Apparently, the L train today was as keen to get going on a Monday morning as the rest of New York often is, and BMT Canarsie riders were left stranded for a while as signal problems halted service underneath the East River. WNYC’s Jim O’Grady asked the MTA about the problems, and although the agency says it’s still investigation, O’Grady notes that signal problems are a hallmark of post-Sandy damage. Floodwaters sat in the L train’s tunnel for 11 days after the storm, and it’s expected that the MTA will have to do some major repair work on that tube in the future.
While an outage of that magnitude is significant and annoying, through high-volume area,s the L is never too far away from the J and Z trains, but from some accounts, many regular L train riders have no idea what to do when their train stops running. My friend Caryn Rose penned a humorous and on-point piece on living in New York, and her takeaway is an obvious one: Know your alternate routes.
Rose, a Greenpoint resident, heard many of her fellow travelers stranded this morning decrying the bus. They didn’t know where the bus went or which one to take. It’s both shocking and not, but anyone who wants to be mobile should know the bus system at least in a home neighborhood. As Rose wrote, “You live here. Not knowing how to ride the buses isn’t a badge of honor, it’s a badge of STUPIDITY. Not knowing your part of town is foolish. Not being able to navigate public transit in your immediate area is short sighted.”
28 comments
You can’t take the subway, ride a bus, or drive a car in metro New York without having alternate routes.
At least they don’t live where I do. In Montauk, there’s one peak train….if you don’t make it or there’s trouble with it…the only alternative is riding my bike 120 miles to work in Long Island City!
~ Patrick
Can you drive to Babylon, Patchogue or Speonk?
Yet another advantage of bikes is that they provide an alternative to the train for many people (especially if the only other alternative is a bus, which cant meet the full demand of a train that is out).
if a subway line is out – the bikes will NOT be a useful alternative for ~99% of the people affected – not exactly that many bikes nearby to handle that # of people.
I don’t think he was referring to CitiBike. It sounds like you are.
John: Correct. I was referring to personal bikes.
Caryn Rose is spot on. Even though I’m a suburbanite, I know most subway lines & a handful of city Neighborhoods particularly areas along Queens Boulevard. Also consider the fact that I’m legally blind &take transit almost everywhere in the tri state area, so there’s no excuse for city residents NOT KNOWING what transit options exist in their neighborhood. I’ll give a pass for new riders & Access-A-Ride customers, but otherwise… go find out. If I can do it, you can as well.
FYI a Hempstead bound LIRR train was evacuated in the East River tunnel, http://www.7online.com.
I thank God every day that I got out of NYC when I did. Since Sandy, the infrastructure problem has only accelerated and shows no signs of getting better. Good luck my fellow Gothamites, I hope things improve, but it sure doesn’t look good.
I thought the hipster types were proud of being “Street Smart” and having their smart phone apps help them find their way. Hilarious.
OMG yr like sooo funny, clever, and original! Can you regale us with more hilarious jokes?!
Hit a nerve? I’m sorry, but I find it hard not to laugh at people who have egos the size of planets and consider themselves super urban street-smart tech types and then can’t find their way around when the L has issues.
I live around them. They’re no smarter that the rest of us although they think that they are!
looks like when the last train to gentrificationville rolls down the tracks, the only thing we’ll hear are shrieks of white terror
hop on a bus or do us all a favor and hop on back to your trust fund parents
Roxie,
Not all of us are trust fund kids. I worked my ass off to get my own apt. Stop being so ignorant.
You guys forget that riding any train other than the L isn’t cool if you’re a Williamsburgian hipster. Even thinking about other train lines isn’t cool. And obviously when this was happening everyone was far too busy Instagramming and tweeting about it rather than looking something up. Smartphones don’t necessarily make their users smarter, it’s often quite the contrary.
Are you guys all being serious right now? Why is there such constant hatred of the people who live off this train line? Making gross generalizations about everyone is overdone and tired. I’ve lived off this line for the past four years, and while I’d like to think of myself as a contributing member of society (not living off my parents, hard working social worker here), it seems like I can’t go a single day without hearing some bullshit about the population here. Get over it! Neighborhoods change, new people move into them, it happens! Live and let live, damn. There are so many more important things to worry about than the gentrification ship that has clearly already sailed. You may think that sounds a little insensitive toward people who have originally lived here all their lives, but where else do you think people who make a modest income are supposed to move? Somewhere you deem appropriate? Please tell me!
Exactly. Not only that, but they act as though nobody from any other socioeconomic group uses the L Train. Despite gentrification, there are still plenty of low-income neighborhoods, NYCHA housing complexes, and blue-collar industrial jobs along the L Train, too, and everyone deserve good service, regardless of who else lives off of it, what they do or don’t do for a living, or where they moved from.
Boiling it down to a “hipster” stereotype is lazy, disingenuous, and just plain dumb.
