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Service Advisories

Weekend service changes

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on June 11, 2010

We’re just two weeks away from the MTA’s service cuts. The new maps are out; the signs are being changed; and all that’s left is for the trains and buses to cease running. Yet, capital work continues apace, and the weekends will always bring service changes.

The following are the scheduled weekend service changes are sent to me by New York City Transit. These are subject to change without notice. Please listen for announcements on trains and read the signs in stations. As always, Subway Weekender has a map visualizing the changes. I’ve always believed Transit should look into producing its own weekend map, at least as a PDF.


From 12:01 a.m. Saturday, June 12 to 5 a.m. Sunday, June 13, uptown 1 trains run express from Times Square-42nd Street to 72nd Street due to rail work between 34th Street and 72nd Street.


From 12:01 a.m. Saturday, June 12 to 5 a.m. Sunday, June 13, downtown 2 and 3 trains run local from 96th Street to Times Square-42nd Street due to reconstruction of the track bridge at the underpass at 96th Street.


From 12:01 a.m. Saturday, June 12 to 5 a.m. Sunday, June 13, uptown 2 trains run express from Times Square-42nd Street to 72nd Street, then local to 96th Street due to reconstruction of the track bridge at the underpass at 96th Street.


From 12:01 a.m. Saturday, June 12, to 5 a.m. Sunday, June 13, uptown 3 trains run local from 72nd Street to 96th Street due to reconstruction of the track bridge at the underpass at 96th Street.


From 12:01 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. Saturday, June 12 and 12:01 a.m. to 5 a.m. Sunday, June 13, 3 service is extended to/from 34th Street-Penn Station due to reconstruction of the track bridge at the underpass at 96th Street.


From 12:01 a.m. Saturday, June 12 to 5 a.m. Sunday, June 13, downtown 4 and 6 trains run express from 14th Street-Union Square to Brooklyn Bridge due to gap filler replacement at 14th Street-Union Square.


From 5:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., Saturday, June 12, 5 trains run every 20 minutes between Dyre Avenue and Bowling Green due to gap filler replacement at 14th Street-Union Square.


From 12 noon to 5 p.m., Saturday, June 12, the 116th Street 6 station will be EXIT ONLY in order to prevent overcrowding on platforms and stairways during the 116th Street Festival. Customers may use the 110th Street or the 125th Street 6 stations.


From 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sunday, June 13, the 77th Street 6 station will be EXIT ONLY in order to prevent overcrowding on platforms and stairways during the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Customers may use the 68th Street or the 86th Street 6 stations.


From 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday, June 12, Manhattan-bound 7 trains skip 69th, 52nd, 46th, 40th, and 33rd Streets due to rail replacement.


From 11:30 p.m. Friday, June 11 to 6 a.m. Saturday, June 12, from 11:30 p.m. Saturday, June 12 to 6 a.m. Sunday, June 13, and from 11:30 p.m. Sunday, June 13 to 5 a.m. Monday, June 14, uptown A trains run express from Canal Street to 59th Street due to a track chip out north of West 4th Street.


From 11:30 p.m. Friday, June 11 to 11:30 p.m. Saturday, June 12, free shuttle buses replace A trains between 168th Street and 207th Street due to cable work between Dyckman and 207th Streets. Note: A trains run local between 145th Street and 168th Street.


From 4:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday, June 13, free shuttle buses replace A trains between Far Rockaway and Beach 90th Street due to station rehabilitations.


From 6:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. Saturday, June 12, there are no C trains between 168th Street and 145th Street due to cable work between Dyckman and 207th Streets. Customers should take the A instead.


From 11 p.m. Friday, June 11 to 6 a.m. Saturday, June 12, from 11 p.m. Saturday, June 12 to 7 a.m. Sunday, June 13, and from 11 p.m. Sunday, June 13 to 5 a.m. Monday, June 14, Manhattan-bound D trains skip 174th-175th Sts. and 170th Street due to a track chip out north of 170th Street.


