A less-than-hopeful map for Northern Brooklyn and Long Island City G train riders.
Over the past few years — since the MTA extended the G train to Church Ave. — I’ve come to appreciate this underappreciated line. I don’t have to rely on it during peak hours, and I generally find that the train shows us as promised and offers a quick ride from Park Slope to Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Long Island City. I can get up to Alewife, Brouwerij Lane, Torst or Fornino with little trouble and no transfers.
For a few weeks this summer, that convenience will disappear thanks to 2012’s Superstorm Sandy. As part of the repairs needed in the aftermath of the storm, beginning this Friday at 10:30 p.m., the G train will run no further north than Nassau Ave., and for five weeks trains will not run between Nassau Ave. and Long Island City’s Court Square. Businesses and residents in Greenpoint and LIC aren’t too happy, but this short shutdown is the least painful choice amongst a series of bad options.
“Our goal is to complete this work as quickly and efficiently as possible while exposing our customers to as little inconvenience as we possibly can by using the more lightly-traveled summer weeks to make repairs,” NYC Transit President Carmen Bianco said in a statement last week. “To that end, we are providing an extraordinary amount of information to help our customers navigate around this vital work.”
According to the MTA, the Greenpoint Tubes suffered series damage when they filled with 3 million gallons of brackish salt water. Pump controls, electrical, communications, fan control and signal system suffered, and power cables essentially melted away. Some systems — ventilation, lighting and communications — were completely destroyed, and the MTA needs the dedicated shutdown to wrap up repairs. Train service will be restored at 5 a.m. on Tuesday, September 2 — the day after Labor Day.
During this outage, the MTA will run two shuttle buses. One will run via Manhattan Av to and from Nassau Ave. while the other will run via McGuinness Boulevard to and from the Lorimer St/Metropolitan Av L station. Additionally, the MTA has announced a temporary free out-of-system transfer between the G train at Broadway and the J/M trains at Lorimer St. It seems likely that ferry service will return to India St. before Friday’s shutdown as well.
For Greenpointers, Long Island City residents and G train riders, this is an annoying inconvenience, albeit a temporary one. Unlike the R train, this work doesn’t require a 14-month diversion, but unlike the R train, there are no nearby subway offerings to pick up the slack. This also won’t be the last of the Sandy-related service changes. Even though the storm was nearly two years ago, the MTA has a few more tunnels to repair. The agency has been tight-lipped on future diversions because they don’t yet know how this will play out. But the L train’s 14th St. tunnels need work as do numerous other East River subway tunnels. In three months, the G and R trains will both be up and running. What’s next looms large.
11 comments
Sandy was actually a break for the MTA. With the exception of the Canarsie Tubes and perhaps the Flushing Line (depending on where they were), the agency will now get federal cash to do work that would have been required anyway (but perhaps not done) due to the lack of state and local cash.
In particular, I’m not sure how the cost benefit of resignaling the Rockaway Branch would have looked if NY had to pay for it in an era of systemwide deferred maintenance that might be coming.
The MTA should take advantage and build a bellmouth and switch for a future Rutgers/Dekalb connection as part of the repair of the Rutgers tube. Not for $600 million plus, as had been estimated, but for half that.
Although those in the know most assuredly discussed this option, since there are switches north of 21 St-Van Alst and somewhere along Manhattan Ave., why not single track operations instead? Just have the trains queued properly, and it should be good to go, no? That’s got to be cheaper than all of those buses and operators and eliminates the traffic they create at Metro/Union Aves
They’ve been single tracking on the weekends, as I found out the hard way after a Mets game.
Doing things piecemeal takes a lot more time and a lot more money. It’s five weeks. Other lines have had disruptions that went on for years — decades in the case of the Manhattan Bridge.
That’s a real ominous note about “a few more tunnels to repair.”
As bad or inconvenient as the G and R train closures are, they’d be nothing compared to a similar shutdown of, say, the 14th Street Tunnel or the Joralemon Street tunnel.
A shutdown of the 14th Street Tunnel will be bad, but there is at least the potential of running a “K” service from Canarsie, down the Jamaica Line via Broadway Junction, and then up the 6th Ave via the Chrystie St Connection. There’s capacity over the Williamsburg Bridge, though working out the 6th Ave line would require some tough choices.
Can CBTC be used in conjunction with regular signaling in the switch-over from the J/Z tracks at Broadway Junction to the L tracks at Atlantic Avenue? Right now the MTA is only using the new system on the lines that share no trackage with other lines, going with the L first and currently working to roll it out on the 7 with the R-188 cars.
Even if that’s workable right now, assuming service is still maintained on the L between Bedford Ave. and B’way Junction, at the very least you’d need spare R-143s or CBTC-equipped R-160s to run on the temporary B’way-Brooklyn route, or the trains would just vanish from the computer when they hit the track connection north of Atlantic Avenue (which would mean only one train at a time could operate in that area).
My guess is at best, the MTA will simply run the L between Bedford or Lorimer and Canarsie, and might run a few extra M trains originating at Broadway Junction over the Willie B, so L riders don’t have to either go all the way to Myrtle-Willoughby to get the M, or make a double transfer in order to get to the 14th Street area or to the north.
It’s not THAT bad for Greenpoint residents. It gets blown up bigger than necessary because residents along the G feel slighted to begin with for only having the G, so when the G is messed up, they’re indignant.
From the FAR northern reaches of Greenpoint, it’s only a ~15 minute walk back to Nassau for the G. Or a ~12-15 minute walk across the bridge to LIC for the 7. Everyone else can continue catching the G at Nassau, but yes, will need to go back to the L instead of into Queens for Midtown service. So it will be a pain to have that time added to the commute for a few weeks, but it’s not like the neighborhood is cut off from subway service entirely.
I am curious why they couldn’t have terminated at Greenpoint. The switches are between Greenpoint and Nassau, so you’d think they could turn around one stop further down. That would have left only the two LIC G stations closed and they are both convenient to the 7 and/or E. That is unless, of course, the flood damage went past the station, which I guess is possible.
In my copy of the book, Tracks Of The NYC Subway, it shows the diamond track switch immediately just north of the Nassau Avenue station on the G-line. Meaning that the track switch appears to be a far distance from the Greenpoint Avenue station.
Is simply could be that the MTA needs some “staging space” or room for the supplies and equipment to do the tunnel work. Or that terminating the trains at Nassau Avenue nearest the track switch would ease the operation of the trains over the remaining segment of the G-line.
Mike
According to Subchat, R160s from the N will operate the G train route during these 5 weeks, the idea being that the variable destination signs on the new tech trains will correctly display the destination in the NB direction.
I also remember reading somewhere that the section that is still running will be operating with higher frequencies, since they’ll be running the same number of trains, just on the shorter section. So overall, the part of the G train that will be running during the 5 weeks will be seeing some improvements, even if it doesn’t get them all the way to Court Square.
Can’t you still get to all those places except Alewife with the Greenpoint Tubes out of service?