Hipsters join rednecks as an acceptable bigotry in the era of political correctness.
Both are white and poor. The hipsters often have college loans, and thus have less than zero.
Using buses sucks. It’s as simple as that. That’s why these people don’t use them. They are slow, tedious, wandering, subject to the whims of the driver, traffic, and other factors. They are off-schedule as much as they are on, and in some instances don’t even go where people want to go. You can wait 50 seconds for a bus or 50 minutes for a bus, and there’s know way of knowing until you’re standing at that stop in the freezing cold or sultry heat of midday.
“Subject to the whims of the driver”
Yes, I can’t even count the thousands of times I’ve been on a bus when the driver decided to make a detour to the Rockaways for a quick beach session!
True, buses aren’t the most reliable. But is there really any other way to fix that than making improvements to the flow of traffic, something that’s wholly out of the control of the MTA? The previous point someone made was true – if you don’t own a car, you should give enough of a shit about your surroundings to know more than just where the nearest subway line you live off of takes you. Maybe buses aren’t the sexiest way to get around, but they are certainly worth something.
Drivers, in my observed experience will do any or all of the following, at any point:
Pull over and wait for no reason
Not pass another bus that is clearly being operated very slowly
Not pass another bus, period
Not stop and pick up passengers whilst driving an uncrowded bus and the crowded bus is stopped and loading
Not pass any slow moving vehicle (assuming a passing opportunity)
Waiting across the street for the loaded bus to become even more loaded.
Getting off the bus while in service
Just a few of the many driver whims.
None of this happens on the subway.
But you’re right, I’ve yet to be taken to the Rockaways on the M101. Now that would be a pleasant diversion indeed!
Doesn’t most of this have to do with maintaining the schedule?
Pull over and wait for no reason
This is probably for timestops and it is intended to maintain the schedule, as Eric noted. If you take a look at a bus schedule, you’ll see that there are specific times only listed for a few stops along the route–usually spaced every five or six stops. Buses are not supposed to run ahead of their schedule, because it can inconvenience riders, especially in lower-frequency situations (getting to a stop on time, only to have to wait ten minutes for the next bus because the bus ran ahead of schedule, is a situation drivers try to avoid).
Not pass another bus that is clearly being operated very slowly / Not pass another bus, period
Buses are supposed to maintain a strict block order, which is also part of keeping the schedule. At the property I worked at, in Virginia, if one bus was caught, passengers who needed to use the next ten stops or so would be transferred to the bus behind, and the caught bus would run express to the next time stop or the one after that.
That’s not really possible in NYC traffic, not to mention that NYC buses are generally more crowded than the ones I drove. That’s also not to excuse bus clumping, but the solution is to increase the number of buses on the route so that each bus spends less time at each station (or more SBS). Given the funding issues that the MTA faces, it’s not that surprising that they don’t have capacity to do that. Not to mention that…
Not pass any slow moving vehicle (assuming a passing opportunity)
Buses are big and do not accelerate quickly. What looks like a passing opportunity to you is likely not actually a passing opportunity–if the car decides to pick up the pace, or the bus needs to go into the opposite travel lane to pass, the driver could find themselves stuck with no way to get to the side for the next stop.
Not stop and pick up passengers whilst driving an uncrowded bus and the crowded bus is stopped and loading / Waiting across the street for the loaded bus to become even more loaded.
I’ll give you these. There should be probably be more emphasis on caught buses becoming drop-off only–only then people would probably complain that “that bus wouldn’t let me on”, so it’s not exactly a win-win.
Getting off the bus while in service
Probably a time stop. Drivers like to stretch their legs, especially on long runs.
Anyway, the answer is more select bus service, with camera-enforced lanes, etc. But I wanted to defend that a lot of the drivers’ whims are actually done for good reasons.
The answer is also realistic timetables that aren’t overly padded.
The WNYC article mentions that many of the people at Bedford that morning were dumped off from inbound trains. It’s pretty crazy to expect people to be able to instantly figure out an alternative route from any random station along their route. Most people don’t have the entire bus map of Brooklyn memorized, and it’s not like they’re particularly intuitive.
I have the bus maps of all 5 boros on my smartphone. They have apps for that. Sure, I don’t know much about the buses in, say, Rego Park, if I were to get stranded there. But I know how to find out in 8 seconds.
It is important to always have a backup plan, especially for frequent or well-known failure points.
-If your particular train line’s tunnel to Manhattan is closed
-If your particular train line is out completely
-If you take LIRR, and it craps out (like yesterday), DO NOT WAIT AT PENN, get thee on the E train immediately.
-If you take NJT, and it craps out, DO NOT WAIT AT PENN, get thee to PABT or PATH to Newark.
But people are creatures of habit and when their daily commute goes tits-up, they’re like “uhhhhhh….”