From 11 p.m. Friday, June 11 to 7 a.m. Saturday, June 12, Manhattan-bound E trains run express from Forest Hills-71st Avenue to Roosevelt Avenue due to a track chip out north of Elmhurst Avenue.


From 11:30 p.m. Friday, June 11 to 6 a.m. Saturday, June 12, from 11:30 p.m. Saturday, June 12 to 6 a.m. Sunday, June 13, and from 11:30 p.m. Sunday, June 13 to 5 a.m. Monday, June 14, uptown E trains skip Spring and 23rd Streets due to a track chip out north of West 4th Street.


From 11:30 p.m. Friday, June 11 to 5 a.m. Monday, June 14, free shuttle buses replace E trains between Jamaica Center and Union Turnpike due to track switch renewal and asbestos abatement at Jamaica Center. Note: E trains are rerouted on the F between Forest Hills-71st Avenue and Jamaica-179th Street.


There are no G trains between Forest Hills-71st Avenue and Court Square. Customers should take the E or R instead. Note: Saturday, Manhattan-bound trains run express from Forest Hills-71st Avenue to Roosevelt Avenue – E overnight or R 5:30 a.m. to 7 a.m.


From 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday, June 12, L trains run in two sections due to CBTC testing:

  • Between 8th Avenue and Broadway Junction and
  • Between Broadway Junction and Rockaway Parkway (every 24 minutes)


From 5:30 a.m. to 7 a.m., Saturday, June 12, Manhattan-bound R trains run express from Forest Hills-71st Avenue to Roosevelt Avenue due to a track chip out north of Elmhurst Avenue.


From 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., Sunday, June 13, A trains replace the S between Broad Channel and Rockaway Park due to station rehabilitations.

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AsidesBuses

City Council sends Albany a home-rule message on bus lane enforcement

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on June 11, 2010

The City Council has sent a home-rule bill to Albany requesting permission to implement camera enforcement measures in the city’s new bus lanes. While the State Senate has approved such a measure, the New York Assembly has yet to pick up the issue. If this sounds familiar, well, it’s because history is repeating itself. The bill, which passed by a 46-4 vote, will once again have to clear Sheldon Silver Assembly, and the last time a bus measure bill got this far, David Gantt killed it.

This year, however, things should be different. For starters, as I mentioned, the State Senate has already signed off on these measures, and the city and the MTA have ramped up bus lane expansion plans. Furthermore, Assembly Transportation Committee head Gantt has said he’s more amenable to a bill this time around. For the city to implement effective bus service, it needs this approval from the state. “Today’s home rule message sends a clear signal to the state legislature that expedient public transportation in bus lanes is a top priority for the city of New York,” Gale Brewer, a council sponsor of the bill, said. And now we wait while putting pressure on Albany.

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Service Cuts

MTA ‘optimistic’ Student MetroCards will be saved

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on June 11, 2010

I have such mixed thoughts about the future of the Student MetroCard program. On the one hand, students in New York City should enjoy free rides to and from their public schools as every other public school student in the country does. On the other hand, the city and state — and decidedly not the MTA — should be picking up the tab for this benefit. On other other, other hand, I have to wonder why Albany can get so up in arms when Student MetroCards are threatened but can’t be bothered to lift a finger when buses and subway routes are eliminated.

Today, the news is guardedly optimistic for the future of the Student MetroCards as politicians and MTA officials believe something will happen to save the free rides for students. Even as New York State prepares to shut down its services because warring factions in Albany can’t come to a budget agreement, legislatures will step in to save student fares. Time, though, is of the essence as the MTA Board plans to vote in less than two weeks on its proposal to eliminate the free rides.

“The sentiment of almost everybody in our conference is that the money has to be put in there,” Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn assembly rep, said to The Wall Street Journal. While other state officials echoed Hikind’s line of thought, no one could say from where the money will flow. In March, Pedro Espada proposed bridge tolls to fund student rides, but that plan hasn’t garnered much attention since then.

