Brooklyn

In the grand scheme of New York City’s subway system, the Smith/9th Sts. station along the IND Culver line isn’t a very popular one. Averaging just under 4000 passengers a day in 2010, it was only the 287th most popular stop around. Despite its low ridership, it is both one of the most picaresque and precarious in the city. The highest station in the system with views of the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan skyline, the viaduct on which it sits has been draped in a protective sheathing for years, and the station has been badly in need of a rehab.

Since late 2007, the MTA had been planning a full station overhaul for the Smith/9th Sts. stop, and for the past few years, they have warned community boards and neighborhood groups of a looming 2011 full station closure. When the service cuts came last year, the authority warned that it would not be able to provide additional shuttle bus service, but when zero hour arrived yesterday and the MTA shuttered the station until next March, people were still upset.

Both Carroll Gardens’ Patch site and NY1 covered frustrated commuters, and the two resulting stories are among my favorites in local outrage. Red Hook residents, who clearly drew the short straw here, will have to take a bus ride either into Park Slope or Downtown Brooklyn to reach their trains, and while these folks complained the most about the state of the station and the safety concerns of the Culver Viaduct, they now are going to complain about the MTA’s fixing up the station as well.

My favorite quotes came from Henry Ramos who spoke to a Patch author. “I am pissed,” he said. “I’m like ‘What am I gonna do now?'” Ramos comes from Williamsburg regularly, and despite a partial platform closure for three months, numerous signs and years of outrage, he wanted even more signs that he probably wouldn’t have read anyway at the station.

Furthermore, he’s bemoaning the fact that the bus isn’t a free shuttle. “If you don’t got a MetroCard for the bus, you gotta walk,” he said. Does that mean he was hopping the turnstile to board the subway? If he has a MetroCard for the bus, he has a free transfer for the ride to Red Hook. But then again, it’s far easier to complain about something long expected than it is to plan ahead.

Once the work on the viaduct that doesn’t require trains to be re-routed is finished, the station will reopen. For those in Red Hook and the southern ends of Carroll Gardens, it’s going to be a long nine months.

DOT has determined that this streetcar route is simply too expensive for the city right now.

Once upon a time, the New York City Department of Transportation viewed streetcars as the next great thing for Brooklyn. “We’re looking back to the future,” Janette Sadik-Khan said a few months ago. “Streetcars remain part of the transportation mix in cities from Toronto to Melbourne, and we need to consider all options to improve transit access in underserved neighborhoods like Red Hook.”

Now, though, DOT is singing a different tune. With advocates howling, the Department of Transportation has wrapped up a six-month study by determining that streetcars are too expensive and won’t deliver benefits to Red Hook without major changes in the city’s development policies.

The topline determinations are clear: The ideal route would cost $176 million to build and would set back the city $7 million a year to operate. Even worse, the line would increase transit use from Red Hook by only 12 percent — or 1822 daily riders — over the current bus routing as DOT determined that most denizens of the area do not own cars and already rely on the bus for subway access. More problematic though are DOT’s determinations that the area simply isn’t planned properly for streetcar transportation. As Red Hook isn’t zoned of high-density, mixed-use areas, streetcars do not make fiscal sense right now.

The feasibility report – a 73-page PDF available here — drills down in depth on the city’s study. And yet, over and over again, DOT comes back to the issue of cost. “The estimated cost based on the conceptual design of the preferred alignment amounts to approximately $176 million in 2011 dollars,” the report says. “Given the current economic environment, it is questionable whether the City could raise the funds for this substantial capital investment. Moreover, in light of the unfavorable feasibility considerations related to the actual operation of such a system, it is uncertain that a streetcar, while technically feasible, is the most efficient option for meeting Red Hook’s transit goals today.”

Opponents have risen a stink about this study. In numerous emails to me, Bob Diamond of the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association claims DOT’s figures are misleading. He claims DOT’s capital cost estimates at $26 million per mile are far too high and cites a 2001 effort by Portland which cost the Oregon city just $13 million per mile. DOT too cites to that effort and claims that construction costs in Portland have risen to $22 million per mile today. It also claims, not incorrectly, that construction costs in New York City are significantly higher than they are on the West Coast.

Meanwhile, as Streetsblog noted, other concerns dominated the report as well. Despite low car ownership rates in Red Hook, DOT did not feel comfortable with removing parking spots, and many alignments seemed to require significant curb cuts and some use of eminent domain in order to ensure adequate turning radii for the streetcars. The most damning critique though, as Noah Kazis writes, concerns cooperation amongst city agencies. He says:

A final objection, though, seems to reveal either a lack of coordination between city agencies or a study designed to reject the streetcar in advance. Having looked at streetcar projects in other cities, DOT found that installing the transit line would only promote economic development if it was paired with changes to the area’s land use planning. Noting that the Department of City Planning doesn’t have any plans to upzone Red Hook’s residential areas or otherwise plan for growth, the DOT study concludes that the “current City development/land use policy is not complementary to streetcar as an economic development driver.”

So while Diamond says that he’ll continue to fight for streetcars in Brooklyn, DOT has other ideas in mind. They want to instead improve sidewalks, bike lanes and bus service into and out of Red Hook and will attempt to better integrate the neighborhood into subway access plans. Yet until they actually follow through with these plans, Red Hook will remain an isolated area with sub-par bus service and subway access. Streetcars could have been a panacea for the area, but like the bankrupt Dodgers, they won’t be making a return to Brooklyn any time soon.

As the Culver Viaduct controversy swirled last week, the local Brooklyn media profiled the upcoming work and brouhaha over those who were unaware of the F train shutdowns. On Friday afternoon, reporter Lauren Moraski interviewed me from the Smith/9th Sts. station to discuss the work and Brooklynites’ reactions to it. The story aired earlier this week on Brooklyn Review on the Brooklyn Independent TV station, and I’ve embedded the clip above.

