RR503

Correct, and this was looked at previously in the 1990s when they set the current standards. Culver Express wouldn’t gain much from this — its curves are either timed or on long uphills that make it impossible to even get to V4 — but on other parts of the system, where untimed geometric limits abound, this indeed could be great. IND Queens and IRT Broadway especially.

Obviously there’s a difference between discussing ways to solve an issue and saying that said resolution should be a priority, but I would rank a terminal swap pretty low among potential investments. You’d be *marginally* benefitting two stations (Stillwell has the , and you could potentially make a <D>) at huge infrastructure cost. If you want to increase terminal cap at Brighton Beach, just reconfigure the switches so trains off of A1 track can relay south of the station and come back on A2 — or essentially what Armandito proposed up thread

Not a great idea. KH middle gets a _lot_ of use as a short turn point for s and a location where layups can be cleared out of the way of mainline traffic.

The switches are already there, but there aren't crew quarters AFAIK. You'd recrew on the northbound at Church a la 205/BPK on the . I'm not even sure this would actually add runtime; keep in mind that the move down to the relay is slow and when I've observed at Church, s regularly spend 15-20 down there.

I know service cut arrangements are fun to tinker with, but the reality is that unless we expect depressed ridership to last for years, cuts won't save nearly enough money to have an impact on a hole of this magnitude; demand elasticities are a thing, and they mean that the more you cut, the less you earn in fare revenue. Now of course, I don't think the MTA will end up having to fill this full budget hole by itself, but even if they only have to cover 500m, simple cuts as proposed here are really not that effective at closing the gap -- not from a ridership loss perspective, and certainly not from an agency political capital perspective.

I don’t think that’s the tradeoff at hand. I have confidence that the feds will pull through, the question is with how much money, and what to cut to fill the last x hundred million gap.

Those went to heaven. We got the E60s.

We sure do. Also some electric trackage on the core routes, with timed transfers to steam shuttles into the pits. RE: OPTO, I'm no labor relations expert, but yes, that would seem like the conversation necessary to have.

Walking on the coals, tending the furnaces....

Friendly reminder that the easiest, quickest and most impactful way to reform the MTA's cost structure is to get a handle on its productivity and process issues. Break down silos, do OPTO, reform maintenance procedures, etc. I would personally start with maintenance: NYCT spends more facility maintainer-hours per mile than does any US system outside NYC *by a factor of 5*. It's nice to be back.

On the contrary, they make damaged equipment hugely easier to repair. You don't have to demolish the bench wall to replace the conduit that got a little water in it.

CBTC will eliminate the restrictions at FH and Roosevelt, as well as the DGT on 4 track north of the station (though you'll still have to take the switch a decent speed, of course)

I had always assumed that SAS2 would include CBTC signals for the line. Everything was built CBTC ready. Broken record here, but prioritizing resource-intensive system expansion projects is not wise in a time when budgetary and, more importantly, human resources are stretched thin. Back to basics, and then build from there. There's also a ton of uncertainty about what ridership will look like post-COVID. Whether peaks (whose intensity on Lex were the driving force behind this entire effort) will be as pointy as before is an open question on

Most of Lex's current day issues are related to overlong dwell times, long control lines and issues closing train spacing via ST. Eminently fixable with CBTC, especially if NYCT fixes CBTC's interlocking compatibility issues. FWIW, dwell times southbound at USQ aren't as bad as northbound. The GFs suck -- if for no other reason than ADA -- but they're not the biggest ops impediment to improved service on the corridor.

