Plan Would Use Long-Unused
Tracks from Bergen to Church
By Raanan Geberer
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
CARROLL GARDENS — The southern terminal of the G train, as transit aficionados know, will be extended five stops south to Church Avenue on the F line’s route in 2008.
Still, that move, while welcomed, isn’t enough for many transit riders along the F’s route, which stretches north from Coney Island along McDonald Avenue to Prospect Park South; and from there to Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Downtown Brooklyn and ultimately Manhattan.
To begin with, the G, or the Brooklyn-Queens Crosstown Line, not only doesn’t go to Manhattan, it doesn’t really even go to Downtown Brooklyn other than the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop. Thus, the move wouldn’t really benefit many rush-hour commuters.
Second, and more to the point, the F line has two express tracks from Church Avenue to Bergen Street that haven’t been used since the 1970s or so. And further south, there is a third express track on the elevated portion on McDonald Avenue.
Getting express service restored on the northern, four-track portion is the cause advocated by Gary Reilly, an attorney originally from New Jersey who has lived in Carroll Gardens for two and a half years.
As for the stops that would be bypassed by express trains, Reilly points out that the V train, which now terminates at Second Avenue in Manhattan, could easily be extended along the F train’s Brooklyn route as a local. Although the V may be well-ridden in Queens, he said, “it’s a ghost train in Manhattan.”
“Every time I use the F at Carroll or Bergen, and a packed F train rolls in,” he writes on his blog, “First and Court” (http://firstandcourt.blogspot.com/2007/05/improving-transit-on-cheap-in-south.html), it drives me a little nuts that this infrastructure [the express-track tunnel] is just sitting there, fallow. Similar frustration when I’m working on the east side in the fifties, and take the V towards home, only to have it end at 2nd Ave.
“Like Frank Constanza at Christmastime, I think to myself “There has to be a better way!”
Reilly, who says the project could be funded from the mayor’s congestion pricing plan, says he has gotten support from other bloggers, such as “KensingtonBrooklyn”
(http://kensingtonbrooklyn.blogspot.com/).
He has also, he says, approached the MTA, only to be told that any such changes would have to be postponed until work on the F line’s elevated viaduct over the Gowanus Canal (the “Culver Viaduct”) is completed.
Indeed, a letter from MTA Transit posted on Reilly’s blog (http://firstandcourt.blogspot.com/2007/05/fed-until-2012.html) says, “Please note that express service on the F or V line and extending V line service into Brooklyn will not be possible until completion of the Culver Viaduct Rehabilitation project in 2012. MTA New York City Transit intends to examine F express service and V line options for possible implementation after the completion of the viaduct rehabilitation.”
MTA spokespersons didn’t return phone calls to the Eagle by press time yesterday.
For now, Reilly’s plan includes getting more local media coverage and getting local elected officials interested in his cause.
Craig Hammerman, district manager of Community Board 6, which covers Carroll Gardens, Red Hook and Park Slope, said that there has been quite a lot of interest in renewing express service in his district, and a meeting on the subject with the MTA was held about 10 years ago. “We would have no objection to reinstating express service, providing that it doesn’t hurt local stations,” he said.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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