MTA Chaos

Dear Editor:

Janno wants to be Robert Moses?

MTA CEO John Lieber, aka “Janno,” is full of ideas, (mostly bad and/or foolish) – the failed experimental one free bus route per borough but “sorry no transfers,” random, easily evaded metal detectors in some subway stations, underground emporia (without shoppers), new benches for the weary at posh new Madison-Grand Central link and its unused shopping mall, 5G WiFi for a two minute crosstown Manhattan shuttle ride, etc. He forgets his well-paid ($400,000 salary) title is CEO of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. That’s Transit, not “shopping” or “frills” Authority. To most of us, “transit” means buses and subways, our lifelines getting us from here to there. Especially those residents furthest from the Manhattan “core.” Bob Moses also loved changes that he considered “progress,” regardless of effects on the public.

Lieber’s vacuity is best exemplified in his oft-stated goal of faster commutes, which he says the MTA will achieve, in part, by reducing the number of bus stops on some routes and doubling the distance between them! For Janno, walks don’t count as part of the commute. Janno, who gets a car and driver as one of his perks on top of his $400K salary, doesn’t understand that a “commute” is the trip from one’s front door to destination… work, doctors, theatre, relatives, shopping centers. Want to “shorten” the commute further? Janno doesn’t include the initial walk from home to the first bus or subway station as part of “the commute.” In one of the most egregious re-routing cases, the Q35, he will also divert the final section of the eastbound route (Newport Avenue and Beach 147th St to Newport and BEACH 116th terminus) onto Rockaway Beach Boulevard. Newport, the spine of the peninsula, the axis of population density of this part of Rockaway, is the final stage of the route it has taken for NINETY YEARS, from just after the opening of the Marine Parkway/Gil Hodges bridge. (That’s even before the MTA took over the private Green Bus Lines and even before Gil Hodges ever donned a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform!). Almost a century with no ill-effects. Janno: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The proposed change will route the Q35 two blocks further from the area’s only shopping/dining out street, Beach 129th Street, and its only public school and polling place, PS/MS 114 on Beach 134th and Cronston Ave. The present Q35 eastbound terminus is a mere twenty steps from the new Q22 ferry origin site and a few more to the many medical, fitness sites and the Rockaway Park Post Office on Beach Channel Drive, as well as the Q53 and Q54 buses and the Rockaway Shuttle (when and if it is revived).

On Rockaway Beach Boulevard, the bus will have to make stops in DOT designated bicycle lanes! Again: Janno: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Buses in bike lanes doesn’t seem to be a particularly well thought out mixed-use plan.

To do all this coincidental with the “temporary” shutdown of the Rockaway Park Shuttle and the A Train to the Rockaways for long-deferred Sandy repairs, looks like a long-term guarantee of chaos for Rockaway’s commuters.

Stephen Keller