ViaWaterViaChurch

There’s something really strange going on with the QM24/25/34 this morning. There’s literally no service right now on the tracker for the Qm24, markedly cut service on the Qm25 and Qm34. Is the time change really screwing up that many people?

They'd probably be even easier to operate if they let drivers go off route late at night and take a deadhead route with highways instead of going down Northern Boulevard and getting stopped every 5 blocks for a 45 second red light.

I’m currently sitting solo on the QM32 8:30am trip back to Whitestone. I know school’s off today and many people stayed home, but surely MTA has to be looking at trips like these to chop away.

59th really is a mess, there needs to be no standing signs from 3pm to 7pm for both sides of the street with heavy enforcement, maybe also no turns allowed on Lexington Avenue, but there definitely needs to be heavily enforced no standing zones from 5th to 3rd avenue. Too often will trucks be unloading, or cars and t-cabs will be parked in these lanes that cause 3 lanes to go down to two or even sometimes 1 lane. It seems more and more lately that QM2/20 drivers are turning off 6th onto 57th and racing to Madison to turn left to make it to their Madison and 59th street pickup. I have no problem with buses taking the lower level to go straight onto Northern Blvd, but without enforcement of no standing zones on 59th, these buses will continue to take a half hour or more to do the 6th avenue pick up adding to run times.

Do you think some of those off peak QM5/6 buses run so late back toward Queens because they never redid the runtimes when they permanently moved the route from via Van Damn via LIE to via Queens Blvd a couple of years ago? While it might be slightly faster or more or less the same time to run these buses via Queens Blvd during the PM rush, it's definitely faster off peak to take the LIE.

So now that mayor has announced that any cars in bus lanes will be ticketed and towed, who’s going to ticket and tow the nypd and nypd traffic cars that park there?

Is Queens getting a redesign like Staten Island? If they are, do you have any idea when it would take place and what kind of modifications to routes they would make?

So today the 4:00pm QM25 bus 3303 was running with a bad alternator on the LIE. Luckily traffic was smooth all the way until exit 19 where it gets off because the bus’s engine was cutting off that the B/O had to restart the engine only for it to cut again not even two minutes later that at one point we were costing on the LIE with no engine on.

I've definitely noticed less people on my rides in and out of the city on the QM25 since the holidays started. I was expecting it to be back to normal this week but so far it's been a lighter load than usual. Also the traffic has been scary light. The 4 o clock bus usually gets off the LIE around 5:15ish, this week so far it's been just before 5:00pm. I'm definitely not complaining but I wonder how much of it has to do with the government shutdown compared versus the end of seasonal work ending, and as VG8 stated, snowbirds and work lulls.

Speaking of bustime, it's a shame that buses disappear from the tracker when they go off route. If the GPS reports where the bus is, why does the bus disappear when it goes off route? I know bus drivers aren't supposed to go off route, but for buses like the QM2 that take 57th street from 6th to Madison as opposed to 59th during the Bayside runs, it would be nice to get an idea as to where they are. It would also be helpful to experiment with alternate routing like when the QM2 goes via the BQE service road and Astoria Blvd as opposed to Northern Blvd (rare for a non Super Express bus to do this, but it sometimes happens).

The QM24 has a lot going against it, during the holidays or UN week I've seen it take up to an hour to do it's PM pickup. It's one of the few buses that has to pick up on 34th Street which is unfortunate because that can easily add 10 to 15 minutes on a bad day to the already awful 6th avenue pick up route. Though the goal should not be cutting an entire line of pickups to speed up service. However, bunching with the 6:30pm bus is absolutely infuriating. There's no worse feeling during your commute when you see the bus that left 30 minutes later than your bus either a stop or two behind you or even pass you up, especially since LaGuardia is so varied as you have some truly great drivers that do their best to go around traffic and get you to where you gotta be, and some really bad drivers who just seem content with driving 35 miles an hour on an open LIE, waiting at the end of the line to get onto the lower level of the LIE (or worse, just taking the top of the LIE), etc. The 6th avenue pickup route is awful. It takes the QM2 35 minutes at peak times just to pick up along 6th avenue and 59th and those guys haul ass and hardly kneel the bus compared to the always courteous drivers from LaGuardia. 6th Avenue is just getting worse and worse, between the wall of pedestrians crossing 6th and 34th causing a back up onto 34th street, the nonexistent "bus lane" because everyone needs to make rights in the CBD, too many pickup stops on the route causing drivers to have to cut across 2 lanes of traffic (since they can't actually use the bus lane) just as they're starting to get moving, and the absolute crawl of 57th/59th street toward the bridge is insane. On an unrelated note, I wish there would be enforced no standing along 59th street between 4-7pm. Too often do I see double parked trucks or T-cabs just sitting on 59th street turning 3 lanes into 1 lane causing huge bottlenecks that make traffic even worse.

I tried to catch the midnight QM2 three weeks ago and of course the bus was nowhere to be found twenty minutes after it was supposed to be running as I was waiting at the 6th and 41st , not showing up on the tracker either. I know late night B/Os love to play games so I just figured I missed the bus and didn't want to take a $60 uber back to Whitestone I had to wind up taking the 7 train and then uber home from Flushing anyway. Of course, as I'm back in Queens on the 7, I see that I didn't miss the bus, it's just that the midnight guy was like 35 minutes late. I'm also surprised that drivers stay on Northern Boulevard off peak, after 8pm the lights on Northern are no way in sync and you wind up stopping about every 3 blocks at a red light, making these trips way longer than they need to be. It's a shame they don't let B/Os take more liberties, especially once traffic dies down around 7pm, to go down 2nd avenue and take the tunnel.

