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| B42 Buses Don't Seem to Be Coordinated with the L Train (323549) | |||
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B42 Buses Don't Seem to Be Coordinated with the L Train |
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Posted by nh153 on Wed Apr 19 22:09:12 2017 It was a nice spring day the other day, so I decided to go to Canarsie Pier on the B42. I was surprised L trains were pulling in and out of Rockaway Parkway Station but the B42 wasn't at all synched with their arrival.The B42 is unique, a legacy I suppose of the promise the Transit Authority made to the residents of Canarsie decades ago, when the L train began terminating at Rockaway Parkway station, instead of continuing its previous route, going all the way to the pier. The B42 frequency is the same as the L train. It remains the only bus route that boards inside the revenue section of a subway station, so you don't need your Metro Card to switch between the two, allowing you to take another bus at the end of your subway ride. For a long time, the B42 was the city's most frequent overnight bus route, because the L, like all subway lines, runs on a 20 minute schedule overnight. Now both the B42 and Q10 run every 20 minutes overnight. The B42 trip is only supposed to be 9 minutes off peak and 11 minutes peak. That makes it one of the shortest routes in the system. But there was so much traffic and parked trucks blocking the narrow part of Rockaway Parkway, between the subway station and Flatlands Avenue, that there's no way you can make it from the L train to Belt Parkway in 11 minutes. My complaint is, there seems to be no attempt to synch the bus departure to the subway's arrival. In Toronto and Montreal, where many bus lines terminate within subway station properties, buses outside of peak times usually wait for a train to unload passengers before pulling out. But I hung out for a while on a weekday and found the B42 comes and goes with no coordination. I'm not even sure if the driver bothers to look at the subway platform. So often commuters who had just exited the L had to wait before the bus even opened its doors and let them in. Then it would be another five minutes before it pulled out, even though we knew there'd be no additional L train arriving. Maybe during late nights, there's some effort to synch departures but not when I was there. Also I noticed the B42 doesn't currently terminate at the pier. It idles on Rockaway Parkway at Schenck Street, the last stop before the Belt Parkway overpass and the pier parking lot. It then makes a U-turn on Rockaway Parkway and picks up passengers for the return to the L train. If you want to go to the pier, you've got to walk the rest of way, under the Belt Parkway and around the circle outside the pier entrance. But my latest Brooklyn bus map still shows the B42 terminating at the pier. |
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