Meanwhile, a quote from Richard Brodsky in The Journal struck me as appropriate too. “When the MTA said that the number was $210 million,” he said, “that was clearly not the case. When I announced that they could do this for nothing, that was clearly not the case.” I’m glad to see Brodsky’s admitting that student travel comes at a cost to the MTA, and I’m relieved to see Brodsky’s recognizing that the MTA’s $214 million figure appears to rely on what they would draw in as revenue if they charged students full fare. The actual cost of administering the student travel program and allowing students to ride for free remains to be seen.

At 347 Madison, the MTA, in the words of spokesman Jeremy Soffin, remains “optimistic” that Albany will come through. Yet, I embrace this rescue plan with some hesitation. What about we the fare-paying public? Don’t we deserve a proper funding package as well?

When the MTA implements its service cuts on June 28, over 2 million straphangers and countless more bus riders will find their commutes and travel around the city drastically altered. Trains will be slower in arriving and more crowded. Some trains won’t run at all; others will see new service patterns; and everyone will pay the price. The people suffering are the workers in New York who drive the city’s economy. Just as the city’s students deserve their free rides, so too do the rest of us warrant subway service that meets demands regardless of the price tag.

If Albany is willing to sacrifice something for students — bridge tolls, congestion fees, whatever it might be — it should be willing to up the ante for the rest of us who need the subways to lead productive lives. Our collective trips to work and to play are just as important as a high schooler’s trip to school, if not more so. Where’s our funding package?

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AsidesNew York City Transit

A train operator takes questions

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on June 10, 2010

As part of its “Taking Questions” series, The Times’ City Room blog hosted Dennis Boyd, a TO along the 4 line last week. He answered three sets of questions about his job and his views on working underground (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3). I found his answers very illuminating because it presents a view New Yorkers rarely see. We know that trains enter and leave stations; we know two people are responsible for their operations; but we don’t know why some express don’t wait for local trains or what the various markings and signal patterns mean. In Part 1, Boyd talks about the new automated announcements and how his job changed. In Part 2, he talks about why Lexington Ave. express trains crawl up and down the line at rush hour, and in Part 3, Boyd delves into train delays. Good stuff.

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7 Line Extension

A faint glimmer of hope at 10th Ave. and 41st St.

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on June 10, 2010

It is the phantom subway station that just won’t fade away. It is the the phantom subway station that, for the sake of a neighborhood and New York City’s future, has to be built. And it is a phantom subway station that just might be inching one step closer to a return to reality.

I’m talking, of course, about the on-again, off-again station at 10th Ave. and 41st St. that will nearly make or break the way we judge the 7 line extension. To recap: The original plans for the extension called for a stop to serve Hell’s Kitchen and the developments near the Hudson River in the low 40s, but as cost overruns became steep, the city — which is funding the entire extension — dropped its plans to build this station. Only the new terminal at 34th and 11th Ave., the lynchpin to the Hudson Yards development, would see the light of day.

First, the city promised to build a shell station at 41st and 10th Ave. so that the MTA could later build a full station, but when that became too expensive and the economy went south, those plans were scraped. At one point in 2007, then-Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff offered to go halfsies with the MTA, but the cash-starved authority with bigger capital fish to fry declined. Then, nearly three and a half years after rumors of the station’s demise first emerged, the Real Estate Board of New York, under new leadership, decided to launch a last-second effort to save the station at 10th Ave., and that is where we find ourselves in 2010.

The news today is guardedly optimistic. Eliot Brown of The New York Observer rehashes recent history and finds that REBNY’s efforts could be paying off if only Mayor Bloomberg weren’t such an obstructionist. He reports:

Now, REBNY feels it has a plan that could keep the station alive, but the Bloomberg administration rejects it as unfeasible. Still, the administration, which initially resisted entertaining the late-in-the-game effort, is itself examining other funding options.