So you do realize that running more trains to the Bronx will reduce average load/train, right? While also allowing IRT West's express tracks to do more than their measly 22tph peak. This notion that you need to put in s because trains from the Bronx will always be full is just...wrong. Induced demand exists, yes, but a) it's weak during peak times, and b) this would allow a nontrivial increase in service level down the express there. There are also, I might add, ways to redistribute loads away from the , for ex by running more . That said, I agree that deinterlining 149 is a bad idea in the short run -- the platforms/stairs that'd absorb the transfer loads there are waaaay too narrow for the volumes that'd be transiting them. I'm really amused by the suggestion that 59 St is a good junction. It isn't. It sucks -- so badly, in fact, that the entire IND is scheduled backwards from it. Regardless, you cannot easily reconfigure Rogers to look like 59. You'd basically have to reconfigure the entire Eastern Parkway line east of Franklin to do so, as preserving the stacked config makes it impossible to deconflict the interlocking (the best configurations the '90s and '00s studies on the issue could come up with were ones that put 3 services on one track through Franklin, the issues with which should be self evident). And, of course, I do not see any logic in spending an order of magnitude more money to build something with a _lower_ operational/travel time return than simply deinterlining the area. Tail tracks would be really nice, but it's worth keeping in mind that the majority (IINM 16/22) of AM put ins come out of 148. Running a few early-AM put ins from New Lots wouldn't be that hard, nor would be skewing the balance of IRT West express service more towards s to allow more put ins from the Bronx's yards -- remember there'll be more space up there for put-ins given that the would have some of its fleet transferred to Livonia.

And, of course, low service frequency is inextricable from problem of interlining. Re: the and yard access, much of the reason this was an issue in the past is because the rampdown in passenger volumes after the PM peak was extreme, so running trains north from Flatbush to yards in Manhattan/the Bx was financially inefficient. That's not the case today, and as has been noted in past discussions on the issue, it'd be trivial to run some s or s as put-ins from Livonia.

Once again, the logic of Dekalb deinterlining is that said transfer really wouldn't have to be used all that much. If you're on the , you can use the to almost exactly the same destinations in Midtown, or transfer to the to get further east/west/closer to 14 St. Vice verse for Broadway: transfer to the to move your final destination around if necessary. And, of course, Herald Square exists. I don't disagree that some of the proposals here are tending towards...the extreme, but I do think it's worth pointing out -- and I'm sure you understand this -- that transfers aren't the only contributor to trip time. Merge delays from poorly designed service pattern, dwell delays from unbalanced loads, etc, all lengthen trips as well, and generally have ramifications for the entire system vs people in some rel. limited submarket. This is about balance.

- If you’re going to interline 11 St, you may as well give Bay Ridge the yard to simplify equipment moves - Phasing out Whitehall as a terminal should be a long term planning goal given its severe negative impacts on through service - City Hall Curve can’t handle >21tph with existing signaling, which would leave you with just 6tph of WHL-CTL after filling Astoria Reforming punch treatment may get you +1tph, but beyond that deinterlining is needed. It alone is likely the most impactful step you could take towards upping capacity, but you’d probably run into other topological constraints if you tried to push tph above, say, 24. Not only is the signal system within the junction quite gnarly (lots of timers, long control lines, etc), but many of the corridors feeding the junction have constraints of their own, ex 36 St merge and long control lines on the NB express for the , the sharp curve entering Dekalb NB on the , Whitehall terminal, 95 St terminal and City Hall Curve on the , 59 St on the , etc etc etc. This isn’t to say deinterlining isn’t useful, you just have to take a system perspective when doing it.

...Bleecker St, Barclays Center transfer to the ... Hardly separating them. FWIW, I think the most convincing argument against deinterlining Dekalb is that it'd make it difficult for West End riders to get to 8th Ave. You'd be looking at either an xfer to the for Jay, a ride crosstown on the , or substitution using the from Barclays for areas south of 42, at which point are only a block from 8th. Do I think that that's sufficient reason not to deinterline Dekalb? No, both because 8th Avenue below 42 St has, by Manhattan standards, very low job density, and because Dekalb has huge operational ramifications for the system...including 8th Ave. But it's interesting food for thought. I'm sure some do through ride. But the peak load point for the is, last I checked, between Roosevelt and Elmhurst -- ie the sum of through riders and passengers boarding west of Roosevelt isn't enough to replicate loads east of Roosevelt. Re: O/D I'd strongly challenge the notion that the primary destinations are Broadway and 53. trains gather most of their loads at 1 stop (Lex-59), trains leave 47-50 packed, and SRO s north out of there in the PM are the norm. 53 is certainly a draw, but let's not forget that 6th Ave is damn near the median midtown job.

