RR503

13 hours ago, bobtehpanda said:

New York and New Jersey have a political relationship that is testy at the best of times. The example of cross state transport systems we do have in the US, like WMATA, are not encouraging.

I'm not a huge fan of 6th Av to Williamsburg. It's a replacement of existing Nassau capacity over the bridge with more useful Midtown capacity, but there's no net increase in actual trains going over the bridge, and I believe that there will need to be a third pair of tracks under the East River to WIlliamsburg at some point.

I've also always been of the opinion that the Utica Avenue line needs to go north, since North and South Brooklyn lack any sort of direct rail connection. And I believe Williamsburg should be more aggressively upzoned, both to try and contain gentrification to where it's already run much of its course, and to try and create secondary centers outside of Manhattan.

I neither think that WMATA is a good example of this given how fraught DC governance is in general, nor do I think that that system is uniquely bad. Let's not forget that WMATA was a relatively well managed system by American standards until the 2009 accident. 

As for Williamsburg, I totally agree that in the long term we need more capacity/more housing in those areas, but it's equally important not to lose sight of just how far below capacity existing lines are. The  runs 20x8 and the  21x8. If you move both to 30x10, you've nearly doubled your capacity. Getting the  via Bridge would also help unlock potential along the Jamaica Ave section of the . 

4 hours ago, bobtehpanda said:

The PATH, because New Jersey actually pays for that.

Here's how you make that work:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0967070X9500022I

14 hours ago, bobtehpanda said:

The new Sixth Avenue Express - consider it a "Williamsburg express". This would be an entirely new line running from Houston St in Manhattan, under Grand, Humboldt, and Beaver with only a stop at Bedford Av, Lorimer-Metropolitan, Montrose Av, and Myrtle Av  . The would depart under Johnson Av.

Why would you not just do 6th Ave express to Williamsburg Bridge? Keeps costs to only lolzy levels. 

24 minutes ago, CenSin said:

Need a better track map with color to show what tracks the trains actually use nowadays

S/b s diverge at the top arrow, run along the track pointed at by the middle arrow (called B lead), and rejoin at the lower arrow.

1 hour ago, Tonyboy515 said:

I just saw a 4-car not-in-service R46 on the Culver el going towards Coney Island right now, any idea what that’s about?

Likely an equipment transfer to CIY for some sort of maintenance work.

37 minutes ago, LaGuardia Link N Tra said:

But wouldn’t it have to go underneath Park Avenue? Because the  are running underneath Park Avenue between 42nd and 14th. 
 

As for SAS 3, it’s flaws put a major limitation as to how effectively we can plan. This is more of a pipe Dream, but elevated LRT’s in Manhattan that make little to no noise as possible would be nice. One on Second Avenue could replace the M15. 

You'd be able to curve over to 3rd if need be, though underpinning won't kill if you just go deep. 

53 minutes ago, Around the Horn said:

Frankly I'd rather extend Metro North down to Lower Manhattan a la Crossrail rather than build Phase 3.

....or that! Wouldn't be surprised if the marginal load movement and time benefits were greater.

Beyond SAS 3 being little more than a pipe dream at this point, I fail to understand why the conclusion from these facts isn't just that we need to redesign SAS 3. It's terrible planning that'll worsen the reliability of the system while adding no capacity. It's connections as you point out are weak; the platform that goes the furthest east is Lex-53, and as you point out that barely gets near the . I'd argue they need to redo the whole thing, placing the route under 3rd north of 34-42, and under 2nd south of there, terminating at Lex-63 for now/in Bronx or in Queens in the future.

3 hours ago, JeremiahC99 said:

When I thought of this plan, I wanted to ensure that this plan would help get riders off the Lexington Avenue Line by making a service that travels directly between the East Side and Queens, drawing crowds away from 59th Street and 51st Street. I was also under the impression that with CBTC, the maximum track capacity tops out to 36 trains per hour. With 2 services in each of the Queens tunnels both at 12 trains per hour, there would be 24 trains per hour in each tunnel, and thats before the SAS plans. With SAS-Queens services, plus the deinterlining of Queens Blvd's 36th Street interlocking, and 4-tracking the lower SAS, another 12 trains per hour would be added, giving 36 trains on the crossings.  However, this would not be done without additional projects to expand service and increase capacity in Queens itself.

