. Women were far less likely to work outside of the home. Today way less people walk to things, and we have way more tourists. People travel further distances than ever for school, work, running errands, and entertainment. Back in the day if you grew up on 91st St, you were likely to live your whole life on 91st Street– your friends all lived on the block, your school was right there, and you got a job at the factory or store down the street. That’s definitely not typical anymore.
I don’t think crowding was “one of the reasons for the 70s exodus” at all. You get into Yoggi Berra logic (“Nobody goes there anymore– it’s too crowded!”) trying to make that argument anyway.
The difference is that the proportion of working adults is going up in much of New York City.
Let’s take the example of Williamsburg on the L. Before all the youngsters moved in, was the neighborhood empty? No, but the people who used to live there were more often children, retirees, unemployed, or simply worked somewhere other than Manhattan. The people who have moved there, contrary to the stereotype of the hipster with a trust fund, mostly have jobs in Manhattan. And of course, they don’t have children, so a higher proportion of the residential space there is now taken up by people who take the L to work.
Moreover, they moved there specifically so they could take advantage of the area where they live, rather than sitting at home watching TV or looking at cat pictures on the internet. Which means that they use the subway more even at non-peak times.
The same story has already happened in several other neighborhoods, and it’s happening now in yet more neighborhoods.
“…looking at cat pictures on the internet.”
Too funny! Though I must admit, some of those cat pics are hysterical 🙂
The “trust fund” is probably more a college student lifestyle anyway that gets exaggerated into trust funds.* Their parents are the middle class/upper middle class types who can afford to give their children a nice apartment and pay tuition at NYU, Pace, New School, Pratt, or wherever. This is not the socioeconomic class that is consuming the cat pictures; it is the uber-creative class that is creating the pictures.
But seriously, the college kids are likely to use transit to get to the city for lots of reasons.
* I would guess the actual trust fund types are living in Manhattan.
“…contrary to the stereotype of the hipster with a trust fund, mostly have jobs in Manhattan”
Huh? I always presumed all those hipsters work in Manhattan – at not for profits or graphic design firms or something similar – but pay for bburg rent with help from the parents.
Take a look at some old pictures. It was always crowded. To summarize a few possibilities though:
• My suspicion, if you’re talking about Manhattan, for why you’re seeing this: tourism is up a lot.
• You’re perceiving more crowding in places around Midtown that have seen pedestrian improvements; in fact, there may be more crowding because of induced demand brought by the pedestrian improvements.
• The Census could be seriously undercounting New York. We are almost certain Queens was severely undercounted. Even if Manhattan wasn’t, much of the undercount in a place like Queens involves people who will travel to Manhattan.
• Kind of like the above, even if each borough only saw a small growth, the effect on Manhattan is multiplied by the fact that nearly every one of those people will probably make trips to Manhattan. If they don’t work there, they probably at least sometimes go in to shop or dine or consume services or whatever people need to do.
• ant6n is probably right. People are probably fatter.
Let’s not forget Unlimited MetroCards. Prior to the late 1990s, you had to pay each time you rode the train. I suspect many people are using subways for short hops that they’d otherwise have walked 20 years ago.
Perhaps, but I was talking more about why the “city seemed overcrowded lately,” per the OP, not necessarily transit. It all feeds into more transit use, though.
Anecdotally, I do find it amusing how many people take subways for trips that on average probably make more sense to walk. I had someone want to subway it from Chambers to Fulton to get to the Seaport recently…. 😐
But most of those short hops aren’t at the peak load point, so they’re not contributing to overcrowding.
I think the “solution”, if there is one, is to have the communities themselves vie for adding entrances. I know that up where I am in West Harlem, many stations would benefit from just having one more pair of exit turnstiles at the extreme ends of the stations. It wouldn’t require more machines, more fare turnstiles or more emergency exit doors – just more ways out when the train arrives. That way rider distribution on the trains would even out, and people would be a lot closer to home when they arrived. They’d still have to go to the same entrance when they wanted to enter the system, but that distribution doesn’t happen all at once, like the crowd that exits when a train arrives. I know I’d rather exit at 146th if I could, and no doubt I have neighbors who would rather exit at 144th – or even further south.
If the people of a community can be convinced of the benefit, perhaps fund raising from private sources can augment a matching fund from the MTA. Now that they’ve removed the attendant’s booth from the outbound 1 Train at 145th Street, I could see a table set up there, staffed by volunteers, with a bake sale every weekday evening to raise funds for the project. Local businesses, the ones likely to benefit from having an exit in front of their shops, could donate goods or services for auction to raise funds. Etc. etc …
It’s not likely to occur … but in a world of focused activism, the subway system would have been expanded decades ago, including beltways from Staten Island to the Bronx that extend out to the furthest reaches of Queens and Brooklyn. We just don’t live in that world yet.
nyland8, you beat me to it! I was just going to propose the 145th St. stop on the 1 train as a perfect example of where to building extra egress points. I live on 148th and I have to walk 2 extra blocks down and then walk all the way back to the end of the platform to get off at 116th. It’s inconvenient for me, but more importantly there are always lots of people who get off at 145th at nearly every time of day. Having just the one exit with what, 3 turnstiles for the whole station is ludicrous.
