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Brooklyn

Does Brooklyn really need a ferry for the R train shutdown?

by Benjamin Kabak July 31, 2013

written by Benjamin Kabak on July 31, 2013

The Great R Train Montague Tube Shutdown of 2013-2014 kicks off later this weekend, but adventurous Bay Ridge and Sunset Park residents who don’t mind an exceedingly long walk will have an opportunity to take a boat instead. After agitating for solutions for those few R train riders who travel great distances, don’t switch to an express train and are bound for Lower Manhattan, politicians and the Riders Alliance celebrated a small victory yesterday when the city announced a new ferry stop, at least for a month.

As the Daily News reported, the Rockaway-Manhattan Ferry will make an extra stop near the Army Terminal at 58th St. near Brooklyn from August 5 through Labor Day. After that, if ridership warrants it and funds can be found, the service may be continued for a few more months of the 14-month R train shutdown.

While politicians celebrated the victory, the feelings were muted by the short timeframe. “We don’t feel that a month is enough time to gauge whether this is a viable alternative,” Justin Brannan, a spokesman for Councilman Vincent Gentile, said, trying really hard. “You have to give people time to know that it’s there before falling in love with the ferry,” Brannan said.

I have to wonder, as I often do, though, if this ferry is viable, necessary or both. Even though the ride is billed as a 15-minute one to Wall St., the ferry terminal is nearly a mile away from the nearest R train step, and the walk is hardly a scenic that snakes under the Gowanus Expressway. The vast majority of riders would be better served transferring to a 4th Ave. express and then to an IRT train at Atlantic Ave. The boat is a fine alternative for the few people who live close enough, but otherwise, those boats will serve as another reminder why ferries aren’t the answer.

July 31, 2013 23 comments

Asides Brooklyn

Link: On the L train’s morning woes and knowing the way around

by Benjamin Kabak June 17, 2013

written by Benjamin Kabak on June 17, 2013

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.”

June 17, 2013 28 comments

Brooklyn Queens

Can you tell me how to get, how to get from Brooklyn to Queens?

by Benjamin Kabak May 31, 2013

written by Benjamin Kabak on May 31, 2013

A sighting of the rare G train. (Photo via flickr user Bitch Cakes)

The geography of New York City makes for some strange transportation bedfellows. Manhattan — a long, narrow island — contains a lot of key job centers and is the house of city government while Brooklyn and Queens, as close neighbors, are home to a combined 4.7 million people. Yet, it’s relatively easy to take a train into Manhattan and relatively painful to travel between the counties of Kings and Queens. That’s a problem.

Every now and then, this transit imbalance takes center stage for a few days. On and off for the past few years, the Pratt Center has tried to fight for better interborough travel options, and the G train remains an object of scorn and derision. Yet, true Select Bus Routes between Queens and Brooklyn remain elusive, and plans to build subway connections died along with the rest of the Second System in the 1930s.

For many New Yorkers, they why of it all is elusive. In 2013, it’s viewed as a great failing that there is no quick way to get from Forest Hills or Astoria to Downtown Brooklyn or Park Slope, that the best transit route from Coney Island to Flushing involves hours of travel through three boroughs. Yet, these patterns have their roots in the history of the city’s economic development and transit policy, and yesterday, at The Atlantic Cities, Richard Greenwald, a history professor at St. Joseph’s College, offered up a brief history of the tortured connections. Here’s his take:

In the beginning, the New York City subway system, as historian Clifton Hood details in his masterful book, 722 Miles, was a commuter line. As such, it was designed to bring people to where the jobs were, and that meant Manhattan. So all subway routes lead there…While the subway got people from the outer boroughs into Manhattan, the once-vast trolley system of New York connected the residents of Queens to Brooklyn…

The demise of the trolleys in the late 1930s and ’40s seems to be largely responsible for disconnecting the two sister boroughs. Yes, they were replaced by buses, but buses have never — for a number of reasons — been able to cement the connection the way trolleys seemed to.