The 63rd Street-SAS plan is slightly close to what Vanshnookenraggen proposed in his future of the SAS post, with a SAS-Queens connection via 63rd Street going out via Queens Blvd.

Maybe I'm not coming up with the best plans after all.

Your plans are good, I just wanted to push back here. My apologies for being harsh. 

The issue with your logic is twofold. Firstly, 36tph is a high throughput, one that is _definitely_ impossible without deinterlining, which is to say your interlining will destroy its enabling condition however limited it may be. Secondly, the existence of more tube capacity doesn't change the basic fact that you're just redistributing throughput inefficiently. As I feel I'm always saying, there are ways to fully utilize Queens crossings with current infrastructure -- appending more infrastructure throws off that balance, and reduces the efficiency of the system as a whole. We should be aiming to maximize that efficiency. If we can have a 4 track SAS, we sure as hell can have a new 2 track tunnel to Queens.

14 minutes ago, bobtehpanda said:

"Half capacity" is still trains roughly every 4 or 5 minutes. It's not nothing.

If we spend 10 billion (or whatever that'll cost) building a subway line, we should be making damn sure we get as much bang for our buck as is possible. SAS 3 adds *zero* new capacity to the system; it needs to be redesigned to make sense. 

1 hour ago, Jemorie said:

Originally until the Lex was extended to Brooklyn following the opening of Joralemon St Tube. Not that I’m against your scenario for the  at Lex-59 or anything, I was just pointing out it would require one track to be closed either part-time or full-time to allow the wall to be torn down for the building of a side platform.

They did just that at BG. Unsure as to exactly how the GOs panned out, but it's doable.

24 minutes ago, R68OnBroadway said:

Could crowds potentially decrease at least a little by rerouting the  up SAS (the thought process for this being that an increase in SAS frequencies could entice some Brooklyn bound  riders to switch over). 

Absolutely. There's a good number of folks who do  to [some other Brooklyn line]; if you can combine better SAS frequencies with deinterlining at 34 and, potentially, Dekalb and the inherently more efficient Manhattan Bridge route, you'd be able to make an impact. 

21 minutes ago, Around the Horn said:

 

I never said a four track subway... Just a second platform on the side of the existing track (either uptown or downtown, whichever is more feasible) to separate the crowds on the platform and spread them out. I'm thinking something like Bowling Green on the and .

There was a study of this sort done for Lex-53 in the ‘80s. I believe @Union Tpke has a copy. This is definitely something that should be looked into as Midtown East gets even bigger, as well as the 59-63 link because that’s two free platforms right there. 

1 hour ago, JeremiahC99 said:

This is why I propose expanding the SAS-Queens connections beyond the planned connection to the 63rd Street Tunnel. With an additional connection to the 60th Street Tunnel and possibly to the 53rd Street Tunnel, riders on the Queens Blvd Line and Astoria Line can avoid transferring at 59th Street and 51st Street entirely and ride directly between work on the east side (or whatever they do there) and home in Queens. So for example, if such a rider lives in Astoria near the Queens Blvd Line (I’m going to use Steinway Street for this example) and goes to college at Hunter Colleges Bellevue Nursing School, rather than take the QBL Local train to 53rd and Lex (under current service patterns), then transfer to the  to get to 23rd Street, then walk a half mile to the Bellevue Campus, that same person can now take the SAS local train straight from Steinway to 23rd Street-2nd Avenue via the 63rd Street Tunnel, then walk only one block to reach the campus. The same would happen in reverse for the commute home after class. No interaction with Lexington Avenue required.

The 60th Street connection time the SAS would also provide redundancy as well. So if the same student sees the Queens Blvd Line knocked out due to an incident, they can then walk over to Broadway on the Astoria Line, take the Astoria-SAS train to 42nd Street, then transfer to the local SAS train to 23rd Street and vice versa in the evening, also avoiding Lexington Avenue.