Steven Spinola, president of REBNY, said he had a consultant produce a report that recommended about $100 million in work to move utilities, an amount that could keep the option open for later funding to finish the station. The full cost of the station is estimated by the city to exceed $800 million.

“What we’re looking to do is preserve the ability that the station will eventually be built,” he said. “Nobody ever really expected the station to be built immediately–$800 million was not ever going to just come from some add-on in a bill in Washington. But can we do something so that over the next five, six years, money can come in from Washington?” …

A spokesman for the Bloomberg administration, Andrew Brent, dismissed Mr. Spinola’s plan as something that would disrupt the current project, which anticipates a line to 34th Street and 11th Avenue by 2013. “We’re not going to entertain any plans that add meaningful time or cost to the subway extension,” Mr. Brent said in a statement. “If a plan can be worked out that preserves the possibility of a station getting built in the future without delaying or adding cost to the project, we’re open to it. That remains a big if.”

Bloomberg’s line of reasoning is utterly spurious. The city has gone this long without 7 service to the Hudson Yards area, and considering that real estate development won’t take off for years in that neighborhood, if New Yorkers have to suffer a delay of a year to ensure that something forward-looking is built at 41st and 10th, the subway-riding public would be better off for it.

Vaguely, Spinola, whose organization didn’t realize for years that the station at 41st and 10th had been axed, ended with some words about the city’s trying to “find a solution.” He said, “At the moment, I think they are taking the concern seriously that the station will not get built unless they do something about it, and I think they are exploring the possibilities.” How comforting.

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Service CutsTransit Labor

A proposal to fix the station agents

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on June 10, 2010

This station kiosk at the local BMT stop at Prince St. closed on May 13. (Photo via flickr user Tim Faracy of Bklyn)

Taxpayers have to shell out $40,000 per day as long as the MTA is not allowed to dismiss its station agents. At least, that’s what Jay Walder, MTA CEO and Chairman, estimated the costs were yesterday morning at an emergency meeting of the MTA Board held to address recent legal setbacks as the MTA looks to dismiss station agents and shutter kiosks throughout the system.

The saga of the station agents is one oft examined here at Second Ave. Sagas. Recently, the news has been coming fast and furious. On Friday afternoon, after issuing a temporary injunction against the station agent dismissals last month, a Manhattan Supreme Court judge ruled that the MTA could not shutter station kiosks without holding public hearings. Even though the authority had held these hearings a little more than a year ago on the same closure plans, because Albany averted the layoffs through a funding package and because the MTA had rescinded the cuts last year, the MTA had to host new hearings because “concerns of the citizenry” could have shifted in time.

On Tuesday afternoon, the same judge amended her order to require the MTA to reopen booths it had closed earlier this year. This order has been stayed pending an appeal. Meanwhile, the MTA Board voted unanimously to host four hearings — one per borough impacted by the booth closures — in mid-July before voting to cut station agents and close kiosks after that. It is, as Walder said today, a foregone conclusion, and the MTA is holding these hearings simply to comply with the court’s order.

“I wish I could tell you that that situation changed,” Walder said. “There’s no indication today, as we stand here or sit here today that the situation, the financial situation is any better than it was when we took this action months ago.”

As expected, the response from the TWU was one of protest. Union officials and Public Advocate Bill DeBlasio are going to host a press conference urging the MTA to hire back, albeit temporarily, the laid-off station agents (at a cost to the taxpayers), and the union continues to push its safety-first platform. “Digital signage and cameras can’t come to the aid of passengers, and can’t offer that immediate link to police and fire that our station agents provide,” TWU Local 100 president John Samuelsen said.

And that’s where we come in. For years, I’ve doubted the efficacy of the station agents. While they may act as a psychological security blanket for straphangers and a limited deterrent for some criminals, they’re not allowed to assist a victim in the midst of a crime and have little effect on those determined to do something bad. Maybe the solution lies in fixing the agents’ roles.

