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September 2, 2018 Bus Route and Service Changes


BM5 via Woodhaven

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14 minutes ago, SevenEleven said:

645am and already an accident upstairs on the bridge and a disabled car that highway patrol wouldn't even try and push to the shoulder. The traffic and the dumb drivers are back for the season!

You can say that again. My bus was 30 minutes late tonight... Traffic already....

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6 minutes ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

You can say that again. My bus was 30 minutes late tonight... Traffic already....

It's getting worse, especially now that school is starting back too (for me tomorrow). The traffic is going to become a nightmare, and those buses and trippers are gonna be way overcrowded as well. As you said however, the traffic is mostly to blame, (from my experience) people cant seem to know how to drive properly without blocking or nearly hitting the bus, makes me wonder how they even got a license in the first place!   

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1 hour ago, Italianstallion said:

I lived near the Q19 route from 1949 to 1973 and then visited often until 2015. The Q19 has always been a stepchild. The reason, I think, is that it is duplicative of the Q69 in Astoria and East Elmhurst west of 82 St. East of there, for many decades it terminated at 102 St. and Astoria Blvd., which was in the middle of nowhere. There is little population density along the farther reaches of the route east of 82 St, and subway access from there is better done via the north-south routes to the 7 train anyway. And as I said, west of 82 you're better off with the 69. Also, from Astoria Houses to the N train there are 2 other more frequent routes - Q18 and Q102. So, most people don't bother with it. The recent extension to Main St. was interesting. Who uses it? Id like to know.

It gets decent usage from Flushing. It of course doesn’t see close to the loads that the Q66 sees but buses generally leave close to standing room only. Extending it to Flushing was definitely a smart move as it offers new options for riders in East Elmurst. I take the Q19 myself when I go to work and it’s definitely faster than the (7) to the Q33 or the Q49. 

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1 hour ago, MysteriousBtrain said:

Its more or less Asians riding the route from Main St to around Junction Blvd and then some.

...and hispanics.

53 minutes ago, BM5 via Woodhaven said:

The new Q22 schedule looks like it's not work. IDK why, but bus appear to be even more unreliable than they were under the old route. Right now, there's only one bus on the entire route.

Hmm...

You made this post 53 mins ago (it shows right now).... I just checked bustime & apparently, I hit the jackpot:

1GVFyFB.gif

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13 hours ago, NewFlyer 230 said:

It gets decent usage from Flushing. It of course doesn’t see close to the loads that the Q66 sees but buses generally leave close to standing room only. Extending it to Flushing was definitely a smart move as it offers new options for riders in East Elmurst. I take the Q19 myself when I go to work and it’s definitely faster than the (7) to the Q33 or the Q49. 

Based on my experience, it depends mostly on whichever bus comes first in Flushing. I feel like people PREFER the Q66 but also don’t mind the walk from Astoria Bl

I would say that that bus gets ridership from Flushing to around 87th St or even Junction, and then almost nothing until Steinway St. Still, it should aleast receive a better schedule.

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On 9/2/2018 at 3:06 PM, B35 via Church said:

At least the SIM32 routing change was worth it ;)
(I joke, but seriously, how many routes did they leave alone/left as-was?)

Oh, I also forgot to mention the SIM5 is literally the old X8 routing-wise (but they basically doubled the service since it's covering old X4 riders as well. The issue of course is that it doesn't run up Church/Broadway)

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1 hour ago, checkmatechamp13 said:

Oh, I also forgot to mention the SIM5 is literally the old X8 routing-wise (but they basically doubled the service since it's covering old X4 riders as well. The issue of course is that it doesn't run up Church/Broadway)

The SIM1 also covers X3/4 riders. But that doesn't serve Father Capodanno.

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36 minutes ago, Lil 57 said:

The SIM1 also covers X3/4 riders. But that doesn't serve Father Capodanno.

But notice how frequency on the SIM1 drops off drastically after about 5pm. The X1 used to run roughly every 5 minutes (with a few X3s and X4s thrown in), while the X8 used to run every 15 minutes. Now it's every 8-10 minutes on the SIM1 & SIM5. No way can anybody say that the SIM1 & SIM5 get comparable ridership. Father Capodanno is faster to reach points south of Midland (though moreso in the AM than the PM), but there's definitely more ridership on Hylan than Father Capodanno.