This is a pretty terrible idea. Let me say it again: a properly designed network with current infrastructure would fill _all_ capacity in existing Queens tunnels. The SAS/63 interlining is bad enough from an ops/capacity perspective. Adding more jury rigged connections into the rest of the tunnel system? Please, dear god, no.

Queens needs more cross-river capacity. SAS 3 needs an outlet that doesn’t involve destructive interlining at its northern end. It’s a match made in heaven.

(And this is, of course, before we consider the complete impracticality of meshing some sort of connection into tunnel infrastructure.)

17 minutes ago, Jemorie said:

I thought scheduling the  to come immediately followed by the  in both directions between the 142 St Junction and Rogers Junction would have been the perfect solution though. I thought it would make both lines run faster in terms of dwelling at stations. But I now see, well, partially anyway, of what you're saying. The former uses R62s, a fleet of cars that have a loss of 4 seats per car, smaller seats, and, more importantly, narrower doors, that create longer dwelling time. So any delay on the former also negatively impacts the latter as well. It's just that I was under the impression that when the  comes first, followed immediately right by a , all the Manhattan-inter borough crowds would go inside the former quickly at each station (with it eventually emptying out as it heads further uptown to 148 St), same with the Bronx-bound crowds going inside quickly on the latter. (Uptown  loads from Brooklyn are light in the reverse peak anyway until they gradually begin picking up at their first Manhattan stop, Wall St, until they have so many passengers each as they head further uptown). Downtown wise, I thought that when the  came first and picked up all the customers traveling within Manhattan, would have made it easier for the  immediately behind it to loose its customers from the Bronx (Downtown loads become lighter on both lines closer to Lower Manhattan, where, by then they are in Brooklyn considered "reverse peak" and are lightly loaded the rest of their routes to Flatbush/New Lots anyway).

No, you're totally right that that's the optimal solution coming south from Harlem/Bronx in the AM peak. It's just that it has knock-on effects when extended to the rest of the line -- in Brooklyn especially, as you point out. That said, the determinants of  schedules are much more Rogers/142/149 than they are convenience. At Rogers, s have to be snaked between s and s; at 142, you have to make sure no conflicting moves are scheduled through the plant at the same time, and at 149, you have to take the result of the previous two interactions and make that 'mesh' with merging  service. Those three variables are a challenge enough; I doubt all that much thought is given to load balancing after managing them in the peak hours thanks to their complexity. 

I left out the  because its volumes will exist independent of any deinterlining plan -- if anything, deinterlining will route more  pax via local. 

Agree re: Woodhaven. Having 36 as either an express or as a Dekalb-style station with the  on the outside (  would then relay to some tail tracks built beyond) would be nice, too, as it saves you a less-than-optimal diverging move at Queens Plaza and, if you go with the  option, sets up a Northern Blvd subway. 

24 minutes ago, Jemorie said:

@RR503, I don't really understand the data to be honest....are you generally saying that a  being scheduled to come followed by a  a minute or two behind it, most of the day and evening hours, in both directions, is what causes irregular service (trains being behind their schedules and all)?

To a degree, yes. When you make that chart with the  and  together, the chart changes, but that's precisely the issue -- the complex interactions the  has with the  and  force it to run irregular headways to maintain a schedule that has any chance of being delivered, which force the  to run irregular headways, etc. Because trains don't generally line up into perfect windows between other trains, you're forced to do ugly shit like this, or schedule delays. 

25 minutes ago, Jemorie said:

What about the  and ? The former goes straight from Manhattan to the Bronx while the latter ends in Manhattan. Either way, both trains will get crowded, with the  being more so with all of its Bronx-bound passengers. In reality, based on my personal prescriptive, the  and  come evenly apart or the  comes right before the  in both directions between the 135 St interlocking and the Rogers Junction interlocking. It should always be the  coming first, followed by a  right behind it, for much of the day and evening in both directions. Remember, the  will pick up everyone traveling within Manhattan and will be emptying out as it heads further uptown while the  will be crowded all the way through since it serves the Bronx. This is common every afternoon all the way into midnight. Downtown wise (particularly every morning), the  will be picking up everyone traveling within Manhattan while the  will gradually empty out. So what is wrong with the "back-to-back" structure?

