Free Williamsburg

The Williamsburg Brooklyn-based culture guide to New York and beyond.

The “partial shutdown” of the L will suck, but these chill MTA videos will ease your mind

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Image by Lia Kantrowitz

Image by Lia Kantrowitz

Actually they REALLY won’t since the changes “may entail waiting 40 minutes for an L train.” The MTA is warning that there will be long waits and trains too crowded to board at “certain times.” And don’t even get us started on the bus situation on 14th Street — critics of the plans worry that they will crawl at a snail’s pace.

less than four days out from the start of the slowdown, it’s become increasingly clear that the governor’s view of service that works may be a bit different than yours. According to the MTA, that promised workable service may entail waiting 40 minutes for an L train, because they’re only running three per hour and “at certain times, it may be too crowded to board the first train.” It may involve taking one of the slowest buses in the city through traffic-clogged streets without any effort from the Mayor’s Office to reduce that congestion.

At its very best, service that works looks like an intricate ballet of precisely-timed arrivals and departures that can be brought to its knees at any moment by a misplaced trash train…. “The L will run on nights and weekends, but it will be much less frequent and more crowded,” the authority wrote on Twitter yesterday—an apparent departure from their previous insistence that nighttime service would be hardly impacted.

Intricate ballet indeed. With the new plans underway this Friday, the MTA is encouraging L riders to consider G, M and & trains as alternatives, which will surely enrage riders on those already crowded lines. On a positive note, 14th Street will be closed to private through-traffic beginning in June to help avoid bus congestion:

The L train “slowdown” will come with bus priority on 14th Street after all.  

The de Blasio administration will ban private through-traffic on 14th Street between Third and Ninth avenues as part of a new pilot street design to help speed up buses during the L train’s Canarsie tunnel reconstruction, according to a draft release of the plans obtained by amNewYork… Under the city’s plans, the new stretch of 14th Street will consist of four lanes, two in each direction: the center lanes will be dedicated to bus and truck traffic, while the outer curbside lanes will be reserved for truck loading and local traffic looking to make pickups, drop-offs or to access garages along the block.

 Private vehicles in these lanes will be required to turn right, off the street, at the next possible opportunity and left turns will be barred. The city, in the draft release, said it drew inspiration from the King Street project in Toronto, where similar vehicular restrictions were put in place to improve cripplingly slow streetcar service on the major city artery.

And about those videos. You can check them out below. Evidently the dude who designed Pong was contracted to design them and to make sense of the service changes: