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| MTA Officials Face (7) Line Riders At Town Hall Meeting (1133001) | |||
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MTA Officials Face (7) Line Riders At Town Hall Meeting |
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Posted by Gold_12TH on Wed Jan 18 21:33:43 2012  Van Bramer held a town hall meeting with the MTA at Sunnyside Community Services on January 11.The No. 7 line will be shut down between Queensboro Plaza and Times Square for 11 consecutive weekends, beginning Saturday, January 21 and ending early Monday morning, April 2. For the same period of time, the 45th Road/Court Square station on the No. 7 line will be shut down completely and bypassed every day, although the connected Court Square station below it will remain open. Further weekend shutdowns in the fall are also on schedule. At a town hall meeting on January 11 held at Sunnyside Community Services, a panel from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority discussed the coming shutdown and the problems of maintaining and repairing a branch of the system some 95 years old, problems that have been the MTA’s stated reason for these wintertime shutdowns for the past several years. Past shutdowns have given rise to annual complaints and led to a town hall meeting conducted by Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer last year. Even so, the shutdown is more severe than ever this year and brought about another town hall meeting, again led by Van Bramer. At this latest meeting, the MTA panel articulated its plans and provided illustrations of both the problems and projected solutions. In turn, the town hall audience was given the opportunity for inquiries and commentary and showed both understanding of what the MTA faces and impatience that, for all the efforts, each year seems to leave the No. 7 line in further disrepair. The first MTA panel speaker was Lois Tendler, MTA vice president of government and community relations, who introduced a PowerPoint demonstration that was referred to for the rest of the meeting. Demetrius Chrichlow, assistant chief officer of the No. 7 line, used it to show what the MTA must endure. There are nearly 600 trains traveling on the line every workday, carrying 425,000 riders. On Saturdays and Sundays, the number of train trips is reduced to about 440. The No. 7 line is and always has been a 24-hour operation, so normally repairs and cleaning occur in the hours when the schedule is slower. Of necessity, periods of down time have had to be introduced, and those periods have been on the increase. So far as repair and cleaning are concerned, the most difficult section of the line, which in its entirety runs from Main Street in Flushing to Times Square in Manhattan, lies between Queensboro Plaza and Times Square. Between Willets Point and Queensboro Plaza there are three tracks, one of them for express service that alternates in each direction. But after Queensboro Plaza the express track disappears, narrowing the available space for repair work. The consequent difficulty becomes acute in the tunnel that runs from Hunters Point to the Times Square terminus. Known as the Steinway Tube, it was excavated between 1892 and 1907 to provide trolley car service. When the Flushing Line was being built during the World War I era, the Steinway Tube was converted to subway train service. The tunnel was necessarily accepted as a finished product that could not be enlarged. The greater amount of room needed for subway cars and third rails meant that maintenance workers had to adjust to less room in which to operate, making normally difficult repair work even more so. The MTA contends that limited and makeshift repairs have led to a critical mass of wear and damage. A dip in service last March compelled a project of scraping and digging out immensities of sludge in the roadbeds to take away what had become an impediment to the electrical system. According to the MTA’s Joseph Leader, who is in charge of maintenance of way, 22 track circuits had been damaged, six critically. All have been repaired. Leader said that the obsolete signal system, often a cause of delay, is undergoing longrange rehabilitation that will produce a complete modernization by 2016. During the 11-weekend shutdown, repairs to the Vernon-Jackson and Hunters Point stations, generally agreed to be quite run down, will be made, and there will be further work to rehabilitate the so-called Davis Street Curve on the tracks between the 45th Road/Court Square and Hunters Point stations. A woman whose station is a local one between two express stations, 61st Street/Woodside and Queensboro Plaza was the first to speak from the audience. She said she is tired of watching several express trains pass each morning as she waits for the local amidst a gathering crowd of similarly frustrated commuters. Chrichlow replied that better coordination between express and local trains should be possible with full implementation of communication based train control (CBTC), radio contact between trains, at a far superior level than the present situation. Other MTA officials at the meeting concurred. Most of the audience members wanted to discuss the shutdown that is about to begin. During each shutdown, the MTA offers free shuttle bus service between Queensboro Plaza and the three closed Queens stations, allowing isolated No. 7 riders to get to Queensboro Plaza, where they can pick up Astoria line service to and from Manhattan. Not good enough, said Angus Grieve-Smith, a Woodside resident, who noted that the MTA owns the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, so why couldn’t it simply run buses at intervals through the tunnel to designated spots in Manhattan? Service could even be paid for with Metrocards. MTA Chief of Operational Planning Peter Cafiero replied that, bottom line, it would be an insupportable additional expense. Van Bramer immediately called that nonsense, saying he could pay for such a bus with money from his own City Council fund. Several speakers later, a woman came back to the bus-and-tunnel theme, warning the officials that lack of emergency bus service in Hunters Point could move local residents to buy automobiles. Brent O’Leary said the Hunters Point and Vernon-Jackson stations were so far from Queens Plaza it would be much more practical to base a bus near the QMT entrance that isolated local residents could use for direct service. He repeated that Van Bramer had said he could pay for it, so why shouldn’t it be in operation? But Cafiero would not budge. Brody Enoch, head of the Rider Rebellion group, said that the MTA and communities “should not be in an adversarial position”. Enoch saw hope even as he was critical. Van Bramer tried again the following day to persuade the MTA to establish bus service through the QMT during the shutdown. He again emphasized that he could pay for it, and again was rebuffed. --- http://www.qgazette.com/news/2012-01-18/Features/MTA_Officials_Face_7_Line_Riders_At_Town_Hall_Meet.html |
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