Lance

They need to upgrade the site as the last refresh was some ten years ago and it shows. Badly. What isn't helping with the new site is the half-assed approach where only some site data from the old site is being transferred over at a glacial pace. The basic design scheme leaves something to be desired, but that's not my main complaint. My main problem is as you said, user-unfriendliness. A lot of the pertinent information is hidden behind several unnecessary clicks. For instance, if you were looking for information regarding this week's Concourse FASTRACK, on the new site, there are a series of additional steps involved in the new site versus the old one. new.mta.info - Home>Planned Service Changes>Subway>choose line and date mta.info - Home>scroll down to Special Subway Notices sidebar This kind of information should be readily available upon opening the site, not through digging through the webpages. It's the same for their PR notices, which tend to be buried under the "News and Events" header. This setup was somewhat acceptable when the new site initially launched because it was expected that these issues would be resolved at some point. However, as we are almost a year in here, users expect some improvements to the new site where access and readability is on par with the old site, but with a better interface than the previous one. More than the ones touted on the subway posters lately.

I modified the topic to include the new MTA site since the new site is essentially the desktop version of the app. Regarding the app, I have always found it to be more cumbersome to get useful information through this app than I would someplace else. For example, trying to get MNRR track info for trains out of Grand Central, it's much easier in my opinion to get that info from TrainTime. For subway arrivals, the MyMTA app suffers the same problem SubwayTime does, in that one has to scroll down the list of stations from endpoint to endpoint in order to get arrival info for their station. While not as clunky as SubwayTime, I still prefer a map-based way to see the train arrivals, which is why I continue to use Underway for this task. Also, MyMTA limits itself in the number of arrivals by only showing the next five trains to arrive in any given direction. That's all fine and dandy if you're at 3 Avenue and the only trains arriving there are trains. Not so much so at express stops or major transfer hubs where one usually benefits from seeing multiple trains' arrivals to better plan their trip. As for the new site itself, I really wish they would pick one. Either move everything over to new.mta.info or stop using that site. I've noticed that all new train information is posted to the new site, but most of the other information related to long-term service changes, PR notices, etc. are still posted on the old site. It looks really unprofessional to have users circle between two completely different and separate websites to get pertinent information from the same agency. Also, related to this, why am I unable to look at all of the service changes per day like on the old site? It's really cumbersome to have to search service changes route by route, day by day on the new site.

Well, I'm glad he's open to alternative proposals. That's a start for sure because as mentioned, a complete elimination of service across the river is a non-starter. It does bring up an interesting point though. The is not the only line subject to cascading delays. In fact, most lines suffer the same fate when an incident occurs. For example, a serious enough incident on 8th Avenue can cause significant delays on the and in Brooklyn and possibly the and as well depending on the location of the incident. Obviously we cannot split every line to avoid such a situation, and I'm aware nobody is suggesting such a drastic move. However, to avoid such cascading problems, the agency has to get better with delay mitigation. They get it right sometimes when they reroute trains away from the incident area, but more times than not, trains are either held in stations for the duration of the incident or are allowed to proceed through the area, albeit at slower speeds, thus leading to a conga line of trains on the opposite end of the line, well away from the location in question. We can fix this one issue by splitting the into separate routes, but we're not tackling the underlying issue at hand by ignoring the true cause. On the subject of the actual proposal @Via Garibaldi 8 quoted, I wouldn't read much into the particulars there. It's obvious he has a general idea of the subway layout in the area, but he's not an avid railfan and probably isn't looking at a track map to see what's actually possible.

Narrow roads above the tracks, shorter trains, possible reduced budgets forcing the IRT and the city to work within the confines of the street instead of widening the road. Take your pick.

@Lawrence St Who knows? I doubt it would've been much different from today's services as we were on course for a change in the south Brooklyn services for decades. The former rush hours-only was becoming more of a useful line, serving as the primary Brighton local line after the Nassau was booted to the West End in '86, a year after its service hours were expanded to midday periods as well. The off-hours to Manhattan was only necessary since something had to serve 57 Street and later 63rd Street. Once through service was operational on 63rd Street, it would not have been outside the realm of possibility for Transit to consider rearranging the services to something resembling the current setup, not just to give each line 24/7 primary service, but more importantly to them, to eliminate seemingly unnecessary and redundant routes during off-peak periods.

