bobtehpanda

So like, to be fair, neither Douglaston or Little Neck have a great parking situation, and they're kind of a pain in the ass to drive or take the bus to, and the stations are located smack dab in the middle of an extremely low density area. which basically just leaves Great Neck. In general, the MTA does not really do systemic thinking related to its rail network. FWIW the last service plan I saw for ESA, whenever that actually opens, is that PW service will essentially be doubled at all hours of the day with trains alternating between NYP and GCT. Not sure how they plan on treating intermediate stations in that scenario. But they definitely have the equipment available to run that kind of service. That being said, Bayside is a lot denser, but Broadway wouldn't necessarily be a slouch if some basic things were done (say, have bus fare be included in LIRR rides). Buses already run past Broadway, they're just not dedicated shuttles, and then that way the LIRR also saves money not having to run free shuttles. (Auburndale I'm a little bit less optimistic about, just because the stop is located between and a bit far from two bus corridors.)

You can have POP style checks on the trains, or even on the platforms or by turnstiles. That's more of an issue with how NYPD operates. NYPD? Operate in a way that is inconvenient because they said so? What a surprise.

I mean, allegedly OMNY is coming to both the railroads. Why would they give af if they're getting paid the same for the same amount of work in the end? Not like they make commission on tickets.

CNG isn't really low emissions. Ultimately the goal is zero fossil fuels. Hydrogen is a pain in the ass to setup. You can't just get hydrogen. That's always been the problem with hydrogen, its distribution and manufacturer. Biodiesel has more or less been a bust.

Basically it just avoids having to bother fumbling around getting an SBS ticket. There was some talk with doing this for the Manhattan crosstowns, to be paid for by the 2007 version of congestion pricing, for largely the same reasons.

But also ridership is a function of frequency as well; a station is less useful if only half the trains stop there. The same as at Bayside, which is to say there isn't really parking.

These are quite effective (mind the source, it's the only one with the video still) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5221063/Fare-dodger-suffers-ultimate-humiliation.html

HEETs are an obvious solution to having riders

With what express tracks

Transfers. Fulton St has very poor transfers in Downtown Brooklyn and SAS transfers in Manhattan are worse. Compare that to Atlantic Terminal. Also speed. The main point of SAS is to relieve the . This is a little difficult if the SAS makes more stops than Lex express, so the idea is that by skipping downtown entirely via Manhattan Bridge you can be much faster that way. The Sixth Av situation doesn't have to be so bad if the transfer at Grand St is cross platform.

I mean, Metro-North does. Then again, LIRR is run differently than Metro-North, although usually for the worse.

Eh, there's a lot of value in reducing the amount of seat changes, particularly as it relates to avoiding having to exit a platform, go up, go through the boarding process, and then get onto an Amtrak train. Also, don't a fair amount of trains from the west and north terminate in Penn Station itself? The terminating procedure takes a long time, so maybe it should be moved to somewhere that isn't the most congested station in the rail network. --- I think Amtrak as part of its Amtrak Connects plan has talked about extending Empire Corridor trains to Ronkonkoma. Stony Brook would make more sense if speeds on PJ were improved, but it takes about an hour less to catch a train from Ronkonkoma than from Stony Brook, and PJ has a lot of curves compared to how straight the route to Ronkonkoma is in comparison.

People need to get to work. It's a civil rights issue (no literally, the ADA is civil rights legislation) Expanding paratransit would be a huge mistake. It already costs $1B+ a year to provide, and that's for the current service which is shitty, requires predetermined appointments 24h in advance that the vehicles are often late to, etc. Serving disabled riders with the actual bus services is a win-win-win; it costs less money and it's more convenient for those passengers. Would you support the service cuts required to pay for more paratransit? --- It always shocks me to see such callous indifference about these kinds of topics, particularly since in this society everyone is one unfortunate event from being broke or disabled (temporarily or permanently.) Crutches gave me a new perspective on how hard it was to be transit-dependent and not have full motor abilities, and that was temporary.

Ehhhh, median bus lanes would take an extremely long time to construct given current construction standards. The Van Ness BRT in SF took six years. IMO the best would be a busway with the rest of Fordham being converted to one-way westbound. Today we have EB bus lane -> EB travel lane -> EB travel lane -> WB travel lane -> WB travel lane -> WB bus lane And that could be converted to EB bus lane -> WB bus lane -> bus stop/median -> WB travel lane -> WB travel lane -> WB parking

My understanding (and I don't think the MTA has ever actually tried to hide this) is that part of why there is this aggressive bus stop removal is to speed up bus times. I would also not be surprised if, as many people do on the various bus proposal threads, the bus routes are being calculated to minimize idle times so that runtime + required layovers = some nice multiple that fits in an hour. (In fact I would be surprised that they weren't doing either of these things.) Reducing payroll costs is not really some ahistorical thing, or even some weird thing. Literally every company everywhere in this country is trying to do that at all times. We don't have ticket collectors or manual door operations anymore, now that we have turnstiles and door controls inside the cab. If anything, the weird thing is that unlike the rest of the economy the MTA stopped trying to save labor.

