A transit system may sleep in a city that never does
By Benjamin Kabak
New York isn’t the city that never sleeps because John Kander and Fred Ebb once proclaimed it to be in a song. Rather, the New York is the city that never sleeps because it’s transit system never sleeps. It might require more patience, but anyone interested in traveling from Inwood to the Rockaways can take the same one-swipe, one-seat ride at 3 a.m. as they can at 3 p.m. That is the beauty of a city with a nightlife as vibrant as New York’s and with an economy dependent upon 24-hour transit service.
Michael Grynbaum of The Times published a piece this afternoon on just that theme. He
examines the planned late-night bus service cuts and finds a few hard-working New Yorkers who will be very inconvenienced by the dwindling off-hours service options. One woman works as a projectionist at the AMC Lincoln Center movie theater and must get home at 2 a.m. to the Upper East Side. In July, the MTA will cut three of the four buses that run through Central Park, and Elaine Beverly will find her options severely limited.
Grynbaum offers more details on the impending cuts:
And while not all of the cuts will be devastating, they will reshape the rhythms of nocturnal New York, when buses and subways are already scarce and routines forged over many years can be tough to shed. Transit officials studied ridership patterns and considered the proximity of other public transportation options when deciding which bus lines to reduce or erase…
Ms. Beverly will lose both the M96 and the M104, which runs along the backbone of the Upper West Side. One alternative, the M10 along Central Park West, will also vanish, even during the daylight hours, and late-night Upper East Side bus service will be trimmed, if not eliminated…
The M86 crosstown bus, with 8.8 million annual riders, is the most popular of the five Central Park routes; it will continue to run at all hours. But the M79, with 5.9 million riders — and the only bus that reaches East End Avenue — will not run after 1 a.m., nor will the M66. (The M72 crosstown route already stops service at midnight.)
The deaths of these lines will lead to problems for those who work at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell and Mount Sinai hospitals and longer commutes for every off-hours worker. “There are a lot of residents in the hospital who have shifts that end late at night,†Patrisha Woolard, a second-year resident at Mount Sinai, told The Times. “That would be horrible.â€
The real statement though on the service cuts came from a bus driver. Vincent Wright drives the only bus that runs the M96 route late at night, and he understands how bus cuts will impact the heart of the city. “This is a 24-hour city, and you can’t have a 24-hour city without a 24-hour system,†he said. “The taxi business is probably going to love this; they’ll throw a big party if all the cuts happen.â€
Some cabs may benefit, but many workers needing transit at 2:30 a.m. cannot afford expensive cabs. They need their one-swipe rides to places far from subway lines. They need their bus routes. They need their transit options, and soon the MTA may take it all away. The city that never sleeps may need to find a new way around town.