The MTA cannot just "stick to their original plans". Cuomo overrode those plans in his press conference last month, so this is what we got. While we'd all like the MTA to be completely autonomous without state control, that isn't the case and it never was. The governor said the MTA needs to complete this work while maintaining peak-hours service for the entire line. This is what the agency was trying to avoid by leaning heavily towards the full-closure option over the partial closure option when the plan was formally announced. Now, their hands are tied and there's not much they can do about it. By the way, unless the plans have changed, the will run to 96 Street when service is reduced in April. As for the comparison to the Bridge closures back in '88 and 2001, those were completely different. When the north tracks were closed, they did not simply close off the Brighton and West End lines as well. and service along those lines were replaced by Broadway services under the same labels in '88 and by the and in 2001.

I like how everyone's got a plan on how they think they can fix 4th Avenue and the line. I just want to remind all of you we have a proposals thread. If they don't directly relate to the issue being discussed here, please keep the ideas to that thread. We don't need this to turn into an offshoot of that thread where every idea and proposal only tangentially related to the actual discussion here is pasted in this thread.

I know it's a pain to deal with these ongoing Jerome Ave service changes, but there is unfortunately a limited window where work can be done. Once baseball season starts in earnest, Transit is at the whim of the Yankees' home schedule in terms of construction work. They could just shut down the line entirely and get the work done faster, but the overwhelming majority do not want that, so this is what we get.

The map is updated for the planned accessibility for East Broadway and 77 Street, along with the current accessibility at 28 Street, Grove St and Harrison. I did not include Union Av or Vernon Blvd as there is no information readily available pertaining to planned accessibility at these stations aside from a note on the Wikipedia pages. In regards to both Times Square and Broad Channel, in my opinion, they don't count as a disabled rider cannot actually enter or exit the station from these platforms, hence the routes being labeled as inaccessible. Broad Channel's platforms are large and flat enough that riders can change between the shuttle and the there, but they are out of luck if they are trying to get off at Broad Channel or any of the shuttle's intermediate stations. Times Square is a similar case as while the Grand Central platform is fully accessible, riders cannot go anywhere on the shuttle since Times Square's platforms are completely inaccessible and that's the only other station on the line. It's the same reason why I have the as completely inaccessible despite the full accessibility at Church Av and the cross-platform partial accessibility at Bergen St through Smith-9 Sts.

The ran to Manhattan on the weekends before July 2001 because something had to serve 63rd Street when the 6th Avenue didn't run. That's not a requirement these days with the running through service along the line now. It's just a matter of justifying 3+ services on 6th Avenue and four along Central Park West during off-peak periods. I included the latter there as I'd try to avoid using 96 Street as the catch-all terminal for every short-turning route, especially if the plan also includes bringing all service there as well.

There were likely people who did the same when these 32s and 42s pushed out the Arnines back in the day. They'll get over it eventually. Or they won't. Either way, those old cars are leaving and not even an early retirement of another car class will stop this now.

Here is the modified version of my Vignelli-inspired map illustrating the accessible stations and those that are in the planning or construction phases as of the latest update to the Capital Dashboard. Click on the image for a full resolution PDF. As you can see, even with the new additions, we still have a lot of work to do to make the subway more accessible, especially on the Crosstown and Jamaica lines.

Of course you can run it in service. You can make the same argument for any route's intervals that presently run empty to the yards afterwards. That wasn't my point, though. The train still has to go from Essex St to the East New York yard; whether it does so in service or out of service is completely up to you.

The eight-car sets on the are essentially newer 160s with a different propulsion system, which isn't a big draw since that line is saturated with NTTs. The ten-car set running on the makes it the first time in over a decade that a new tech train is running on the 8th Avenue express / Fulton St express / Rockaways lines that wasn't a rerouted train or an emergency put-in to make service after an event or something. Different circumstances entirely. After all that time sitting idle at Bombardier and here in the city, they probably upgraded the announcement system to be on par with the rest of the NTTs. I wonder if they fixed that glitch where "the next stop is/this is" all comes from the , regardless of route.

It would be much better to suspend service west of either Lorimer St or Bedford Av. The only reason service has been cut beyond Broadway Junction as of late is due to pre-closure signal and track upgrades to allow trains to turn around there without severely delaying service.

