officiallyliam

The to Broad Street gets into Manhattan and then turns south - a direction hardly anyone is going on weekends. The majority of riders coming from Brooklyn will switch to uptown trains at Essex - hence why weekend service didn’t even go as far as Broad until a few years ago. The best weekend service patterns for the go uptown on Sixth Avenue - where people want to go. Ideally, weekend service should go to 57th or Queens Plaza, but if that would disrupt service too much, 96th is another option.

No it's not - not if the all-important one-seat ride is really a scenic tour of the subway system. People aren't going to be willing to waste money on the RBB just because it could get them to Lower Manhattan in an hour.

I live near the in Ridgewood. I take it sometimes on the weekends. The Ridgewood or Williamsburg to Central Park West corridor (which isn't really a thing in the first place) does not warrant extending the to West 4 and screwing up service. It's a much smaller number than you realize. The to Essex Street, for now, does just fine.

Sending the to Chambers get people to the at Canal and the at Essex for 6th Avenue service. While there's no direct 8th Avenue transfer, there are several ways to get there and it's not worth complicating service just to allow for a small number of people going from the to the 8th Avenue trains.

I'm not a regular Lex rider but here's my thoughts: the reduction in ridership due to the SAS opening has been offset by the MTA running less trains. As a result, the trains aren't less crowded at all - and sometimes are more crowded. More frequent Lex riders may confirm this.

Why demolish the Liberty El? Liberty Avenue has grown around the subway become a bustling commercial strip. Elevateds seem bad, but remember Jamaica Avenue: businesses thought the demolition of the el would be the best thing since sliced bread; the eventual demolition sucked potential customers away from Jamaica Avenue and bankrupted their business. I agree, though, with following through on the IND Second System plan to extend the Fulton Line, but I'd do it like this: Fulton Express to Far Rockaway. (don't split the A; you'll leave Far Rockaway underserved and Rockaway Park overserved) Fulton Express to Lefferts Blvd. to Rockaway Park stays as it is. Fulton Local to Cambria Heights. (via a two-track line under Pitkin and Linden. three-tracks is probably overkill, and I don't think there will be enough stops on the existing Fulton line and the Cambria line to make getting to Manhattan too slow; the Fulton express will have 2x the capacity for Cambria Hts riders who need express service.) I disagree on the RBB, at least in the short term. If we're going to do expansions off the Fulton Line it should be 1. connecting the SAS, 2. going to Eastern Queens, then maybe 3. the RBB. Plus, a local from Rockaway to Manhattan is certainly not going to be more attractive than the current setup. Don't you think most Rockaway riders will bail at Rockaway Blvd to get express service to Manhattan, rather than going via Queens Blvd?

I would use upper Roosevelt as a terminal for the first phase of Rx, and as a branch after my proposed second phase. The problem with Roosevelt UL is that you can get in, but I don't think you can get out - the tracks stub-end facing the mezzanine around 75th St, making it impossible to go west from the upper level. The Astoria station will be an engineering challenge, no question, but not impossible. Instead of sending the RX towards Co-Op City as the RPA wants to do (which, as you said, isn't running though a very desirable area for a transit extension), I'd send the line towards The Hub using part of the old Port Morris Branch. RX trains would come over the Hell Gate, swing left into the Port Morris Branch under St. Mary's Park, then connect it to a short new tunnel under 149th. The RX tracks would arrive on the outside of the platforms, creating a cross-platform transfer from the RX to Manhattan-bound trains. A map below to visualize: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zhotz4uq76blrt0/Triboro_BronxPhase.jpg?dl=0

The Far Rockaway branch has much higher off-peak ridership than the Rockaway Park branch. The Far Rockaway terminus is in the middle of a downtown commercial district (meaning more jobs) and is also surrounded by denser housing than the Rockaway Park end, which is much more suburban. In short, the Far Rockaway branch would be underserved by just the .

