MTA Spells Out L Shutdown Mitigation Plan At Council Hearing

GRAMERCY, NY — Transit officials aim to run 80 buses an hour in a series of "L-alternative" routes to shuttle 225,000 weekday L train riders during the Canarsie Tunnel's 15-month shutdown, said New York City Transit President Andy Byford during a Wednesday City Council committee hearing, AM New York reported.

City Department of Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg and Byford presented their mitigation plans for the L train shutdown to the council's Wednesday Committee on Transportation hearing, which stretched to more than five hours of back and forth between straphangers and officials. Transit experts outlined the bulk of their plan, which relies on several new bus routes and beefing up neighboring train lines.

To accommodate the 70 percent of commuters expected to shift to nearby subway lines during the shutdown, the MTA will add five trains to the M line, which will operate 24 hours a day seven days a week into Midtown, and add extra cars to G and C trains to pack in more passengers. E service will also beef up with additional trains, reported AM New York.

A drastically smaller number of commuters will take to buses during the shutdown, but the MTA and the city's transportation department have heavily focused on creating what they've termed L-alternative bus routes to fill in for the shuttered line. These routes are expected to carry 17 percent of L train riders and run less than a minute apart during peak ridership, the newspaper reported.

The four L-alternative routes are meant to be short and sweet to quickly get busses back into the line up of transporting commuters.

The L1 SBS route will run from Grand Street in Williamsburg to Gramercy, L2 SBS will operate from Grand Street to Soho, L3SBS will run from Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg to Soho and the last route, L4 SBS, will also get rolling from Bedford Avenue and drop riders off in Gramercy. To provide overnight service to and from Manhattan, route L2 SBS will connect with the previously announce M14 SBS line that will operate along 14th Street, AM New York reported.

The newspaper reported that the chaotic roadways will be monitor by a team of 102 NYPD traffic enforcement agents and 46 police officers, because even in off peaks hours, 26 buses in the afternoon per hour and 38 buses in the evening per hour are expected to whizz along Manhattan and Brooklyn's thoroughfares.

Details on the bus routes come just after the MTA announced that it will turn 14th Street spanning from Gramercy to the West Village into a busway for 17 hours a day.

Photo courtesy of Metropolitan Transportation Authority