Let’s take a look at a station diagram. Below is a map of the 28th St. stop at on the 7th Ave. IRT.

This station today features just one agent and remaining station booth on the uptown platform in between the two staircases at 28th St. The booth and agent are in the fare-control area and thus have a limited view of the platform. Those people waiting on the platform between 28th and 27th Sts. aren’t visible to the station agent, and those waiting at the southern end of the station are a block and a half away. By sitting behind the turnstiles inside a booth, the agent is useless for anyone under duress at the far reaches of the platform, and this reality is acted out at stations around the system.

To solve this problem while actually increasing safety, the MTA and TWU should work together to change the job. Station agents should be positioned anywhere throughout the station. They should be available to help those at the fare-control area, but they should also patrol the platforms as a set of eyes. They aren’t police officers and don’t have law enforcement powers, but the agents could be used as a community watch for the subways. That has to be a stronger deterrent than the mostly useless agents out in force today.

The MTA, though, can’t enact this plan without more money, and the TWU has spent its efforts defending jobs instead of offering up better suggestions. We the taxpaying and subway-riding public instead will get a labor fight, more layoffs and the bill for what amounts to a legal technicality under the station agents can be eliminated through the proper procedures in six-to-eight weeks. It hardly seems worth it.

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Service Cuts

In Bushwick, sugar-coating a service cut

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on June 9, 2010

When residents who live along the M line from Bushwick to Middle Village wake up on June 27, they will find their commutes drastically altered. The M will no longer travel down Nassau St. and into Southern Brooklyn. Instead, with a new orange bullet denoting a Sixth Ave. trunk route, the M will take the Chrystie St. Cut to Broadway/Lafayette and make local stops up Sixth Ave. to Forest Hills. It is a service cut with a purpose.

For thousands of commuters, this new service pattern will be a step up. Having a one-seat ride from Bushwick to Midtown while bypassing the need to switch to the crowded F train is a service improvement the MTA should have implemented years ago, and today, Metro explores how residents in the norther parts of Brooklyn are looking forward to the new service patterns.

“My roommate and I were thrilled when we found out,” Adam Thompson, whose nearest stop is at Central Ave. on the M, said to Carly Baldwin. “I hang out in the West Village a lot and this will be the first time I don’t need to take two trains to get there. I really think we’re the only community not getting screwed by the service changes.”

If only life in the post-service cuts era were as rosy as Thompson makes it out to be. It’s certainly true that Thompson’s weekday rides to the West Village will be vastly improved, but that’s about it. After 11 p.m. on weeknights and at all times during the weekend, Thompson will still be stuck with a three-train ride to the West Village. Futhermore, as the MTA explains, weekend headway increases and load guideline revisions means that trains will arrive less frequently and will be more crowded. A service cut is a service cut is a service cut.

At some point in the future, when the real estate tax revenues rebound, the MTA’s fiscal outlook will turn from red to black, and the agency may begin to explore restoring lost service. When it does, the M should still service Midtown via the Chrystie St. Cut, but until then, we can’t gloss over the reality that, on June 27, subway service will be worse for everyone in New York City. The new service patterns may sound alluring, but I’d prefer service to meet demand and not these cuts.

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Buses

When bus lanes aren’t a subway

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on June 9, 2010

A painted bus lane can’t come close to matching the benefits of a subway.

When the MTA and New York City’s Department of Transportation unveiled the East Side Select Bus Service plans earlier this week, the back-slapping had started even before the politicians had enough time to pose in front of a new bus. Half a decade before Phase 1 of the Second Ave. Subway is set to debut, the new bus service — New York’s own half-hearted attempt at Bus Rapid Transit — will revitalize transit along the East Side. It will be, they said, a surface subway.

