Reconsidering the Local

I'll admit, living on two local-only lines makes me a little biased against express trains. Expresses are one of the great oddities you encounter when moving to New York. We're conditioned to believe these trains, whisking past station after station, are getting us to our destination so much faster than those poor souls on the local tracks. Those long, uninterrupted stretches feel so much faster, and we arrive sooner than the equivalent local, and so we take for granted that an express train is a great upgrade in service.

Waiting for the local / Photo by the author

Expresses do a lot of great things for the subway, namely add capacity that would not exist in a traditional two-track setup, so that the system has incredible throughput capacity, even with its aging infrastructure (signals, switches, interlockings, and so on). And express trains are faster - that's no illusion. But go through the timetable or take a moment to track just how much time you're saving, and you'll quickly realize that an express, fast as it feels, doesn't offer the sort of mythical time savings we've been conditioned to believe. Take for example a trip from 168 Street to Euclid Avenue. On the local C train, it takes about 63 minutes. If you took the A instead, it would last about 52-53 minutes, depending on the train. In relative terms, that's a big savings (15-16%), and even in absolute terms 10 minutes is something. But that's a ride over the entire length of the C line, not a jaunt from uptown to downtown or Brooklyn to Manhattan. On most trips, the savings offered by an express over an equivalent local is only a couple of minutes - convenient, but not exactly life changing.

That's an important distinction to note when considering our system, because the express good/local bad paradigm seeps into most conversations about subway service. Here on the Culver line, the unused express tracks rear their ugly head on a regular basis. Adding express service would lengthen headways on the local tracks (the MTA has stated it would not add net service and is otherwise constrained by 6th Avenue and Queens Boulevard track capacities) and would add express trains that bypass the some of busiest stops on the line, save for 7th Avenue and Church Avenue, all for a time savings of a few minutes for express riders (and an added wait of 4+ minutes for local riders). Even so, local politicians and advocacy groups love to talk up the prospect of an express, as if that 3-5 minute time savings from Kings Highway will be more than a drop in the bucket. If the line needed more capacity and the MTA were offering more trains, then express service would be a no-brainer, but that's not the situation. Time, effort, and resources spent on advocating for express service could be spent instead on improving service, such as by implementing Communications Based Train Control (CBTC), which would allow faster and more frequent service at all stops.

The express/local dynamic also keeps us from considering other options that could improve service. Local service along the 4th Avenue line was hit hard by the 2010 cuts, which eliminated M service and reduced local stations R service only. The N and D trains run express from Atlantic Av-Barclays Center to 36 St, skipping 4 stops along the way. Late at night, however, the D runs local along this stretch (the N does too, but it replaces the R). Based on the MTA's timetable, an express train from Atlantic to 36 St should take 6 minutes. The local? 8-9 depending on the train. If we could get away from denigrating local service vis-a-vis express, we might be able to consider a new service option: run the D local in Brooklyn (these 4 stops plus DeKalb) at all times. It might sound crazy to make an express service local, but consider the benefits: a new, one-seat ride to areas in Midtown and the West Side for growing areas like Gowanus, South Slope, Greenwood, and Sunset Park; and vastly improved transfer options for F and G riders at 4 Av-9 St (the nearest F-D transfer is at Broadway-Lafayette and no G-D transfer exists). And the costs for such a change are quite minimal: a delay of 2-3 minutes over the entire 36 St-Atlantic stretch - one that could likely be managed away over the length of the route.

This is just one possibility, but it goes to show that by reconsidering our perception of express service, we can find low- or no-cost ways to improve service. And who knows, maybe someone will think this is a worthwhile idea.