The Astoria line could use this treatment to for getting off the platforms. Two narrow staircases that are so packed, you have to wait in line for quite some time just to get to the mezz. It reminds me of the old South Ferry station.
MTA could easily build exit-only staircases at the ends of each platform that bypass the mezz and go directly to the street. Just need some of those old Iron_maiden style gates
This is a great idea. Those stations get packed.
Community pressure to reopen entrances can work. The South Portland St exit at Fulton St (G) is a fairly-recent example:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/f.....A9639C8B63
I wonder how much of this can be done in concert with real estate development. For example, there’s a full block of 1-story retail on the west side of Broadway between 109th and 110th. that’s just waiting to be replaced with high-rise apartments. When/if that happens, the MTA might be able to work with the developer to get an elevator & stairway exit added to the southbound 1 110th stop at 109th/Broadway, adding accessibility to the 1 station and spreading out where people wait on the platform.
Admittedly, the southbound 1 at 110th is not a high priority in the overall scheme of things, but I wonder how much of this sort of opportunistic improvement could be made.
Excellent point. This is where good transit-oriented development planning can really benefit expansion and rehabilitation of the city. It will require working between the City and the MTA though. Like the development at the old St. Vincent’s right on top of 14th St station — development there should have included variances in concert with money for improving that station and increasing access points.
I know that MTA is looking at TOD but the city needs to do this as well.
Finally some good ideas other than lets tax the middle class drivers out of the city.
There is a plot of land owned by Acadia real estate management along the brighton lines sheepshead bay stop. I would propose allowing them to build over the train station in exchange for adding elevators to the sheepshead bay station. Also they could add parking so the mta can eliminate the costly parallel express bus service. Clean the environment up by getting the buses off the road, add ADA access all for no cost to taxpayers
The L is a victim of poor transit planning as well as the disconnect/fragmentation of various governmental entities. How long ago now did the city re-zone many parts of Williamsburg? How long ago now did the traditional route of gentrification start? First artists, now hipsters and wannabes, and now the stroller set is beginning. None of this happened overnight. But because of bureaucratic largess, institutional stubbornness and dysfunction, the L can barely handle what’s being thrown at it.
Oh, and it’s not over. The bulding boom continues (albeit at a slower pace since the Great Recession), and that boom is expanding ever eastward. So as crowded as the L is now, it will only become more crowded in the years ahead.
Building additional ingress/egress points is a start, but only a start. Many exits/entrances now just have a steady stream of people. It’s hard to tell where the break is in between trains. From 1 L to the next, it’s nearly 1 long line, with no breaks at Union Sq (Lex stairs), 1 Av and Bedford (west exit).
Your snark at Williamsburg residents (hipsters/wannabees/stroller set) is so old and unoriginal. They live in NYC, work, and pay taxes, and most cities in the NE would kill to have these “wannabees” move in. That being said, there was no guarantee that the area would become as popular as it is just because it was rezoned. I don’t think anyone could have predicted the huge growth in North Brooklyn over the past 20 years. If anything, the MTA was probably looking at decreasing service in many parts of the city in the 1970s and ’80s because residents were fleeing by the busload.
Kindest sir/madam,
Would you please forgive me my humblest of errors and let me correct as follows: the creative souls seeking an affordable place to rent, the self-satisfied trust fund babies looking to party hearty, the I am higher than thou organic food consumers/I need a fixed wheel to gain acceptance who do indeed eat at Kellogg’s, and lastly the now that’s it so safe condo dwelling ‘professionals’ who have no interest whatsoever in associating with anyone other than their own kind.
You see, no matter how I describe them, and I hoped that this time I was more ‘original’ and ‘new’ for your tastes, the simple fact remains, as was the point of my post, that even though our governing and administrative bodies knew this was coming at least a decade before the big influx of those that the “most cities in the NE would kill” for, and they did little to nothing to expand mobility options.
And how exactly did the gov’t know the crowds would come? Many parts of town have empty lofts, cheap rents and room to grow (South Bronx, North Shore Staten Island) and they haven’t seen nearly as much growth (if any) that North Brooklyn has. Your 20/20 vision is nothing short of amazing. You should run for Mayor. You’re such an obnoxious asshat, you’d win easily.
