F'ed until 2012?!

Uh oh.

This is in response to your recent e-mail to MTA New York City Transit offering
transit-related suggestions regarding F and V service.We appreciate your
interest in improving mass transit, and thank you for your suggestion. We
have forwarded your e-mail to supervision in the appropriate operating
department for review. However, 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.If
you have any further transit-related questions, concerns or suggestions, please
contact Customer Services at (718) 330-3322, Monday through Friday, from 9:00
a.m. to 5:00 p.m., or write to Customer Services at 2 Broadway, Room A11.146,
New York, NY 10004.We take the concerns of our customers very seriously
and thank you for your interest in our transportation system

The F line has a Wikipedia entry that is informative. Apparently not only the rehabilitation project but also damage from a signal fire at Bergen Street are our obstacles to restoring express service.

KensingtonBrooklyn has posted extensively on the F line's shortcomings. I enjoyed the comment thread attached to this post.

Assemblywoman Joan Millman on Congestion Pricing

Streetsblog has the text of a letter from Assemblywoman Millman in response to inquiries about her stance on congestion pricing. The full text is available here.

Some people view this as anti-congestion pricing. I disagree; I think it's perfectly reasonable to express some reservations about the plan's impacts.

Let me be clear: I support congestion pricing 100%. However, implementing the program is going to have impacts, and those impacts must be addressed. For our stretch of Brooklyn, which already has congestion at rush hour, we can expect significantly increased ridership on the F line due to the plan and to continued population growth.

The MTA can cheaply and quickly improve subway service for a wide swath of Brooklyn by reinstating express service on the F and extending the V into Brooklyn. If I were Joan Millman (a man can dream, can't he?) I would support the mayor's plan but demand that the F & V line improvements be made concurrently or before.

Improving Transit On the Cheap In South Brooklyn

I've long wondered why the express tracks on the F line are lying dormant in Brooklyn. Every time I use the F at Carroll or Bergen, and a packed F train rolls in, it drives me a little nuts that this infrastructure 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. And what about those filthy, unused platforms at Hoyt-Schermerhorn?

Like Frank Constanza at Christmastime, I think to myself "There has to be a better way!"

Via KensingtonBrooklyn, I learned of this plan from Community Consulting dating back to 2003. There's a lot of terrific ideas there for improving transit in Brooklyn. See especially pages 11,14,21.

I love the idea of extending the V out to Brooklyn and running the F as an express. It seems like an egregious waste of resources to let these tracks sit empty, when we could cheaply improve service to thousands of people in Brooklyn and Manhattan. The V is currently a ghost train in Manhattan. Let's split the F train's burden more equitably with the V.

If we're serious about getting cars off the road, and congestion pricing in Manhattan, let's take the simple (and cheap!) measures available to us to make subway commuting a more attractive option for the outer boroughs. The better we make our transit systems, the more people will get out of their cars.