Broadway works well because it was shoehorned onto the Queens Blvd line via the 11th Street connection. Remove that connection and you've essentially reverted back to the pre-1955 semi-streamlined services, where the Sea Beach/West End express lines ran to 57 Street and the 4th Avenue local line to Astoria, which was the original intention of the Broadway line, minus the never-built extension to the Upper West Side. The IND doesn't lend itself all that well to streamlined services without over-serving at least one branch because of the half-assed way the lines were built. We're literally missing half of the trackage intended to make such a solution viable and without new construction, we'll continue to run into this same dilemma. That's going to be an issue for a few of these "fix the 4th Avenue line" ideas as this particular branch does not lend itself well moving trains to a subway maintenance yard. Whether it's the to Astoria, an extension of the or some other Nassau St line that would serve 4th Avenue, at least one service will require a lot of dead-heading to get back to their home yard. Under the plan to restore service back to its pre-1987 route, this would be the service that would have trains run to Coney Island out of service all the time. If we extend the to 95 Street and cut the back to Manhattan with its current route otherwise (and this assumes the oft-proposed "all Broadway express lines run to 96 Street" plan also goes into effect), whatever serves Astoria will have to dead-head down to Coney Island from whatever southern terminal said Astoria service ends at. If the 4th Avenue-Nassau St line is not the , but rather a completely separate line that does not run the entire length of the Broadway-Brooklyn line, that will also have to run light to East New York yard, along with the aforementioned Astoria line. It's quite a conundrum that will not be resolved unless a new maintenance yard is built along 4th Avenue. Too bad the MTA is reluctant to expand 38th Street into a maintenance yard.

Agreed, but they've been overruled on that front. It's also going to be interesting how they plan on running weekend service. In the original one-tunnel closure proposal, the plan was to suspend service entirely between Bedford Av and Lorimer St to allow for semi-normal service on the Brooklyn end while the Manhattan side is relegated to severely reduced service. Full details still haven't been revealed as to how this updated closure will impact service away from the tunnel, but unless I'm missing something, it sounds like full service will be curtailed to those 20 minute intervals during the weekend tunnel closures.

Based on the information from the Capital Dashboard, quoted by @Union Tpke here, it looks like both the upgrade process for the 142s/142As and the construction process for the 262s will occur at the same time, pending funding for the 2020-2024 capital program.

Pinned. I'll reformat the original post later to put the listed stations in some sort of order.

Shifting gears, we have the finalized plan for the partial shutdown. If you're familiar with the recent nights and weekends closures, you're more than well prepared for the actual shutdown, which still begins on the weekend of April 27th. During these off-hours closures, service will be reduced to 20 minute intervals across the river and possible across the entire line, especially during overnight hours to facilitate the closure of one tunnel. The shuttle buses loop connecting the Canarsie line to the Crosstown and Jamaica lines will be in effect, but all other shuttle bus options offered during the original planned shutdown will not run. Also under consideration is turning both 1 Avenue and 3 Avenue into exit only stations during the closure periods to avoid a massive overcrowding situation. WNBC has the full story.

Doesn't that shaft the off-hours Sea Beach riders? Unless you're also advocating full-time service to/from Manhattan, aren't you relegating them to those West End-style shuttles that were the bane of everyone's commutes back in the day?

I wasn't aware the 211s had a four-car option as the order has been painted as the replacement for the 46s. Either way, based on the quote, there will be an additional 88 cars for the East, presumably to off the remaining 42s as well as fleet growth. It still does not negate my point though, that the rest of East New York's NTT fleet should be upgraded for CBTC so there isn't an overreliance on the 143s. Those incoming 211s will face the same fate otherwise in that they'll be run to the ground because of a lack of options.

Agreed. I have no particular preference, even if it is Mitchell, but standardizing the recordings should be done at some point. Since the original recordings back in 2000 or so, there have been numerous changes to the announcements for service changes, new bus/train transfers, station name changes, etc. The ending result is a hodgepodge of different voices per announcement string. Also, if they ever did get around to redoing the announcements, perhaps they could agree to use one recording across all of the services. With @Mr Railfan's announcement dump over the past few weeks, it's become readily apparent that there are many instances where a station name recording was done multiple times for each line. vs is an obvious one, but there are also ones like vs via Broadway (the latter of which has slower station announcements despite using the same person). I get why it was done, since the entirety of the announcements are slower than the Broadway ones, but a complete redo, with awareness to avoid these types of inconsistencies, should negate the need for multiple and redundant recordings.

Or they could upgrade the remaining A1s along with the 179s to be CBTC-compatible. We have a lot of capable trains to take the load off the 143s. They just aren't compatible yet. There's no need for more four-car sets when the East is already saturated with NTTs. It would become even more saturated if the ever became full-length, thus forcing the four-car 179s elsewhere.

Good luck trying to sell an elevated line to an area that hasn't had one in nearly 50 years. In this day and age, it's subway or bust.