South of 96 St, the loading difference between  and  trains is relatively small, and there exists significant intra-segment ridership between 96 and Franklin. Scheduling the  unevenly creates load imbalances and increases the chance of dwell congestion related delays as you get further away from 135 St. Outside of Rogers, I don't see  scheduling as being nearly as much of a problem as some B div lines, but it's something worth keeping in mind when you try to estimate the impact of interlining on rider-experienced service.

30 minutes ago, Jemorie said:

The major reason for the  delays are the East 180th Street/3rd Avenue-149th Street merge, 142nd Street Junction, and Nostrand Avenue Junction. A perfect scenario: a Manhattan-bound  express and a Manhattan-bound  local in the AM Rush can arrive just before the junction at East 180th Street, only for one of them to get held as the other proceeds first. The  can be delayed 2 minutes and will again can be delayed an additional 2 minutes by another Manhattan-bound  local departing Jackson Avenue on its way to 3rd Avenue-149th Street. It happens. It probably might end up being delayed by a Manhattan-bound  crossing over to the outer track from the middle track at 138th Street-Grand Concourse and again by a New Lots-bound  in Brooklyn after Franklin Avenue. So in total, 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 8 minutes behind schedule for the southbound  towards its Flatbush terminus.

All I'm saying is that if all of these IRT A Division at-grade level junctions were foreseen beforehand, the whole 3rd Avenue-149th Street and 149th Street-Grand Concourse would have been 3-tracks with two island platforms, and the junction at East 180th/Rogers Junction would have been designed differently so that AM Rush Hour southbound  express trains would experience little to no delays today.

As for as the ...the R62A's narrow doors, smaller seats, and end cabs resulting in a loss of 4 seats per car, are where the delays come from...

Preaching to the choir here. Merges suck, and a delay at one generally leads to delays at the rest. I will say that E180 isn't much of an issue in the AM -- s use B lead to get around s crossing to the middle -- but the rest of them are crap. Rogers especially. But the infrastructure of today is what we're stuck with, so the task at hand is coming up with ways to mitigate these design issues as best we can. New switches and deinterlining at Rogers are at the top of my list for this very reason. 

There’s a good bit of room to up  service levels to handle more folks at 51. The question is much more whether or not the IND platform can handle the additional volume.

33 minutes ago, bobtehpanda said:

There are lots of reasons why one might wait ten minutes during transferring, including unreliability, but another big thing is capacity.

We know there isn't core capacity on the subway. There are plenty of segments of the subway network where during peak hours, there are way too many people for too few trains, so you may get passed up by the first few because they are too full. Asking people to transfer may put them in a situation where previously, they already had their space in the train, but the transfer asks them to abandon it and go to a line where they will get passed up, and suffer additional travel time penalties as a result. Interlining is great for increasing capacity, but it's not going to move the needle on, say, the most congested sections of the IRT, or the QB Express (if you were to send every local to 8th and every express to 6th) to the point where this isn't going to be the case.

Not only that, but deinterlining, particularly in the most deinterlined QBL scenario, will result in unbearable amounts of platform congestion at Roosevelt, which is already extremely overcrowded during the peak as it is. I would be more supportive of the "drastic" scenario if 63rd St linked to QBL before Queens Plaza instead of after it, but them's the breaks. In a similar vein, I would not consider the 51 St platform capable of hosting significantly increased crowds.

It is worth noting that across the pond, the long on-again, off-again propoposal to deinterline the Northern Line is being accompanied with a GBP250M expansion of the Camden Town station so that passenger overcrowding doesn't reach dangerous levels. Quite frankly, in the current subway system we need that kind of investment in several stations, let alone with a deinterlined, transfer-heavy system.