I think the problem is more how to do rider distribution on the Q27. West of QCC even on weekends it's not uncommon to have lots of people passed up on 46th and 48th Av because the bus is full coming from QCC and points east. I'm cautiously optimistic that the split will be okay, since it more or less splits the Q27 into its three distinct rider bases, QCC to Flushing, SE Queens to Flushing, and SE Queens to QCC.

It's not just about getting through Jamaica but also to it as well. Hillside is heavily congested until you pass the Clearview Expressway for buses coming from the east. The Q27 is busy, but it's not really slow, and very few of the roads it's on are heavily trafficked until you hit Flushing itself, and that you'd have to deal with no matter which way you try getting into Flushing.

It probably wouldn't do a whole lot. There isn't a whole lot on 188 that would draw SE Queens, and there are faster ways to get to QCM. For all its faults, the Q27 is definitely one of if not the fastest way to get to Flushing from SE Queens, and it's one seat to boot.

So I think I have a reasonable way to do all that; Q88 - unchanged Q17 - HHE Q73 - weekdays only to QCC, weekends terminate at 188th. I think the routing to QCC is important, but AFAIK QCC isn't open much weekends anyways. I prefer 73rd over HHE to Springfield, if only because the HHE in that stretch is taken up mostly by highway interchange.

So looking more into this, I get what I deserve for looking at this PDF before the morning coffee. The route by route for the Q26/27 doesn't mention the Q78, and I skipped over the map on page 35. It's pretty shitty IMO that the full map is buried in a 515 page PDF, and even in the "high-res" version it isn't particularly easy to read. --- The Q78 is a good idea. Personally, I still don't think that people from 120 Av to Jamaica Av are really using the route to get to past QCC in large numbers, because it usually isn't the most direct way to get to those places from those routes. --- As far as other changes go, the one that sticks out to me is the Q88 and Q73. I think the Q73 is probably long overdue, as some kind of 73rd Av route. I'm not super convinced that this is the correct solution. What I observed when I rode the route was that a lot of people on the Q88 on both the 73rd and HHE portions, used it to go to the little shopping center on 188th St. The new route configurations more or less cut off both roads from direct access to the shopping center, and it's not that far of a walk, but I personally wouldn't have made that decision. Also, I'm not sold on this whole HHE only thing; east of 188 there isn't a whole lot on HHE itself. (Also, I don't like the change because it would've made my personal trips to QCM more annoying, but that's me.)

To clarify, I mean Jamaica Av (& Springfield) not Jamaica the neighborhood. My bad.

Huh, missed when this came out. Looking at this and how it pertained to bus routes I used to use Q20/Q44: lol @ the Q44 they finally did it. Q20s at Briarwood makes more sense, they carried air east of there. Can't speak about College Point, though 20 Av is just a bunch of big box stores that I can't imagine had high ridership anyways. Q43: thankful that the awful Winchester routing proposal is dead. All day limited service west of Springfield is nice. Q46: not sure how I feel about the limited sections being moved west to 188. Seems like it'll slow things down. Q45: the effort to put lipstick on the LNP pig continues, it's not a good road for bus service. Q17: totally nonstop between HHE and Sanford is overkill. There should at least be a stop on Holly. Glad they shortened the Jamaica end. Q26/27 The current Q27 does too many things and struggles. That being said I don't know this was the right call. I think a lot of SE Queens folks going to QCC are going to be inconvenienced. This has been talked about before but I think I would split the current version of the Q26 they have to end at Jamaica, and then have a separate SE Queens-QCC route for the rest. I'm not sure how I feel about the Sanford routing. It'll probably be faster, but would've been mildly inconvenient for me when I was riding buses in Queens.

Idk about the in-train ones, but the station ones are actually paid for by an ad agency, not the MTA, so the fact that they show more ads than info is a feature, not a bug.

Vertical PSDs exist for different door configurations:

A single bus from Port Jeff -> SBU -> LIRR Ronkonkoma -> Patchogue? Sign me up. I wonder if the bus + LIRR at Ronkonkoma will end up being faster than changing at Huntington.