I know at least some of them can pick what they want. I heard a CP Driver who frequently picks the 2002 MCIs telling a passenger one day that he always picks the 2002s because they're faster than the 2006s. This guy has a lot of time on, I think he was one of the old Queens Surface drivers.

What are some of the sections of the LIRR or Metro North where the trains get some serious speed?

Would you keep the Super Express trips the same? Via LIE in the morning and via 36th street to the tunnel and all stops on Union at night?

Would the QM5/6/8 be better off not making stops along Union Tpke that the QM1/7 already serve? It seems like overkill. It's nice to have so much service along Union Turnpike I'm sure, but the people coming from Glen Oaks already have about 30 minutes of pick ups before they even get to the same part of the line that the QM1 serves. It would also help to speed things up for off-peak riders since the buses could via the LIE for more of the trip and instead and get off at 188th/Francis Lewis Blvd.

Yikes, what a ride home today on the QM2. Traffic was unbelievable horrific today. I don't know if it's because everyone was trying to rush home before the storm or what. My 6th ave QM2 that left at 4:45pm didn't get to Linden/Whitestone Expy until about 6:30. This is usually about an hour or so trip. I've never seen the Queensboro bridge so backed up. My driver actually went via the Upper Roadway to get to Northern which I'm not sure really saved us any time because it literally took us about a half hour to get from the exit off the bridge onto 21st street to where the lower roadway would turn onto Northern. I actually felt bad for the poor B/O. He was clearly very frazzled (though he was a very skilled driver) and had it by the the time I got off.

Does anyone know why the pick system is designed the way it is other than that it's probably written into the contract? Why is there a long pick from Labor Day weekend up through the week after New Years, but then the Winter pick only lasts 3 months and ends in April, which then lasts another 3 months and picks up after the 4th of July, only to have a quick two month run and then bring us back to Labor Day with the long 4 month haul.

So I decided to drive down to Fresh Meadows on Monday and take the QM7/8 downtown. I managed to catch a QM8 on 188th and 73rd Avenue about a stop or two before it turns onto Union Turnpike and it was practically SRO. All in all, it takes that bus about an hour and a half to two hours to get downtown from 260th and Union Turnpike in the morning when there's generally less people on the roads compared to the PM rush and you still get the benefits of the HOV lane on the expressway. The bus I got on left 260th/Union at 6:27am. That run from Glen Oaks up to around 188th seems to be no joke. Considering the bus was practically full by the time it got to 188th, I'm surprised the QM5/8 pick up and drop off on Union Turnpike at all during the AM and PM rushes. You would think they would try and do anything they could to trim time off of those runs, especially considering there's the QM7 for downtown folks, and midtown folks get the QM1 and the overlap from the QM6 as well. I would hate to be driving a QM8 during the PM rush, surely some of those runs have to take well over 2 hours, pretty crazy to think you can catch a jitney from midtown and be way out in Suffolk County in that amount of time.

Nothing worse than finally finding a driver who knows how to step on the gas and use that bus for it all it's worth...only to have the new pick come out and never see the guy again.

Did yesterday start a new round of picks?

So yesterday I caught the 5:08pm QM2 Super Express to Whitestone and I have a couple of thoughts: 1. Going crosstown is very annoying. It's just bumper to bumper along 36th Street (obviously this is how it is), but it kind of dispels the notion that the MTA doesn't want to extend more service downtown because trips to Whitestone are already long from Midtown as it is. On most days it probably takes just as long to get across from 6th to tunnel/bridge as it does to get up the FDR. 2. I was otherwise impressed that it only took about 60 minutes to get from 6th/36th to the first stop Whitestone Expwy/Linden. Though I think most of that comes from not having to make the other stops along 6th and 59th street. I can't really decide if one route is better over the other. It would probably be faster during off-peak times grossly outside of the rush hour range to drive down 2nd ave and take the Midtown Tunnel to either the BQE or Van Wyck. But I was also tracking a 3rd Ave QM32 bus that started its run at 5:10pm and it was only maybe 5 minutes behind us at the first stop running via Northern Blvd. My work schedule is changing soon and it doesn't make sense to stick around for the Super Express buses. I think my best bet is probably just to take the QM32 because it's much easier going up 3rd Ave then having to go across from 6th (obviously). I can't imagine how awful it must have been back when buses were running via 8th Avenue back in the day.

More buses are needed on the AM QM25 runs. It seems like the line has grown in popularity with Middle Village and Glendale residents over the past year or so. It also seems like the M Train shutdown has finally caught up with everyone as now the first three AM buses are practically SRO (and this is the middle of summer). There was a supervisor doing counts at the last stop on the first AM run yesterday morning, hopefully changes will come when school is back in session and even more people resume taking the bus If there is no room in the budget to add another bus or two, then perhaps either the last 8:25am run can be cut, or one of the QM24/34 runs can be cut. From what I heard from a B/O who drove the 8:25am run about 6 months ago, there's maybe 6-8 passengers on the 8:25 am QM25.

Last night I was driving on the Whitestone Expressway by Linden Place and the movie theater when I saw an X80 sitting on the service road by the shopping center across the expressway from the movie theater. I see that it runs express from Lex125th and Randall's Island but I don't think there was any concerts there on a Tuesday night. And what would it be doing in College Point? Maybe it runs out of the CP depot?

I feel like the Q38 is notorious for bunching during the PM rush and the Q47 can be straight up anemic sometimes taking 30-45 minutes to get from Roosevelt-74th to 80th and Eliot. You're probably just better off sticking with whatever express bus you live nearest too because at least those are consistent and it saves you the trouble of trying to run around like a maniac trying to anticipate which bus will come first. I wonder what the cause of the bunching is. Does one bus leave late? Maybe there is a tie up around the mall?