With the much-dreaded L Train shutdown now only a year away, concerns continue to be raised that the MTA’s shutdown plan will not be sufficient to accommodate the estimated 275,000 riders who currently use it to get between Brooklyn and Manhattan daily. In a recent twitter Q&A session where he also revealed that The Smiths are the NYCT Subways’ (or at least his own) favorite band, NYC Transit Authority head Andy Byford called the shutdown a “huge challenge” but also noted “there is still time to refine the plan.”
The NY Times has also investigated the impact the shutdown could have on Lower Manhattan in a new article. “One year from now a large swath of Lower Manhattan will face a deluge,” the Times writes. “Fourteenth Street, for nearly its entire length, will be transformed into the busiest bus route in the country, ferrying as many as 84,000 people a day.” Seventy buses an hour are expected to cross the Williamsburg Bridge, where three new bus routes will run to Chinatown and Soho, while in the West Village, 5,000 bicyclist are expected to use new bike paths. There’s also concern about increased vehicle traffic: “During the height of the morning rush, traffic is projected to increase by 71 percent on 12th Street as drivers seek ways around the car ban on 14th Street, according to the Transportation Department. At night, the estimate predicts an increase in traffic of 29 percent along 12th Street, which only has a single lane.”
The Times continues:
The city has a goal of ensuring that buses can cross the bus corridor along 14th Street in 20 minutes, a speed rate of over 6.5 miles per hour and over 40 percent faster than buses there travel now. But some transit experts are dubious, believing that 14th Street “will saturate with buses,” said Annie Weinstock, the president of BRT International, a company that plans and designs bus rapid transit systems and that helped produce an alternate plan for 14th Street. “Buses will queue up behind one another and become a bus parking lot.”
Read the full article here.
The L Train shutdown is currently set to run over 15 months, down from an earlier estimate of 18 months, but still a long time.