Starting in the 1920s, a company called National City Lines started buying up street car lines, then mostly privately owned. In 1936, the company became a holding company owned equally by General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, and Phillips Petroleum. Perhaps you can guess where this is going. NCL bought up trolley systems in over 40 cities and 15 states, converting them almost overnight into bus lines. In 1947, they were indicted in federal court, in what became known as the “Great American Streetcar Scandal.” Two years later, the four original companies who owned NCL, along with MAC Truck, were found guilty of conspiracy to monopolize mass transit. But by then the damage was done. Most of the nation’s streetcar system was in junkyards, replaced by buses.

Outside of the streetcar conspiracies, Greenwald points his fingers at the social stigma attached to buses as a reason why the trolley connections were cut. “In the outer boroughs of New York, trolleys had acted as a primary mode of transportation,” he said. “Buses, on the other-hand, were tertiary, connecting commuters first-and-foremost to subway lines.” That’s not quite accurate though as the current Brooklyn bus map and the old trolley map look awfully similar. At ground level, at least, it’s no harder or easier to travel between Brooklyn and Queens than it was 80 years ago.

What happened were social shifts. Up until the last decade or so, few people noticed the poor quality of transit connections between Brooklyn and Queens because no one wanted to travel between these two boroughs. As gentrification took hold though, suddenly, middle/upper class neighborhoods were disconnected. It’s easy to travel from East New York to Jamaica or the Rockaways via the IND Fulton Line. It’s not easy to get from South Slope to Forest Hills without a arduous slow ride through Manhattan on the F train. Neighborhoods eight miles apart may as well be in different cities.

Fixes for this problem are not easy to identify. Even the long lost Second System wouldn’t have materially improved connections between Brooklyn and Queens. We instead need something as creative and fanciful as Vanshookenraggen’s Franklin Ave. Shuttle extension (or the entirety of his Second System plans). Such plans, though, require money to be no obstacle, and for the foreseeable future, money is an obstacle.

In the meantime, a better Select Bus Service would do the trick with a focus on interborough connections between neighborhoods that are current disconnected. Of course, SBS takes literally years of planning and is fraught with its own problems. Meanwhile, as jobs migrate from Manhattan to centers in Brooklyn and Queens, the Outer Boroughs remain frustratingly disconnected, a victim of the history of the economic growth and centralization of Manhattan and a lack of foresight by politicians over the past 100 years. It’s a rather familiar story after all.

May 31, 2013 60 comments

Brooklyn

Great Moments in Transit Reporting: A fake scandal on fake signs

by Benjamin Kabak May 23, 2013

written by Benjamin Kabak on May 23, 2013

The ugliness of these temporary signs has struck a nerve at the Daily News. (Photo via MTA New York City Transit / Marc A. Hermann)

As Second Ave. Sagas skips toward its seven anniversary, I’ve seen transit beat writers across the city come and go, and right now, we’re in a bit of a golden age of transit coverage. From Matt Flegenheimer at The Times and Ted Mann at The Journal to Matt Chaban at Crain’s New York and Stephen J. Smith at The Observer, a bunch of smart, open-minded reporters are tackling the city’s transportation beat, and they’re doing a great job of it. Yet, some coverage in other papers makes me slump my shoulders in defeat or throw my hands up in disgust.

Today’s Daily News features one of those pieces, and although the story is a minor one, it’s worth a few minutes of our time. The piece in question comes to us from not one but two reports, and it focuses on obviously temporary signage at Smith/9th Sts. and the way the signs look. The sub-hed on this groundbreaking piece of reporting tells us all we need to know: “Fake signs are only temporary. But they are ugly.”

At issue are some identification signs at the ends of the Smith/9th Sts. platform. At some point, the MTA will install proper mosaics in these locations, but to ready the station for passenger service after years of delay, the agency posted temporary paper signs designed to mimic tiling. “The signs were fabricated and installed as a temporary measure for the station reopening and will be replaced by the contractor with new mosaic tile signs,” a Transit spokesman said.