Yeah, of course they don’t want to. But we aren’t getting new Manhattan<>Queens tunnels anytime soon, and the only way you can extract more capacity from Queens boulevard is by getting more people to ride locals west of Roosevelt, sooooo... As anyone who rides QB can tell you, the incentives to stay on the local today are mighty weak. Ever been to Roosevelt during the AM rush? Wall of lining the express, that grows whenever a local pulls in.

Yes! This is exactly what I’d do. People underrate the capabilities of WTC (look at 8th or SF ) as well as the operational convenience of having your QB-53 service be a short line.

This effectively limits 8th local and 6th local to a _combined_ 30tph. Have the decency to give the its own trunk! It seems I'm fighting a losing battle here on convincing folks that interlining 36 St is a bad idea, but I'll make one last pass at it. As I mentioned upthread, 59 St -- whose merge configuration is exactly the same as 36 -- is a bad merge. It is, in fact, a _very_ bad merge. It causes a massive amount of runtime variability on the routes that pass through it, and is in fact so limiting of B division performance that the entire division is scheduled backwards from it. Here are variability charts for the and to help attach numbers to the issue: The merge performs badly not because it's cursed with slow switch speeds or poor signalling, but because of its design and its position on the routes that transit it. 59 St is what I like to call a 'conflicting merge,' where a merge delay can ripple backwards through the pipeline and cause a delay on a different service (think: ). Here, this effect is especially pernicious because a delaying a or vice versa can further complicate things by messing up the merge of the second service -- if a is delayed by an and delays a behind it, that may end up delaying (or being delayed by) a . Worsening its impact is the fact that it's positioned immediately before a high-dwell station, meaning delays from a merge get followed by a nice dose of NYCT close-in fixed block ops, which are...bad. Finally, the merge in both the north and southbound directions is downstream of at least one other merge, making consistent operation through it that much more difficult. 36 St would be all of this, but worse. While there isn't a high dwell station to aggravate things, switches at 36 are slower and train volume is higher. With _current_ throughputs (before you up service levels, which sorta is the whole point of this exercise) Jackson Heights (closest measure point with all services passing through) sees 4tph more trains (in both peaks) than 59 St does in the AM. Both charts show n/b train volumes: vs Given that merge delays are proportional to throughput (see chart below of runtimes through a day), you've got a problem. I am _extremely_ skeptical that you'd be able to hold the PM peak railroad together through 36 St, what with the lines having passed through merges and a bunch of high-dwell Midtown stops on their routes to 36. I think as throughputs went towards 50 or 60tph, you'd end up with trains stacking up through 63 St and into Queens Plaza, which really just...isn't a way to run the trains. This operational logic alone should be enough to convince folks that this may not be the wisest of ideas. In case you don't feel this way, let's talk about O/D. Sure, QB local loses direct 6th local access, and QB express gets cut off from 53/8. But express riders can easily transfer at Jackson Heights to recapture that O/D, and local riders can get the at 7-53 for 6th; neither of those losses should be dealbreakers. The O/D argument that _should_ give pause is that interlined 36 St would mean there is zero incentive to stay on the local past Roosevelt (or Woodhaven, if that gets built out). On the ? Take the . On the ? Take the . That would likely make the Queens Boulevard dwell time issue -- which already produces peak hour runtime increases as pronounced as this: ...to say nothing of the fact that it'd further reduce the efficiency of the Queens subway network by reducing loads on the one part of said network that has significant room for growth: QB local. I really don't suggest this course of action.

Yes, internal schedules schedule put ins, layups etc. They are not random operations. This. A bunch of new operators on a line with tons of gnarly GTs and poorly signed (if signed at all) STs is really not a recipe for consistent runtimes and service delivery. I do not mean to belittle the work those crews do, of course. It’s just they could benefit from better infrastructure, better training and a more nurturing supervisory environment.

The other horrible one is the , especially during GOs or rush hours. A 2 hour round trip without leaving the cab PEL-BBR-PEL + adjacent track flagging or rush hour delays can really do a number on you. And if you're late, and your layover gets cut at Pelham...

I don't think it did... 1) Maybe the switches connecting City Hall yard with the mainline north of Fulton. The diverging move north of BB is awful. 2&3) Yes. Deinterlining CPW is an extremely worthy policy objective in and of itself. 59 St is a terrible merge -- so bad, in fact, that the entire IND is scheduled backwards from it.