There is in fact a _lot_ of excess capacity during peak hours on the subway. We run 373 trains out of 600 possible, assuming 30tph on each core-bound track, and the cordon track with the most peak-hour trains (Lex exp) runs a measly 26tph. And yes, interlining can absolutely move the needle on those corridors. Especially in the PM peak, QB express dies because of that merge at 36 St; remove it, add CBTC (as they're doing) and you have a whole new railroad, one that's likely capable of 34-36tph if you can learn to do better-than-terribly with dwells. Same goes for Lex and IRT 7th with the junctions at Rogers and, to a lesser extent, 149 -- Rogers is second to only Dekalb in its capacity loss, and that's a loss that carries largely up 7th Avenue onto trains that are actually now _more_ crowded than their equivalents on Lex. 

I'm a bit skeptical that deinterlining will screw Roosevelt. The dominant transfer flow there is the wall of people dumping local for express; attaching attractive destinations to the locals will lessen that impact. To be sure, you'll get folks from express stops wanting to transfer to locals, but I'd be somewhat surprised if that ends up eating up the savings. That said, I absolutely agree that deinterlining should be accompanied with investments in station infrastructure if only because there's a lot of relatively cheap rider minutes to be had in things like the addition of stairs/escalators. 

Back-to-back trains are yet another consequence of interlining. If you're trying to thread service at uneven frequencies through complex arrangements of merges, you sure as hell are going to get some ugly gaps in the schedule. Compare and contrast: 

...the 's scheduled headways at 125 St

...and the 's scheduled headways there:

1 hour ago, bobtehpanda said:

What alternate transfers have been built out for QBL local -> Lex express? It's 53rd-Lex or 59-Lex. To go downtown any other way would require more seats or a diversion to the West Side. 63-59 would be a distance of three blocks or about 800 feet, definitely on the longer side of any of the transfers in the system. (59-Lex's northern end is at 60th St.)

Not for Lex express, for other Lower Manhattan routes, for example the Fulton-area xfers. Those absolutely aren't the most direct routes, but they're a) one seat rides, and b) generally don't experience the crowding/congestion that Lex does -- both of which shoot run and transfer times upwards. Optimally we'd have a functioning Lex express, but even with CBTC, that route will remain slow in some areas; certain idiosyncrasies in CBTC control logic may actually increase dwell delays in areas like Grand Central. 

1 hour ago, bobtehpanda said:

As far as demand for Downtown goes, I wouldn't be quite so sure about discounting transfers downtown immediately. The decline of the Financial District when it comes to jobs is real, but there is also growth in entertainment and residential south of Midtown as well, not to mention 

This is a fair point, but that market really isn't Lex express's sweet spot. For destinations north of Union Square, you're better off taking the  from 59/51, and south of there, you're bracketed with Queens-linked one seat alternatives except for at Astor Place. Given how messy the GC-Union Square section of Lex can be, I would highly doubt that you save any time relative to the other route alternatives by doing  -  - . 

1 hour ago, bobtehpanda said:

You can care about multiple things. I care about reliability, but I also care about a commute where I don't have to constantly walk and transfer and possibly miss a connecting train and wait an additional ten minutes for a train. 

We have data on train reliability but we don't have good data on how people move throughout the system. We only track Metrocard entries and we have annual counts of how people enter the core. The MTA is not running a crazy data-driven shop like TfL, because it simply doesn't connect nearly as much data in the first place. Right now we don't have good tools to measure impact to current riders, so at best calling anything an "improvement" for riders is premature at best, particularly some of the misguided proposals like locals scraping the walls to 179th.

Not all deinterlining is bad, but I don't think you necessarily need to kill the  on QBL. Separating Broadway express and Broadway local alone would do wonders. Terminating the at Whitehall and routing 4th Av local trains up Nassau would also take the out of DeKalb and solve issues. There is a whole lot of grey between today's crazy interlined setup and all locals to 8th and all expresses to 6th, or even just evicting the  .