So yeah, Midtown has its share of screw-ups, but the biggest schedule blunders were definitely Downtown.

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2 hours ago, checkmatechamp13 said:

But notice how frequency on the SIM1 drops off drastically after about 5pm. The X1 used to run roughly every 5 minutes (with a few X3s and X4s thrown in), while the X8 used to run every 15 minutes. Now it's every 8-10 minutes on the SIM1 & SIM5. No way can anybody say that the SIM1 & SIM5 get comparable ridership. Father Capodanno is faster to reach points south of Midland (though moreso in the AM than the PM), but there's definitely more ridership on Hylan than Father Capodanno.

So yeah, Midtown has its share of screw-ups, but the biggest schedule blunders were definitely Downtown.

Agreed, If only the (MTA) can listen to us...

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Ok....... From what I see, the B35 has not had service reductions that are noticeable at all. Church is flooded with artics, but I don’t see any major gaps in service at all. True Church now TSP, and that way be a factor. Every bus on the line (WB) right now is articulated except for one.... The 4 that just passed me we’re not spread apart as the new schedule would suggest. They literally all seemed to be 6-7 minutes apart and it’s now midnight. 

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4 hours ago, East New York said:

Ok....... From what I see, the B35 has not had service reductions that are noticeable at all. Church is flooded with artics, but I don’t see any major gaps in service at all. True Church now TSP, and that way be a factor. Every bus on the line (WB) right now is articulated except for one.... The 4 that just passed me we’re not spread apart as the new schedule would suggest. They literally all seemed to be 6-7 minutes apart and it’s now midnight. 

Scary coincidence - Before I dozed off last night around 11pm or so, I was also checking out bustime for the same reason!

It was a WB bus that was the lone non-artic running last night.... EB, buses were rather uniform, but WB though, I did notice a gap.... One bus was at the terminal (M. Gaston), the next one was at Remsen (which is fine, given the scheduled headway), but fam, the next bus after that.... was around McDonald av.... Saw that & cringed....

One thing I'll say is that, between [driving to work/home] & [being out & about, picking up some odds & ends & what not], I have not seen one bus so far that wasn't crushloaded.... Said to myself, my days of casually/randomly taking the B35 just might be over.....

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5 hours ago, B35 via Church said:

Scary coincidence - Before I dozed off last night around 11pm or so, I was also checking out bustime for the same reason!

It was a WB bus that was the lone non-artic running last night.... EB, buses were rather uniform, but WB though, I did notice a gap.... One bus was at the terminal (M. Gaston), the next one was at Remsen (which is fine, given the scheduled headway), but fam, the next bus after that.... was around McDonald av.... Saw that & cringed....

One thing I'll say is that, between [driving to work/home] & [being out & about, picking up some odds & ends & what not], I have not seen one bus so far that wasn't crushloaded.... Said to myself, my days of casually/randomly taking the B35 just might be over.....

I don't know what these re-designs are supposed to do because commutes are becoming worse by the day.  It took me over an hour 30 minutes this morning on a Super Express.  There was an accident with at least three cars and a school bus which snarled traffic down on 230th and then there's all of the construction and street narrowing from that causing more back-ups.  The other thing that is really concerning to me is that people are going to have fewer options as the (MTA) calls themselves re-designing the routes, so when a line is messed up, you're going to see CRAZY gaps in service similar to what you're seeing with the new Staten Island express design.  It seems as if the norm now is simply not to run buses that are scheduled, either because they simply don't fill the trips with fill-ins, OR the drivers are so damn late that they have them skip trips entirely and just start at another point.  And everyone is acting like they don't know what's going on.  The drivers pretend like they're powerless and clueless, which I quite frankly don't buy, and management at the depots claims they can't do anything either.

I'm telling you, service has never been worse.  There's also no enforcement of any bus lanes.  They're either CONSTANTLY blocked by some construction work, or they're backed up with cars sitting in them to turn or blocked by the side streets with traffic blocking them, so those are almost useless.  A part of me wonders if all of this is being done purposely to accelerate implementation of congestion pricing because  there's just so much back-ups now.  It's worse than it's ever been. I think it was like this going back to 2007-2008 right before the economic crash... Makes you think...