As well as this, isn't this service pattern also unpopular due to the length of the routes? Forest Hills to 179th isn't a super long extension (seven stops), but the and are very long routes as it is. If I recall correctly, operators and conductors tend to complain about the length of the when weekend G/Os extend it to Jamaica, and would likely be against a permanent line extension. As for the holding delays, extending the might actually help a little with that. Yes, people will bail from the local to the express, but the flow of those riders will be distributed between Parsons, Union Turnpike, Forest Hills, and Roosevelt. If the locals and expresses are timed to meet at certain stops, could this alleviate the extreme crowding at Roosevelt?

Really? Then how do we go about evaluating the best ways to spend money now if we aren't learning from the past?

The freight - Triboro line interaction is manageable. The ROW is mostly wide enough for three tracks, meaning at least one track could be devoted to freight at all times, or at least that passenger trains could have places to pass slow-moving or stopped freights. As for rolling stock - using FRA-compliant Nippon Sharyo DMUs is the cheapest option, and is the option that doesn't come with FRA traffic regulation problems. However, they need to be longer than 2 cars; we don't want to end up instantly over-capacity. My only concern with these is the acceleration and deceleration performance of DMUs, which usually lags behind EMUs, especially on lines with lots of closely-spaced stops (like Triboro). The other option that I can think of is to electrify the line with a third rail, and add more trainsets to the Staten Island R211 order. These (I think) will be OKd by the FRA as well, and will have higher capacity and better performance than DMUs. This, though, will come at a higher cost, one electrification is factored in.

I actually drew up a map some time ago of a crosstown LRT system that would incorporate the AirTrain (with infill on the Van Wyck) with the Rx, as well as the otherwise-misguided LGA AirTrain and the Lower Montauk, creating two main crosstown routes and one east-west route. https://www.dropbox.com/s/fl4ghaw7bljrbp0/Interboro LRT Map.jpg?dl=0 The RBB could be incorporated into this as another route between Howard Beach and Astoria or the Bronx, connecting via the LIRR ROW to the Rx line near Queens Blvd.

So then why did people along Woodhaven shoot down the proposal for a real, high-capacity BRT solution running in the median of Woodhaven and Cross Bay - something that would be our first real bus rapid transit service (and that could have been light rail later)? Woodhaven Blvd has the space to make its buses not slow, and we chose not to pursue that. Instead we have watered-down "BRT" in the form of Select, which is essentially just a normal bus by world standards, and is apparently still slow. The Woodhaven Blvd corridor and the RBB corridor are, unfortunately, not one and the same because of the RBB's alignment. The obvious demand on the Woodhaven Blvd corridor does not alone justify the construction of a subway several blocks away.

Want to go from the Rockaways, Howard Beach, or Ozone Park to Lower Manhattan? The does that. Want to go from Woodhaven to Lower Manhattan? The is right there. Going from QBL to Lower Manhattan? The does that; the does via a transfer at Lex. To go from any of the RBB neighborhoods to Lower Manhattan via Jackson Heights, LIC, and Broadway is to take just about the most circuitous route possible.

I don't think it was as much of an issue, as both the and went local then - so there wouldn't have been a merge at Grant.

So then explain to me the logistics of BRT on the Rockaway Branch, and why buses should be diverted from Woodhaven to the ROW. How are we getting buses on and off of the ROW (at both Rego Park and Ozone Park ends)? How do you make up for the fact that you've just taken away easy transfers to the and due to the nature of the ROW being several blocks from Woodhaven Blvd, and the fact that the fastest, most frequent routes will no longer serve a dense commercial corridor? Are we diverting all the Woodhaven Blvd buses to the RBB, or just the 52/53? These questions, I believe, make Rockaway BRT much less worth it. Compare this to the rail option. There are lines on both sides of the ROW for a new route to slot into. It is less important that it is a few blocks offset from the main attraction corridor of Woodhaven Blvd, as it serves a different market to buses: faster, express traffic to western Queens and Manhattan instead of the local traffic that buses do better. If people hadn't shot down proper median-running BRT on Woodhaven Blvd, that would be the option I would pursue in the short term. If we're doing anything with the ROW itself, though, it should be rail. It simply makes more logistical sense.

Using what 6th Avenue capacity? 6th Avenue is a cross-platform transfer away from SAS at 63rd and Lex, and a block or less from Broadway between 57th and 23rd. If providing a redundant additional option means creating a bottleneck at 63rd on lines which already have too many bottlenecks, then the people on the UES can cry me a river.