As @Around the Horn pointed out, more service variants = longer waits, and more interlining = less capacity. The impacts wrought in those areas by interlining are really non-trivial, and will likely get worse under CBTC. There's always going to be a tradeoff here, and there's 100% a balance to be struck, you're right, but again, in capacitally/operationally stressed areas, deinterlining is a necessary part of the solution. 

Metrocard O/D data sure isn't perfect, but applications thereof have rarely been off by more than a few tenths of a percentage point esp when overlaid with granular data sets like Census LEHD or CTPP. Would it be better if we had 'real' OD data? Sure, but it isn't like we're flying blind either. And we absolutely do have more than annual cordon counts: traffic checkers are always out and about, we have 6-minute resolution AFC data. All of this is to say we absolutely can speak authoritatively on whether things are improvements or not, maybe with a lesser degree of accuracy here, but nonetheless a good, first-order level of accuracy (which, btw, cuts both ways -- your claims of the virtue of something are just as weak as my claims of its failings if you denigrate data). 

I disagree on the . For one, you can't turn at Whitehall unless you're cool with the Broadway local below (at least) Canal only getting 6-8tph; Whitehall ranks *high* on the list of shit terminals in this system. For another, as I covered here, it's exceedingly difficult to deinterline Broadway without also deinterlining Astoria, at least before the corridor gets CBTC. These arguments are all secondary to the fact that the  reduces Manhattan-Queens capacity by its throughput + some value related to its impact on the services with which it merges. If you can get a functional terminal in Astoria (which is looking likely),  trains are going to be taking up valuable slots in both 60th and 63 Sts -- 63 St because whatever runs via 60 from QB is something that isn't running via 63. Given the massive growth in LIC/Astoria/Queens generally, making sure our trans-river capacity is maximized is something of the utmost importance, and the  stands pretty directly in the path of that happening. 

Now, of course, there are short(er) term capacity opportunities that can be leveraged to increase service levels -- terminal operations at Forest Hills being the most important one, capable of contributing up to 10tph to throughput -- but I for one am skeptical that we'd be able to realize those benefits with the complex Queens Plaza-area merge arrangement in place. That's, again, a significant capacity loss, and is again one that won't necessarily improve with CBTC. The impact of increased  service on 60th St tunnel ops would also be somewhat significant. Because the  enters the tunnel at 20 where normal trains are going...much faster, the merge impact is even greater than it would be normally thanks to control line length issues. So again, IDK how possible that'd be without deinterlining. The question then becomes one of just _how_ many people are using the Lex 59 connection, how large they're benefit is from said connection, and whether that outweighs the losses to the rest of the system because of it. 

1 hour ago, bobtehpanda said:

Remove the from 59th and then we run into the same issues we had pre 59-express: dwell time at 42nd will become even more insufferable due to all the congestion from cross-platform moves.

I've yet to be shown that that dynamic would be the same what with Lower Manhattan having declined so much relative to Midtown since the 1950s and alternate transfer having been built out. You'll have to evidence this. And again, 63-59...

1 hour ago, bobtehpanda said:

You could just say the riders should just stay on the local, but then how would you even enforce that? People have talked about how the express isn't actually faster til they're blue in the face and yet people still swap from local to express all the time. Something about a horse and water.

Gosh, could it be that...the express is faster but that incentives just don't line up? I would love to hear you explain just how a rider from Woodhaven to 5/53 would make that trip under a Queens deinterlining plan without, ya know, staying on the local. There's a big difference between people hyperbolically evidencing their estimation of the impact of timers with suggestions that local > express and people saying that the current route structure in Queens heavily incentivizes transfers at Roosevelt. 

1 hour ago, bobtehpanda said:

Are we here to make riders' commutes actually better or are we here to push numbers around on an excel sheet and declare mission accomplished?

Ah, the good ol' anti-professional planning argument. We love it.

I can't speak for you, but I care about things like whether or not the subway network in Queens will have capacity to absorb further growth, whether or not we can even _schedule_ even headways, whether or not an incident on Broadway can bring the entire B division down, and whether or not dwell issues at Roosevelt make FH-Roosevelt runtimes on the E and F look like this (lines are 25, 50, 75 percentile):

...so do pardon me for suggesting some data-driven approaches to easing the subway congestion and capacity issues in Queens. Because what we have sure as hell is not working. 