Meanwhile, in typical man-on-the-street fashion, two Daily News reporters even managed to track down someone to complain. This is, after all, still New York. “That’s pretty terrible considering the amount of money that went into renovating the place,” said Dennis Nemirovskiy, who likely hadn’t even noticed the signs let alone dwell on them before the reporters approached him. (Another rider had a more practical take. “Unless it’s going to improve the service it really doesn’t matter,” she said.)

And that’s the key to the Daily News article. Even though I’ve spent 300 words discussing it, it really doesn’t matter. The MTA is facing myriad problems that actually matter. It’s recovering from a crippling hurricane that has drastically reduced the expected lifetimes for key pieces of equipment. It’s heavily in debt with no end to the borrowing in sight. It can’t get out of its own way on capital projects and can’t garner political support for needed expansion efforts. And the Daily News is making a scandal out of a temporary sign.

When everyday New Yorkers bemoan the state of the subways, think back to this article because this is why. It’s lowest common denominator coverage that leads to politicians who don’t know how the subways are run or why services are constantly being threatened or cut. It’s why two sets of books has persisted for ten years. It’s great for instant outrage and absolutely terrible at generating a modicum of support transformative, long-range solutions to regional transportation problems.

May 23, 2013 16 comments

Brooklyn

After maintenance dispute, Aquarium bridge to come down

by Benjamin Kabak May 13, 2013

written by Benjamin Kabak on May 13, 2013

The Aquarium bridge feeding into the West 8th Street subway station will soon be torn down. (Photo by flickr user BrooklynLove)

For the better part of a 50 years, a pedestrian bridge has spanned Surf Ave. near West 8th St. in Coney Island, delivering subway passengers from the station to the boardwalk and aquarium. That bridge, according to a report in The Brooklyn Paper, is set to come down later this year.

Will Bredderman has the story:

Citing safety concerns and the structure’s unsightliness, the New York City Economic Development Corporation — the agency responsible for promoting business and tourism — plans to dismantle the walkway over Surf Avenue and the New York Aquarium parking lot at a yet-to-be-unspecified date this summer. An agency spokesman called the half-century-old bridge an eyesore, and said that it was likely to become unstable in the next few years.

In an effort to keep crossing Surf Avenue easy, the spokesman said that the city will broaden the sidewalks, install a crossing light at the intersection of W. Eighth Street, and create a new entrance to the Boardwalk at W. 10th Street.

Community Board 13 district manager Chuck Reichenthal applauded the news, saying that the neighborhood panel has begged the city for years to tear down the deteriorating walkway. The bridge — originally built 50 years ago to convey people from the F-Q stop to the then-new aquarium — has long been an orphan, with the MTA, the aquarium, and the Parks Department all denying responsibility for maintaining it.

Despite objections by local advocates that the bridge keeps “children and the elderly out of danger while crossing busy Surf Avenue,” wider sidewalks and a crossing light are a far better way to create a vibrant pedestrian-focused area than a bridge is, and daylighting the street underneath will help as well. The fish, albeit rusty, were always a kitschy cute touch.

May 13, 2013 32 comments

Brooklyn Service Advisories

Map: FASTRACK, shuttle buses arrive in Bay Ridge

by Benjamin Kabak May 6, 2013

written by Benjamin Kabak on May 6, 2013

Shuttle buses and a stub N train will pick up the slack during this week’s FASTRACK.

During my talk at the Transit Museum a few weeks back about the MTA’s FASTRACK program, Larry Gould, an ops official with New York City Transit, spoke at length about the operations planning that goes into FASTRACK. Where possible, Transit prefers to limit the use of shuttle buses and tries instead to urge riders to use alternate nearby routes. For most FASTRACK treatments, that’s an easy ask as the nearest subway line isn’t too far away, but for this week’s Bay Ridge/4th Ave. FASTRACK, the shuttle buses will be out in full force.