Rebuilding these junctions will not clear the choke points, only make them somewhat easier to navigate. Clearing the choke points entirely means eliminating the merging and reverse-branching that creates the choke points in the first place. I don't think that guaranteeing increases in the reliability of the subway system across four boroughs is appealing to the few - quite the opposite, in fact. As for the democracy argument, I'm all in favor of direct democracy and generally favor more power being devolved to local communities. One area that I don't, though, is in the service planning of a massive and intricate rapid transit network. The priority, as I see it, should be providing everyone with a service that is as dependable as possible. That sometimes means sacrificing giving everyone the direct service they might prefer, especially when one transfer point makes an alternate possible.

Agreed with regard to reroutes. Some of the complicated reroutes that Transit does during disruptions, while fun for us railfans, end up further torpedoing service. And how different is this to today? That is likely going to get stuck in the two-track section north of Prospect Park behind the immobile s. This is the kind of disruption I deal with as an rider, but I'm willing to put up with it once in a while for 2-3 minute intervals in rush hour service that keep ticking when the rest of the B Division hiccups.

This makes no sense in the first place. Secondly, I (and others who propose various degrees of de-interlining) are not doing this with a blatant disregard for customer preference. I (and I think others, feel free to correct me) simply believe that customer preference leans further towards having more frequent and more reliable service across the board than having a plethora of one-seat ride options. Exactly. There's a reason that the , the , the , the , and shuttle lines are regularly cited as the most frequent and most reliable: they run independently, unaffected by track-sharing with other routes and the resulting knock-on delays. Isn't this a model that we should be following? The way we run most of our service is inefficient and hampers frequency, and a big part of that is all the merging and reverse-branching that's going on. London is squeezing 23+ tph out of legacy lines; the CBTC- and ATO-equipped Central and Victoria lines run upwards of 33 peak TPH. There's little saying we couldn't do the same on the East Side and the West Side IRT if the and were run as independent lines. Ditto for Concourse, CPW, 8th Avenue, 6th Avenue, Brighton, and Fourth Avenue by disentangling their respective junctions. Rebuilding junctions won't deliver this potential massive increase in capacity that we clearly need.

So de-interlining, a purely operational solution that will cost next to nothing, is off the table because of its political in-feasibility and the uproar that it would cause. But shutting down some of the busiest lines in the subway for long periods and tearing up Eastern Parkway and/or 149th St, and likely spending billions of dollars doing so, is the logical solution. Something here isn't adding up for me.

Additional options? Why do we insist on providing service to 8th and 6th - trunk lines parallel through Harlem and UWS and just two blocks apart through Midtown - when we could boost whole system capacity and massively increase reliability by de-interlining? Thus, your argument about cross-platform transfers has no point. The goal of the subway should be to provide the most reliable and frequent service to the most people, not the most number of one-seat ride combinations - especially when that sacrifices capacity. This plan would reduce the number of merges to one - just before/after Hoyt - which ideally could be eliminated in the future by a Fulton local SAS extension. The can run out of 36th St Yard. If I'm correct, when the opens it will do just that as the will displace the from Jamaica.

What about swapping the and northern terminals? This way, Concourse riders with longer commutes can keep CPW express, while the never have to switch tracks in Manhattan, and we wouldn't have to construct any new switches. My plan would be: the basically becomes the , the peak-direction express to Norwood; the becomes the (although maybe it could be extended to 167 or something for more Bx-Mnhtn capacity); the ends at 168 and the serves 207. Inwood riders wanting 8th Avenue have a cross-platform transfer at 125, as do Concourse riders bound for CPW local stops.

It's not like that's a much better proposal, even though you act like its the cure-all for riders. You've just introduced another merge to the , , and , lines which have too many merges as is, and inconsistent service as a result. SAS to 6th Avenue is a cross-platform transfer already, and the two are within walking distance throughout Midtown. It's not necessary, and will only exacerbate the precarious situation regarding frequencies and merges on 6th Avenue, QBL, and Broadway.

That's what the (P) reading on the R32 rollsigns is for, right? I heard somewhere that it was "P" for "Penn Station", the service you just described above.