That final phrase is a loaded one, and it’s a huge exaggeration that’s being bandied about as though it’s nothing. It first popped up in a Daily News article on Monday morning because DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan used it. “We are basically building a surface subway for the 54,000 riders who use this route every day,” she said.

Sadik-Khan, generally a sound advocate for street developments, is just wrong. She, her DOT and the MTA aren’t basically building a surface subway for the city streets. They’re adding incremental improvements to the bus system, slapping a fancy name on it and proclaiming it the age of Bus Rapid Transit. What they’re offering is a far cry from true BRT, and it’s insulting to call it a surface subway.

Vitriol and outrage aside, it’s important to understand why Select Bus Service isn’t true Bus Rapid Transit and why Bus Rapid Transit, let alone New York’s SBS offerings, aren’t comparable to subway service. The biggest aspect of the SBS plans that prevent it from being rapid transit anything is the right-of-way. While 1st and 2nd Ave. will soon be marked with painted bus lanes similar to those that run across Fordham Road, these lanes are not bus-only lanes in the truest sense of the word. As long as the lanes are not physically separated from the rest of traffic and as long as these lanes don’t get signal prioritization, the Select Bus Service lanes are just fancy lanes for a glorified Limited bus service.

Intertwined with the right-of-way issues are concerns about speed. A local subway can go from Houston St. at Broadway to 125th St. at Lexington, a distance of approximately 6.4 miles covered by the 6 train, in 22 minutes. That’s an average speed of approximately 17.5 miles per hour. It currently takes the M15 nearly 90 minutes to make a similar trip up 2nd Ave. The MTA claims the SBS route along Fordham Road is 10-15 percent faster, and even if the same gains can be realized without dedicated lanes along the East Side, that entire trip will now take 80 minutes instead. It’s progress, but until buses can enjoy signal prioritization and blocking-the-box enforcement, they will forever be slowed by crosstown traffic and the ebb and flows of the avenues. A subway doesn’t have to wait for a car to clear the intersection before moving forward; a bus does.

Finally, we arrive at the issue of capacity. Simply put, a bus — even the new articulated Select Bus Service buses — cannot keep pace with a 10-car subway set. A typical R142A car is at capacity with 176 passengers, and so a ten-car set can hold 1760. A Nova Bus LFS can fit under 100 passengers. With 6 trains running every four minutes, the M15 would have to run at a near-continuous rate to provide bus service equivalent with subway service. No matter what the Transportation Commissioner might say, Select Bus Service isn’t a subway system.

For New York, it’s easy to feel cheated by these words. Our elected officials are engaged in some serious make-up artistry. They’ve offered up a halfway solution for bus rapid transit and are trying to put lipstick on a transit-deficient pig. If the city wants to offer subway service along 2nd Ave., it should work to expedite progress along the Second Ave. Subway. If it wants to offer true bus rapid transit, it should fight for physically separated lanes and signal prioritization. Otherwise, they may call it a subway, but if it walks like a bus and talks like a bus…

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Service Cuts

Judge orders shuttered booths reopened

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on June 8, 2010

MTA Board to meet to address station booth closure plans

Updated (5:50 p.m.): Four days after ruling that the MTA couldnot shutter station booths because the authority did not follow proper procedure, the same Manhattan judge has ordered the MTA to reopen token booths and station kiosks that were closed last month as part of the MTA’s budget crisis. Despite holding mandated hearings in early 2009 on the same closure plans, Judge Saliann Scarpulla has ordered the MTA to hold hearings this year because concerns over the closures may have changed. The new ruling is a blow to the MTA, and the authority says it will appeal the order tomorrow morning.

The agency released a statement this afternoon:

The MTA continues to disagree with the court’s ruling that additional public hearings are required before the station booths and kiosks can be closed, and that the kiosks closed in May need to be re-opened. These closures were necessitated by the MTA’s dire financial situation, and the need for the savings they generate remains.