Starting tonight at 10 p.m. and continuing each weeknight until 5 a.m., trains will not run along 4th Ave. in Brooklyn south of 36th St. N trains will be diverted along the D train’s West End line to Coney Island while a special N shuttle will operate along the Sea Beach branch from 8th Ave. to Stillwell Avenue. R trains, until they cease operating for the evening, will terminate at 36th St., and only shuttle buses will supply transit service into Bay Ridge.

This week’s treatment is likely the trickiest and most onerous for riders as late-night Bay Ridge service usually isn’t the best. On a good day, the R train operates only as a shuttle late at night, and riders have to switch at 36th St. anyway. Now, though, there’s no direct N service to and from Manhattan. Though the transfer at New Utrecht/62nd St. to the N shuttle alleviates the pressure, travel times will be significantly longer this week for Brooklynites.

As this is one of the tougher FASTRACK’s, the next weekday change is the easiest. Later this month, Lexington Ave. trains will run only on the local tracks overnight — which they sort of do anyway. More on that in a few weeks.

May 6, 2013 4 comments

Brooklyn

On Smith/9th Sts. and ADA compliance

by Benjamin Kabak April 30, 2013

written by Benjamin Kabak on April 30, 2013

Smith/9th Sts. towers over Brooklyn, but the platforms do not have elevator access from street level. (Photo: MTA New York City Transit / Marc A. Hermann)

When the Culver Viaduct’s Smith/9th Sts. station reopened on Friday, the politicians came out en masse to support the station. Although the MTA acknowledged the delay in restoring F and G train service to Red Hook’s subway connection to the rest of the city, politicians made more than mere note of the delay.

“Finally, the long, long wait my constituents suffered is at an end,” City Councilwoman Sara M. Gonzalez said. “While the delays continued, residents of Red Hook endured longer waiting times and distances. I am confident they will like what they see as they begin to utilize this station again. Now, whether their transit needs are for employments, health, entertainment, academic or other personal choices, they will leave and arrive in this splendidly transformed station and I share in their joy. I look forward to advocating further with Red Hook residents as we seek further transit improvement options.”

What no one mentioned was the station’s lack of elevator access, and as riders returned to the station — even as work continued, in fact — I’ve received more questions concerning the MTA’s ADA obligations than just about anything else related to the project. Local business owners voiced their outrage on Twitter. “Smith/9th St subway station: $32 million, 2 years, no handicap access,” the social media arm of Seersucker, a restaurant on Smith St. above the Carroll St. station, noted. “How did NYC officials let that happen?” They’re not the only ones wondering, and so I set out to investigate why Smith/9th Sts., 87.5 feet above the Gowanus Canal, contains escalators and stairs but no elevators.

According to the MTA’s release on the station reconstruction, the $32 million projected included “ADA features” but not ADA accessibility. Stair risers and treads are now uniform dimension, and handrails are at the proper height and size. The platform edges now contain tactile warning strips as well. But that’s it, and with more steps leading up to the station entrance, it’s now even harder for straphangers with limited mobility to navigate the station.

The MTA has already fielded inquiries concerning ADA-accessibility at this station, and spokesman Kevin Ortiz issued a statement: “The design for ADA elevators at this station was structurally unwieldy and financially prohibitive due to the station’s layout.” I spoke to Ortiz yesterday afternoon, and he elaborated on the situation. Considering the geography of the station over the canal and its height, the MTA estimated requiring four to six elevators to make this station ADA-compliant, and given the ridership — under 5000 fares per day, 286 out of 421 and 93 out of 157 in Brooklyn — the elevators were cost-prohibitive and economically inefficient.

“But what of the ADA requirements?” an astute observer may ask. It’s a valid question as the ADA appears to require transit agencies to spend some part of a project on ADA upgrades and generally require rebuilds to be ADA compliant. As I understand it from MTA sources though, the agency has an ADA waiver. They must outfit 100 Key Stations with full ADA access by the end of the decade, and the MTA is currently ahead of schedule. But for new projects, they can argue for an exemption if doing so is structurally infeasible. If a 90-foot high station that spans a body of water wouldn’t qualify there, I don’t know what would.

