New York City transit planners are on the brink of screwing up a popular and important bus route linking the busiest subway hub in Queens with LaGuardia Airport.
Beginning in September, the MTA plans to cut airport stops from the Q33 and turn it into an ordinary neighborhood bus route that cuts through Jackson Heights and East Elmhurst. The move comes as a new express route is added. The new route will be called the Q70 Limited. The Q70 will make just two stops in Queens before jumping on the BQE and Grand Central Parkway where it theoretically will travel at highway-type speeds.
The rationale for adding a limited-stop bus service to LaGuardia is sound. But there are two serious problems with the proposal.
1. The Q33 in its current form is a consistently reliable trip for airport workers, fliers and people moving about the neighborhood. In recent years, the MTA has done a fine job matching schedule and bus capacity with demand. During the week, the Q33 makes 133 runs to the airport a day. To slice off the airport component of the route simply because the new Q70 Limited is being added makes no sense. It takes many years to develop the kind of user patterns that have made the Q33 a hugely successful public transit endeavor. The MTA report backing removal of airport stops from the Q33 claims only one in five of the 10-thousand daily riders are coming to or leaving from the airport. I believe this is flawed data. I ride the Q33 at all hours of the day and night and I would say at least half of the ridership has the airport on the itinerary. Many airport workers like me bought or rent apartments along the route because of the Q33’s famous reliability. To abruptly remove airport stops from the Q33 would force riders to do one of two things. They could walk the final one-third of a mile or so from the proposed end point at 95th and Ditmars to and from the airport. This sounds easy but for those toting luggage, the somewhat treacherous trek across the bridge over the Grand Central would be aggravating enough to scare lots of people away. The pedestrian crossings at the airport are dangerous as it is. To add a steady flow of Q33 riders dropped off short of the airport adds risk. The other option should the Q33 eliminate airport stops is for people to gravitate toward the Q70. How will they get there? It sounds absurd, but they can’t walk it, they will take the Q33.
2. The other problem is the path taken by the new Q70 LTD. It’ll start at 61st Street and Roosevelt Avenue in Woodside and pick up folks with luggage coming off the LIRR and 7 train. It’ll then crawl down Rosie to 74th Street to pick up more people coming off the myriad of subway options there. After that, the bus starts its non-stop voyage to LaGuardia. It’ll go down Broadway to 37th Avenue to reach the BQE. During good chunks of the day, the BQE will be bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go. Same for the merge onto the Grand Central. It’s unlikely drivers will be permitted to improvise the route. All my knowledge of traffic on the BQE is anecdotal but if the MTA is adding the Q70 LTD to save people time, I don’t think it’s gonna work with any consistency. I’ve taken the Q33 to work at all hours of the day on all days of the week and I’ve never been late. At worst, it takes a half-hour to get there. The “staff summary” (section 6.1) provided to the MTA to support the new route and the shortening of the Q33 contains an incorrect observation. It says in part: “(The Q33) is frequently affected by slow speeds and low reliability related to congestion on local roads, narrow streets and long dwell times.” This is inaccurate. The Q33 has extremely high reliability and generally moves quickly once you get past a couple of choke points on Roosevelt Avenue.
A consortium of transportation officials have long sought ways to improve public transit options in and out of LaGuardia. The obvious solution is extension of the N train from its current end point at Ditmars Boulevard. The Vallone family and other powerful Astoria neighborhood advocates have effectively killed those efforts. They don’t want elevated subway tracks and the clanking that comes with it running through their neighborhood. The yellow taxi lobby also has had a hand in opposing subway linkage at LaGuardia.
To get around that, the MTA has done a pretty good job improving city bus service in and out of the airport. The best known bus is the M60. It runs from the Upper West Side of Manhattan through Harlem over the Triboro Bridge to the airport. The MTA has bolstered the reliability of the M60 substantially by adding a steady stream of double-long buses (referred to by riders as “accordion” buses) to the round-the-clock schedule.
There’s only so much the MTA can do to move people in and out of LaGuardia without a rail link. Everything they’ve done until now has been smart. The Q70 LTD is worth a shot but should not be done in concert with cutting the airport stops out of the existing Q33 route.
To comply with the law, the MTA has scheduled a single public hearing before pushing through the changes. The hearing will be held at a hotel near LaGuardia on May 1. I plan to speak at that hearing. I will urge the MTA decision-makers who assemble there to leave the Q33 just as it is.