1 hour ago, bobtehpanda said:

Introducing transfers is fine if you assume that the rider

• has no other transfers they're making in their journey (e.g. subway to bus)
• if they do have other transfers, they're equally accessible vs the current option they have today.

Making somebody with a one seat ride transfer is one thing. Making somebody with a 90 minute commute going from bus to subway to subway take a fourth transfer is another thing.

For example, while I used to advocate for it, I'm not too sure about Broadway off QBL, because it adds an additional transfer if you want to get from Lex Express -> Queens Blvd Local. 51 St is only local so that's an unavoidable problem.

This mentality sorta _has_ to be broken for any real change to happen. Transfers are shit in NYC because service frequencies and reliability are shit, in part because we try way too hard to guarantee one seat rides. The negative impact of merges on speeds, capacity, reliability etc cannot be overstated. 

As for the Broadway-QBL issue, this is why you build a 63-59 passage and/or deinterline so that QB local goes to Lower Manhattan via 8th to get those Lex riders a good replacement service. Or you don't do those things, and understand that giving everybody everything they want is shitty planning -- 59 St is a serious problem area for Lex. Sometimes you have to cause a small(er) group of riders pain for systemwide benefit; taking a myopic view that focuses just on losers is exactly the mentality that got us into this mess in the first place.

10 minutes ago, P3F said:

I would be surprised. During the majority of rush hours, DeKalb junction does not add a perceivable delay to runtime, beyond needing to stop at Myrtle. Even if something has to merge up ahead (which is not usually the case) that's usually no more than a minute or two added.

So, in my opinion, riders would simply see it as reducing convenience for no perceived benefit. 

Dunno about that. The data I'm looking at for the  show a solid 2-2.5 min median PM peak runtime premium from Canal to Dekalb. When the *median* loss is that much, yeah, you're inconveniencing people. Given the interchangability of the 6th and Bway corridors, the fact that the only people who'd really lose full dual access are folks at Brighton express stops and 36 St, and that there may be people who want the corridor they don't have, I'd def say this is worth considering. 

Also the reasons @Around the Horn and @T to Dyre Avenue give. Capacity and schedule reliability are important!

24 minutes ago, P3F said:

It's not really that ridiculous, because it's simply the most convenient setup for riders on the BMT branches based on ridership patterns.

That was a decision made pre-Bleecker St, pre-signal mods and pre-service performance data in an era when job distributions looked quite different than they do today. I would not be at all surprised if the rider mins equation favored deinterlining today; Broadway and 6th run within a block of each other north of 14 and Dekalb is...quite the dumpster fire. 

8 minutes ago, Jemorie said:

@RR503, do you, personally, like the current  or do you feel they should send all West Side express trains to one Bronx/Brooklyn branch and all East Side express trains to the other Bronx/Brooklyn branch? What’s your take on the matter?

If you said to me that I could fix just one thing in the system, this would be it. That junction has been studied over and over and over again, and the recommendation is always the same: fix it. This is the sort of thing that won't get easier with CBTC, and is the sort of thing that's infinitely easier to do now than it will be later. I do not overstate the issue when I say that this is *the* capacity constraint on the A division. 

I'd personally do  Utica/New Lots and  Flatbush. 

13 hours ago, Union Tpke said:

@RR503 Yesterday, as the T/O of my  was waiting for the lineup at 75th, he was doing pushups in the cab against his seat. That was a first. Once we got yellow over yellow we were in the station for a minute or so because 71st Master put the holding lights on for some reason.

Ugh. 

7 minutes ago, Gotham Bus Co. said:

As I have said before, faster speeds are meaning less when trains have to hold in every station to make up the time they saved.

Yeah but...this isn't true. Most of the time, a hold will be for some connection or for a gap rather than to hold to time. And at any rate, holds to time affect only those trips which pass through the hold point.