We believe the prior public hearings fully conformed with the legal requirements and will be appealing the judge’s order as soon as it is entered. The appeal triggers an automatic stay of the lower court’s order, and the MTA therefore should not be required to re-open the recently-closed kiosks at this time.

At the same time as the MTA pursues the appeal, we will be proceeding on a parallel track with the public hearing process. With that in mind, an MTA Board meeting is scheduled for tomorrow at which the Board will be asked to authorize the public hearing process to move this vital cost-saving initiative forward.

Concurrent with this appeal, the MTA Board in a special session at 9:30 a.m. tomorrowwill meet to discuss the future of the station agents under fire. Per a note from MTA CEO and Chair Jay Walder, the board will “address the litigation strategy” and will vote to start the public hearing process on the booth/kiosk reduction plans.

Friday’s ruling and today’s order both hinge on technical procedural issues, and the MTA can overcome the findings simply by holding another round of costly and time-consuming hearings. In the meantime, the agency will pay out at least $100,000 per day in taxpayer money until the station booths are closed for good in a few months. The TWU may have won this round of lawsuits, but I have to wonder who comes out ahead.

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BrooklynMTA Absurdity

At Jay St., a station rehab but no coat of paint

by Benjamin Kabak
written by Benjamin Kabak on June 8, 2010

When entering the newly-renovated Jay St. station, don't look up. Credit: The Brooklyn Paper

For as long as I’ve been writing Second Ave. Sagas, I’ve wondered about the MTA’s rationale or lack thereof for its painting program. In 2007, the MTA couldn’t get a $50-million station painting plan off the ground because authority heads could not figure out which stations to paint first. In 2008, Transit announced that, instead of painting 46 a year and covering the system with new paint within a decade, only 12 stations per year would receive a fresh coat of paint, and the entire project would take four decades to complete. Can it truly be that hard to paint some subway stations?

Apparently, the answer is yes, and this year’s story about painting woes comes to us from right under the MTA’s collective nose. The IND stop beneath 370 Jay St. in Brooklyn is amidst an extensive renovation that will see this station connected to the R stop at Lawrence St./MetroTech. The station rehab is set to cost $110 million and won’t rap until August 2011, but the MTA is conveniently omitted a paint job for the ceiling above a few of the station entrances. Gary Buiso from The Brooklyn Paper has more:

The transit agency said this week it will not repaint the peeling ceilings on either exit on the west side of Jay Street between Willoughby Street and Myrtle Avenue, leaving a moonscape of potentially toxic paint chips raining down…

Transit spokeswoman Deirdre Parker insisted that the areas in question are safe, noting that the ceiling was re-painted in the 1990s with a non-lead based paint. But even so, the agency regards the situation as dangerous: Above-ground station cleaners are instructed to sweep the courtyard area with wet cloths and a HEPA vacuum — which contain specialized filters to trap dangerous lead particles, which can cause serious health problems. “It’s just a precaution in case there are previous coats of lead-based paint underneath,” explained Parker. The agency has not provided straphangers with masks or HEPA filters.

The ceiling work is not included in the current rehab plan, which will be completed by August, 2011. Transit officials said that intra-agency discussions are underway to try to secure funding for the paint job — but could not provide a cost estimate or a time frame for the work, vexing area business leaders.

The property at Jay St. has, as I recently explored, been a huge thorn in the authority’s side. It is an eyesore amidst a revitalized part of Downtown Brooklyn and has sat empty since Transit acquired the building well over 10 years ago. The authority continues to promise that something will happen. But storefronts are empty and scaffoldings mar the neighborhood.

A paint job, of course, is the least of anyone’s concerns when it comes to reliable transit service and the MTA operations. But the paint jobs have vexed the authority for over four years. Nicer station environments encourage more transit riders and make everyone’s day more pleasant, and yet, if the authority cannot do something so simple as to recognize when a fresh coat of paint is necessary, no wonder public faith in the MTA is never very hight.

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