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9 hours ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

I'm telling you, service has never been worse.  There's also no enforcement of any bus lanes.  They're either CONSTANTLY blocked by some construction work, or they're backed up with cars sitting in them to turn or blocked by the side streets with traffic blocking them, so those are almost useless.  A part of me wonders if all of this is being done purposely to accelerate implementation of congestion pricing because  there's just so much back-ups now.  It's worse than it's ever been. I think it was like this going back to 2007-2008 right before the economic crash... Makes you think...

NYPD doesn't like to enforce bus lanes, because it's b**** work.

NYPD also doesn't like bus lane cameras, because they 1) want the ability to keep their friends and families out of tickets, and 2) they want the city to hire more cops to say they'll enforce bus lanes. But that won't happen, because of the first statement.

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On 9/6/2018 at 4:40 AM, B35 via Church said:

Scary coincidence - Before I dozed off last night around 11pm or so, I was also checking out bustime for the same reason!

It was a WB bus that was the lone non-artic running last night.... EB, buses were rather uniform, but WB though, I did notice a gap.... One bus was at the terminal (M. Gaston), the next one was at Remsen (which is fine, given the scheduled headway), but fam, the next bus after that.... was around McDonald av.... Saw that & cringed....

One thing I'll say is that, between [driving to work/home] & [being out & about, picking up some odds & ends & what not], I have not seen one bus so far that wasn't crushloaded.... Said to myself, my days of casually/randomly taking the B35 just might be over.....

very true. The one thing though, at night they really move. Those ops do 40mph the whole run so the buses really move faster than one would thing. Remsen to the MG terminal is about 6 minutes that time of night too. 

I notice the crushloaded buses a lot more as of the past few days. I've observed people that has of late been getting dolar cabs hopping on the B35. Especially the Limited. I just met my girl at 96 and Church. Normally she would take a cab. Today she said she saw this shiny new bus that looked like it came from her neighborhood (Bronx) and decided to jump on it. The said the bus (1085) was SRO from the Q train to Remsen. This was her first time on the B35 ever. 

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On ‎9‎/‎4‎/‎2018 at 10:06 AM, FLX9304 said:

Nope, blame it on the person who ran the MTA in 2010. This is why I agree with @B35 via Church to reinstate the Q79. More better and efficient 

This will never happen unless the Village of Floral Park allows bus service to be extended to the LIRR Station, as originally proposed in the late 1980's.

(Which is almost nil.)

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1 hour ago, East New York said:

very true. The one thing though, at night they really move. Those ops do 40mph the whole run so the buses really move faster than one would thing. Remsen to the MG terminal is about 6 minutes that time of night too. 

I notice the crushloaded buses a lot more as of the past few days. I've observed people that has of late been getting dolar cabs hopping on the B35. Especially the Limited. I just met my girl at 96 and Church. Normally she would take a cab. Today she said she saw this shiny new bus that looked like it came from her neighborhood (Bronx) and decided to jump on it. The said the bus (1085) was SRO from the Q train to Remsen. This was her first time on the B35 ever. 

Service looks to have become complete shit. As of now most of the buses are heading west with 2-3 buses going East. My mother waited an hr for it. Nice one MTA....

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On 9/7/2018 at 8:58 PM, East New York said:

very true. The one thing though, at night they really move. Those ops do 40mph the whole run so the buses really move faster than one would thing. Remsen to the MG terminal is about 6 minutes that time of night too. 

I notice the crushloaded buses a lot more as of the past few days. I've observed people that has of late been getting dolar cabs hopping on the B35. Especially the Limited. I just met my girl at 96 and Church. Normally she would take a cab. Today she said she saw this shiny new bus that looked like it came from her neighborhood (Bronx) and decided to jump on it. The said the bus (1085) was SRO from the Q train to Remsen. This was her first time on the B35 ever. 

Much to some people's belief, Church becomes eerily quiet (just like Utica does) past a certain hour.... I still opt for the dollar cabs during the later hours though, primarily due to "frequency" reasons... lol....

