By Raanan Geberer
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
BROOKLYN – When the Transit was released Authority’s report on overcrowding, right up there with the Lexington Avenue line in Manhattan was the L train, known to old-timers as the 14th Street Canarsie Line but to younger people as the line that connects Manhattan to trendy Williamsburg. The Lexington Avenue line (4, 5, 6) and the L both registered as having 100 percent overcrowding. But while the Second Avenue subway will presumably take some of the traffic off the Lex, no such project will affect the L.

The L train is slated to become at least partially computerized, which will allow the MTA to run trains closer together on that line.

However, the L still suffers from a basic handicap — it’s only a two-track line.

When the 14th Street-Canarsie line was completed in the late 1920s, the Brooklyn scene was vastly different than it is today. Williamsburg was one of the poorest neighborhoods in the borough, a place that people left as soon as they got a little money. Bushwick was a middle-class area, but still rather spread out.

And Canarsie itself, other than the beachfront area, was basically a neighborhood of swamps, marshlands and ramshackle one-family houses, the butt of jokes by vaudevillians.

In those days, and even into the ’70s and ’80s, the type of development and explosive population growth we later saw in Williamsburg and Greenpoint would have been unheard of. But that’s exactly what happened, and a similar process is under way in Bushwick. So now we’re faced with throngs of people crammed onto narrow platforms waiting for a train that will take them two, three or four stops into Manhattan.

The most effective solution, it seems to me, would be to provide express service on the line. At one time, some trains during the rush hour provided some unofficial skip-stop service between Broadway Junction and Myrtle Avenue, but that hasn’t been done in many years, according to my unofficial sources.

Adding an extra track, or two extra tracks, for rush-hour express service would be an expensive proposition, but it may be a good idea 10 or 20 years down the road, especially if government funding becomes less tight financially. At one time, in the pre-World War II era, money was readily available for subway construction; that could be the case again someday. You never know. I concede that rush-hour express service might not help Williamsburg residents, because they live only one or two stops from Manhattan. But it definitely will help riders who live a few stops down the line, in Bushwick, East New York and Canarsie. And if some of those people get onto express trains, the Williamsburg residents who get onto the locals will have less crowded trains — or vice versa.

Construction would be difficult. It would likely require a second tunnel beneath the existing one to house the express tracks. This is the way the Sixth Avenue line in Manhattan was converted to local-express service in the 1960s. But it’s at least worth a study. If express train service can be (hopefully) reintroduced to the F line, why not to the L?

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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