Actually, the Melrose neighborhood in the South Bronx has seen a population growth of close to 50% since 2000, as per the 2010 census.
Don’t take census increases too literally without reading deeper. I haven’t in this case, but they could reflect population growth…or just better counting.
Or a bit of both. The huge “growth” in NYC in the 1990s I believe is thought to be around 50% from reducing undercounting.
Hmmm… where did you read about the 50% bit? I’m asking because the census numbers for 1990-2000, unlike for 2000-10, accord with the housing unit survey.
I’m not sure off the top of my head; maybe I am remembering wrong, but I thought it was the rough consensus in the urban planning usenet group after 2000. According to this, the 1990 undercount for NYC was thought to be close to 230k though. If they were mostly caught in 2000, that’s about 33.5%, assuming they didn’t find more undercounting. Still pretty substantial.
Regardless, the housing survey sounds like an extremely unreliable why to measure growth in urban areas.
It takes no crystal ball – in hindsight or foresight – to have seen that W’burg would take off. In the mid-80’s (almost 30 years ago!!), I used to call the L Train the “Artist’s Shuttle” because of all of the artists who lived in the E.Village and had lofts in W’burg. By the early 90’s those artists were being priced out of the E.Vill, and they chose to consolidate to live and work in W’burg (makes sense, right? They already were in the neighborhood working). And it has always always always been a truism in NY (at least in the 20th C.) that where you have an artists neighborhood, gentrification will follow and the neighborhood becomes attractive to non-artists (Greenwich Village, SoHo, East Village, West Chelsea, etc.). Couple that with an easy 1-stop ride to a desirable area of Manhattan (or 3 stops to one of the busiest subway interchange stations giving access to Wall Street, Midtown, etc.) and you have an infallible recipe for a neighborhood to take off. Add some favorable rezoning and you have a mix that Staten Island’s North Shore, the South Bronx (yes, even with its remarkable resurgence) just can’t match.
Yeah, you’re probably right. I do wonder how predictive the artist thing will be in the 21st century. There ain’t many places close to Manhattan left to migrate to. There are cheapish apartments to be had in parts of Queens (Ridgewood, Maspeth), but loft spaces aren’t very nearby the trains.
If people actually kept the tihs cleared from their eye sockets (spell “tihs” and “eye” backwards please) with regard to crime, they probably could have. Alas, to this day, people are crediting policy with something that was probably more organic and/or cultural. And they’re still fantasizing the problem will come back if we don’t keep pouring money into the NYPD. (Up until 2008 or so the fantasy still existed that if a recession happened, as happened frequently from the 1970s to early 1990s, the problem would come back. But experience has shown that not to be the case either)
I really credit natural selection – not necessarily of the biological variety, but still. Once the boomers/early Gen Xers* who were committing most of the antisocial behavior in New York in the 1970s-1990s grew up, went to prison, moved to Florida (yes), and/or died, there really wasn’t a sufficiently antisocial crop of newcomers to replace them. The only place where biology might step in is they didn’t last long enough to produce children, despite stereotypes about strappin’ young bucks taking T-bones home in taxis from the supermarkets with welfare money. Or, alternatively, the folk made it past those high-crime years of 15-25 or so – “grew up,” so to speak – and did manage to sire children actually did it in an environment without whatever the factors were that created the original problem.
Which kind of brings up another point that seems to stump everyone except people who are too dumb to be stumped: what, exactly, created the original problem? Either way, once it died down, the growth in North Brooklyn was more akin to homesteading at first. There were cheap places to live that were convenient to Manhattan and safe enough, only to get safer as it continued to die down further.
* The same people Larry Littlefield calls “Generation Greed,” probably.
If your explanation were correct, Florida would currently be suffering from high crime rates 🙂
A much more logical explanation would be that since Roe vs Wade far fewer unwanted children, who tend to grow up materially and emotionally deprived and thus to get involved in crime, have been born.
No. Steven Levitt’s evidence for the Roe effect is flimsy, based on overinterpreting noisy data: New York and some other states that legalized abortion before Roe had their crime rate start dropping a bit earlier than the national average. The problem is that crime drops in other countries, e.g. Britain (abortion legalized in 1967, crime peaked in 1997) and Canada (abortion legalized in 1988, crime peaked in 1990), do not exhibit the same effect. On top of that, individual cases of crime reduction can be traced to policing changes, and those happened a bit earlier in New York, from which they exported to the rest of the US by Lee Brown and Ed Bratton.