If people are hopping into dollar cabs at a lesser rate (due to there being more room on the buses now), that suits me just fine :D.... What I can tell you is that, people are getting kinda fed up with the dollar cabs because they've gotten quite scary lately... Apparently, a lot of them don't wanna go to E. 18th anymore; some don't even go past Nostrand.... This scenario is very reminiscent of how things were around here back in the 90's as far as that goes....

I'm going to predict that, upon the next MTA fare increase, will come the next dollar cab fare increase.... Both will end up being $3 a ride, which is going to push a LOT of people onto the buses.

On 9/7/2018 at 9:41 PM, dkupf said:

This will never happen unless the Village of Floral Park allows bus service to be extended to the LIRR Station, as originally proposed in the late 1980's.

(Which is almost nil.)

There's some conflation going on here....

The reversion of the Q79 is not contingent with the route running to LIRR Floral Park.....

 

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As someone who lived in the area, the Q79 is not really workable as a full bus route. A glorified LIRR shuttle is not really enough to justify running a separate bus line. 

If the MTA were able to offer a smaller tier of service like Translink Community Shuttles in Vancouver, it might work. Or maybe if the City contracted out a half-hourly jitney service.

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4 minutes ago, bobtehpanda said:

As someone who lived in the area, the Q79 is not really workable as a full bus route. A glorified LIRR shuttle is not really enough to justify running a separate bus line. 

If the MTA were able to offer a smaller tier of service like Translink Community Shuttles in Vancouver, it might work. Or maybe if the City contracted out a half-hourly jitney service.

It was workable -  as a glorified LIRR shuttle.

Whether the route's existence was justified though, is debatable... AFAIC, it beats marring the Q36 by having that run up to LIRR Little Neck....

The Q89, now that was an unworkable route.

 

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2 hours ago, Lil 57 said:

Talking about the Q89, is there any old sechedules of that route?

http://web.mta.info/busco/schedules/q089cur.pdf

If a route was discontinued after 2002 or so, and it doesn't share a timetable with a route that still exists today (e.g. S67 and S66), its timetable should generally still be accessible on the MTA site.

Speaking of the Q89, is there any credence to the story I've heard that Green Bus Co. created it solely to prevent another bus company from running an actually usable bus route on that part of Linden Blvd? 

 

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25 minutes ago, Mysterious2train said:

http://web.mta.info/busco/schedules/q089cur.pdf

If a route was discontinued after 2002 or so, and it doesn't share a timetable with a route that still exists today (e.g. S67 and S66), its timetable should generally still be accessible on the MTA site.

Speaking of the Q89, is there any credence to the story I've heard that Green Bus Co. created it solely to prevent another bus company from running an actually usable bus route on that part of Linden Blvd? 

 

I don't even know what the purpose of the route was, didn't even run during the rush hour.

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2 hours ago, Mysterious2train said:

http://web.mta.info/busco/schedules/q089cur.pdf

If a route was discontinued after 2002 or so, and it doesn't share a timetable with a route that still exists today (e.g. S67 and S66), its timetable should generally still be accessible on the MTA site.

Speaking of the Q89, is there any credence to the story I've heard that Green Bus Co. created it solely to prevent another bus company from running an actually usable bus route on that part of Linden Blvd? 

 

Lmao... WTF are those service hours? How did that thing survive for three entire years after the PBL takeover?

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10 hours ago, Lil 57 said:

I don't even know what the purpose of the route was, didn't even run during the rush hour.

 

8 hours ago, P3F said:

Lmao... WTF are those service hours? How did that thing survive for three entire years after the PBL takeover?

Yeah, I remember somebody saying on this on Subchat or somewhere that Green Bus Lines, which used to operate the Q89/Q9A, created the route primarily to prevent other bus companies from running service on that section of Linden Blvd. I don't know how true that is, but I can't think of any other explanation for its extremely poor headways and downright bizarre span of service. 

If that reasoning is true, it seems like in a weird way, the Q9A/Q89 accomplished its goal? Since the MTA never did anything with it after taking over the route and that portion of Linden Blvd continues to be without local bus service to this day. I wonder if the MTA kept the route around just because they didn't want to look like they were cutting service.

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