Furthermore, that there has been no lawsuit filed against the MTA strikes me as strong evidence against any wrong-doing as well. Disabled riders and their legal advocates are not shy about flexing their muscles. They successfully sued for ADA upgrades at Dyckman St., and the MTA’s settlement included promises of an elevator. Two years after Smith/9th Sts. station shuttered and around five years after plans were first unveiled, no court challenges to the plans exist.

So what remains is a tough situation made worse by circumstance. No one in the 1930s anticipated the ADA when building the station, and now, in 2013, we have a new station without full ADA access. It strikes me as a situation with no good answer.

April 30, 2013 64 comments

Asides Brooklyn

Smith/9th Sts. set to reopen next Friday

by Benjamin Kabak April 19, 2013

written by Benjamin Kabak on April 19, 2013

After a delay of few ~~centuries~~ months, the MTA will reopen the Smith/9th Sts. F/G subway stop next Friday, April 26 at 10:30 a.m., agency spokesman Kevin Ortiz just announced via Twitter. The station closed in June of 2011 and was supposed to reopen mid-2012. But delays due to both the normal course of work and Superstorm Sandy pushed the opening back into 2013. Now, Red Hook and Carroll Gardens residents and business will get their subway station back.

I’ll have more details on the reopening as they become available, but it seems likely that the work isn’t completed even as the station is ready for revenue service. Two weeks ago, I snapped a photo behind the construction fence of the entrance, and much work remained. Still, the MTA vowed to reopen the station before May Day, and they’ll finally meet a Culver Viaduct project deadline, albeit one pushed back countless times.

April 19, 2013 6 comments

Brooklyn

Photo: Sneaking a peek at Smith/9th Sts.

by Benjamin Kabak April 11, 2013

written by Benjamin Kabak on April 11, 2013

A glimpse inside the entrance to the Smith/9th Sts. subway stop. (Photo via Second Ave. Sagas on Instagram)

On Sunday afternoon, I found myself on a long stroll through Brooklyn, and my walk took me east on 9th St. from the Carroll Gardens area. As we walked past the blue construction wall currently shielding the Smith/9th Sts. subway stop from the outside world, I noticed a sizable gap in the fence and snapped the above photo. It certainly looks like there is plenty of work to be done.

Now, the MTA is toeing the line with regards to the station reopening soon. Earlier reports indicated a potential April 22 service date, and MTA spokesman Adam Lisberg promised me trains before May Day. The Culver Viaduct rehabilitation project has no track record of on-time performance, but work doesn’t have to be completed for stations to be ready for passenger use. We’ll find out how things are going within a few weeks, but no matter the outcome, the station entrance area and platforms visible from the trains look much better than they did a few years ago.

April 11, 2013 14 comments

Asides Brooklyn

Transit finally announces late April opening for Smith-9th Streets

by Benjamin Kabak March 21, 2013

written by Benjamin Kabak on March 21, 2013

It’s not quite the first quarter of 2013, but it will have to do. Barring an earthquake, alien invasion, Godzilla or some other act of God, the Smith/9th Sts. station on the Culver Viaduct will reopen during the week of April 22nd, Transit announced tonight. The station, which has been closed for the better part of two years, has undergone extensive renovations, and although some elements which do not impact overall functionality remain unfinished, the F and G trains can begin stopping there again soon.

“This has been a long and complicated project but we are grateful for the community’s patience while we performed this necessary work,” Thomas F. Prendergast, president of MTA New York City Transit, said in a station. “This station will be 80 years old this summer and this rehabilitation will see it reach that milestone with a much improved appearance and functionality.”

The elevated station — the highest in the system, in fact — spans the Gowanus Canal and serves as the subway gateway to Red Hook. The rehabilitation project has been reconfigured and delayed numerous times, and the 22-month station closure has impacted accessibility in transit-poor parts of Brooklyn. Its return in a month will be quite welcome indeed.

March 21, 2013 28 comments

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