Did Britain or even Canada have comparable crime? I have a hard time seeing why that effect would exist outside the USA. The period was one of relative economic turmoil, and the Thatcher/Reagan movements probably only exacerbated that, but it really doesn’t explain why the antisocial behavior that was happening in the USA happened. Other partial explanations could be white flight, suburbanization, decreased gov’t support for urban areas, worsening education, blah blah, but they’re all pretty unsatisfactory even if they weren’t as common in other countries as they were in the USA. (Canada, frankly, is largely a demographic parallel.)
Still, I can see the abortion thing having an effect, albeit one overstated by Levitt. I can also see policing having an effect, probably a bigger one, but still overstated by fans of aggressive policing.
The crime rate estimated by the British Crime Survey is twice that estimated by the US’s National Crime Victimization Survey. The reason people think Britain has less crime is that Britain has much less homicide, and cross-national comparisons usually use homicide because it’s the only crime for which reported rates are reliable; most countries do not have high-quality crime surveys.
There’s an article I read a few years ago that did a quick survey of all OECD countries and found that Britain was in the top 2 for crime, while the US was squarely in the middle. It did not mention where Canada was, unfortunately.
Well, I was mainly referring to homicide and I suppose other violent crimes myself. I realize property crimes perhaps tend to be lower in the U.S.. Also, don’t know how it compared then, but I was talking about the 1980s more, not today. Things were a lot worse then until Reagan, Giuliani, and Newt rode in with tough on crime policies and saved us!
There is also the possibility that these things just go un- or mis-reported in the U.S. compared to the U.K.. At the very least there is probably a uniformity to reports there that doesn’t exist here. Imagine, even the farcical town/village courts in NYS deal with “crime.”
They aren’t as stark as they were a few years ago, but Florida does have relatively high crime (PDF of 2008/2009). IIRC, they were worse a decade or so ago.
I can buy abortion dented American crime, but I really have a hard time buying the effect was that big. Still, it doesn’t explain how the problem started, which I think it much more interesting.
There’s a reason why the Second Avenue station on the F now has its main entrance at First Avenue, and that’s because of the residential patterns in the area, where Houston Street extends almost 3/4 of a mile further east before you hit the river. The geographic situation is not as severe at 14th Street but it falls into the same category, but despite calls for a new Avenue A exit for over 40 years, nothing was done, and now due to the growth in Williamsburg, you don’t just have the situation were Manhattanites are jamming the final two cars on the west end of the L, you’ve got a growing number of Brooklyites battling for the same space.
Put in the Avenue A exit and you shift 50 percent or more of the First Avenue passengers to the east end of the train, where the only others on the line who really benefit from being there are those going all the way to Canarsie. (And just as an aside, it will be interesting to see how the boarding patters change, if at all, on the B/D/F/M once the Bleecker Street uptown transfer to the 6 is completed and a premium is put on being at the rear of the train heading into Manhattan. Going the other way, for years the front two cars of the 6 have been much become ghost towms on the final three stops downtown, once the passengers headed for B’way-Lafayette empty out at Bleecker.)
You can put Nostrand Avenue-Fulton Street on the (A)(C) in that category. There used to be exits at Arlington Place-Fulton Street. Re-opening those exits would facilitate transfers between the (A)(C) and northbound B44 SBS.
That would be very helpful. It would also make it a good bit easier to walk from the shuttle to the A/C instead of only being able to transfer to the C at Franklin.
Yes please! Let’s reopen the 110 and 111 St exits and the crossunder on the 8 Av line. Crowding isn’t a huge issue here yet, but the existing entrances are not very convenient, particularly in bad weather. Crime isn’t what it was when these spaces were shuttered.
Low crime is also a reason why the subway is now crowded at all hours of the day. This crowding makes it even safer to ride outside of rush hour, so it gets more crowded, and so on…
If I recall, a few weeks ago, an article was posted, (Perhaps on this site itself) wherein every single car on the BMT Canarsie Line was at capacity. (Or something like 99% for the last car.)
While I 100% agree with the need to open shuttered entrances and exits, particularly at 7th Avenue in Brooklyn, and various elevated lines in Brooklyn and Queens, as well as the need to better serve neighborhoods like Alphabet City on Avenue A via brand new entrances, for the most part, the BMT Canarsie Line would not be benefitted by new entrances in a cost-beneficial way.
CBTC is the clear, viable, NEARLY COMPLETE option to improve service for all L train riders. It will dramatically increase frequency of service, and line capacity, and supposedly will be completed and be put into regular revenue this year, fingers crossed. For the millions we could spend working on L train entrances, maybe we could extend the IRT Flushing Line in the correct direction (Further into Queens rather than further into Manhattan.)
maybe we could extend the IRT Flushing Line in the correct direction (Further into Queens rather than further into Manhattan.)
Please marry me.
I agree with many of these comments that adding exits along much of the L is not all that cost effective — but that exit at 14th/Av A is long, long overdue.