Regular readers of SAS know the story by heart by now, but Moraski managed to track down a few more commuters who were surprised by the station closures. One wants to see a shuttle bus that, due to MTA budgetary problems, won’t run while others will just have to hoof it to Carroll St. While riders all along the F line in Park Slope, Windsor Terrace and Kensington will suffer, Red Hook residents drew the short end of the straw. With limited subway service and no added bus lines, it’s going to be a long year for those who rely on the F for their commutes.

Manhattan-bound F riders are gearing up for months of inconvenience. (Photo courtesy of @JeffreyNYC)

One of my main themes at Second Ave. Sagas over the past four years has involved New Yorkers’ relationship with transit news. I’ve looked at how the millions of people who rely on the MTA for travel don’t pay attention to the news, how the news doesn’t do an adequate job explaining certain transit stories and how the MTA’s own approach to customer service oftentimes compounds the problem. Nowhere is that more evident than in today’s developing outrage over the upcoming shutdown of stations along the F line in Brooklyn as part of the Culver Viaduct rehab project.

The basis for this tale is a simple one: After three years of planning and the start of Phase 1 of the Culver Viaduct rehabilitation plan, the MTA announced this week that, beginning January 10, Phase 2 shutdowns will begin. In other words, from January 10 through May, as part of a $275.5 million rehab on a structure that’s falling apart, the following changes will be in effect:

• No Manhattan-bound F or Queens-bound G service at 15th Street Prospect Park and Ft. Hamilton Parkway Stations.
• No Manhattan-bound F service at Smith-9th Sts Station. Queens-bound G service stops at a temporary platform.
• All Manhattan and Queens-bound trains stop on the express track at Church Avenue and 7th Avenue stations.
• Manhattan-bound F and Queens-bound G trains stop at a temporary platform accessed via the Coney Island-bound platform at 4th Avenue-9th Street station.

Somehow, despite years of warning, the locals are outraged. Popular neighborhood blog Fucked in Park Slope is too beside itself for snark while Gothamist is fielding some priceless emails. “We’re new to Windsor Terrace (2 months) and fairly new to New York (6 months),” one Brooklyn resident said. “I’m absolutely livid that this is happening with a week’s notice, especially in the winter. This is the first we’re hearing of this and is part of a chain of the F train messing with us. I’ve lived in cities for the past 10 years and I can tell you this level of fuckery wouldn’t fly in LA or Boston.”

So where to begin? Where to begin? Should we point out that subways in Los Angeles and Boston, you know, shut down over night so that people can’t get home via public transit after midnight? It certainly would be worse living in Windsor Terrace if the last F train departed from midtown at 11:30 p.m. every Friday and Saturday.

But instead, let’s look at some history. In late 2007, New York City Transit unveiled their plans for the Culver Viaduct, and while the timeline has been pushed back and the project slightly scaled down in the intervening years, the same service changes apply. In fact, in a presentation to Community Board 6 in 2007, Transit presented the exact same service patterns going into effect next week. Take a look:

A presentation from 2007 shows plans portending next week's F/G service outage in Brooklyn.

That 2007 presentation wasn’t the only one Transit has delivered to Brooklyn. Take a look at a similar one from 2008. It’s just another in a long line of slideshows Transit’s community relations officials have given to Community Boards. In fact, as recently as this past fall, I sat in on a meeting at which officials discussed these exact service changes.

Furthermore, the MTA has released its own video on the project; and crews have been working on the viaduct for nearly ten months. In other words, since 2007, then, Brooklynites knew or should have known that their service was going to be cut for a few months, and if people moving to the area or already living their failed to do adequate research, that’s on them.

Of course, oblivious locals who don’t seek out transit news aren’t the only ones to blame. In fact, I don’t expect people to attend Community Board meetings and few non-members do. But New York’s various news outlets pay people to attend and report on those meetings, and over that last few years, that’s just what they’ve done. Newspapers ranging from The Daily News to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle have covered the work.

My site is but a small fish in the giant sea of New York media, but unfortunately, Brooklyn news outlets haven’t done a thorough job of explaining the impact of the Culver Viaduct rehab. Take a glance through the Brooklyn Paper search results of stories relating to this work. The paper mentions that service to and from Smith-9th Sts. will be impacted, but it doesn’t explore how the need to run F and G trains on the express tracks will lead to trains bypassing 15th St. and Fort Hamilton Parkway. That’s a failure of media.

Finally, the MTA isn’t absolved of all blame either, and in fact, the authority hasn’t upheld its end of the deal. At a Community Board 6 Transportation Committee meeting earlier this fall, committee members specifically asked the MTA to warn the neighborhoods well ahead of time. Instead, the MTA started hanging up signs portending a four-month service outage just seven days ahead of time. Even though the MTA had warned community groups and received a far amount of press coverage, Transit should be papering stations well ahead of the service outages. The authority can’t force news down people’s throats, but it can do a better job of getting the word out ahead of time. One week is not enough lead time for a warning of this magnitude.

This day of outrage in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace highlights how people simply take the transit system for granted. They’d rather every station but theirs get rehabbed and are content to let infrastructure age if it means they aren’t inconvenienced. The millions of New Yorkers who ride the subway every day are also content to ignore the news that impacts their lifeline to the economic hubs of the city, and the media that covers these areas is content to do a half-hearted job of it. The MTA too doesn’t make it any easier. This is outrage that has been in the works since November 2007, and with a little more effort from everyone, it should have been completely avoidable.