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A Subway Map Remade, in Hopes of Matching Routes and Riders

By MICHAEL LUO
Published: February 20, 2004

When the first train rumbles across the Manhattan Bridge on Sunday morning, the confusion will begin for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers adjusting to the most significant redrawing of the subway map in decades. The changes come with the nearly two-decade rehabilitation of the bridge finally coming to an end, and four subway tracks, instead of two, will be in use over the nearly century-old bridge for the first extended period since construction began in 1986.

But once thousands of riders overcome their initial confusion, they will settle into new commuting and travel habits. Certain routes will prove popular; others may not. Only in the coming months will transit officials be able to tell whether they have succeeded in their attempt at the arcane art of rail service design.

"It's not like other new products, where you can test-market it and expand it," said Peter G. Cafiero, director of New York City Transit's rail service design unit. "Ultimately, we have to just do it."

The reconfigured subway plan - which will affect 600,000 riders - is the result of more than two years of work. Planners analyzed ridership numbers, origin and destination patterns, demographic projections and computer models. An intriguing picture of how the city has evolved over the last 20 years emerged, and transit agency planners tried to redesign the system accordingly, while also taking into account budget and operational limitations. They admit, however, that it is as much art as it is science.

Among the broad trends they tried to incorporate in their plan: once problem-plagued areas like Union Square and Times Square have become weekend destinations needing more service; an artist enclave known as SoHo turned into a retail hub; growth in Midtown far outpaces that of Lower Manhattan; growth in scattered neighborhoods like Astoria, Prospect Park and Bay Ridge has altered subway demands.

Providing the crucial backdrop to all this: the city's overall resurgence and the transit system's recovery from the depths of the 1980's, has spurred subway ridership. Since 1986, ridership has grown by more than a third, to 1.4 billion trips a year. Perhaps more telling, two-thirds of the growth is in weekend travel, with many riding the subway to shop and dine out.

"Back in 1986, you only rode the subway if you had to," Mr. Cafiero said.

Meanwhile, because of the construction on the Manhattan Bridge, a major disparity has existed between where people in Brooklyn wanted to go and where trains took them. Only half the trains running between the two boroughs were running over the bridge, but about three-quarters of people riding from Brooklyn to Manhattan have been traveling during rush hour by the bridge, bypassing Lower Manhattan.

But the often-delayed work on the bridge, which saddled the system with reduced capacity, presented planners with an opportunity.

Staffers in the transit agency's seven-person rail service design unit began mulling in 2001 what information they needed to form their plan. With the increasing use of the MetroCard, they realized that they had a huge head start over their predecessors who had worked in the era of the clunky token.

"Ten years ago, we relied a lot more on census data info to predict where people were going," said Keith J. Hom, chief of the transit agency's operations planning department. "Now we have MetroCard."

Planners also organized workers in May 2002 to interview more than 2,300 riders on subway platforms in Brooklyn. A major question was what to do with the Brighton line, currently served by the Q train. In 2001, when work was finally completed on the southern side of the Manhattan Bridge and lines were scrambled so work could start on the north, those on the Brighton line suddenly found their trains heading up Broadway, after more than a decade of heading up Avenue of the Americas.

Transit workers asked riders which they preferred. Almost two-thirds, they found, preferred Broadway.

"It goes to a lot of areas that have really grown," said Mr. Cafiero, pointing out that Broadway has evolved into a retail corridor, connecting the hubs of SoHo, Union Square and Times Square.

Corporate offices have also spread out, planners said. "Back in 1986, the biggest office destination was the Sixth Avenue corridor," including places like Rockefeller Center, said Glenn S. Lunden, a transit agency planner.

Examining origin-destination data, they found that 40 percent of riders were heading to Midtown during rush hour, but 20 percent were also heading to what they called The Valley, the area between Canal Street and 28th Street. Less than 15 percent were heading into Lower Manhattan.

This information went to the heart of what planners decided to do for what they call the Fourth Avenue line in southwestern Brooklyn.

Back in 1986, the N train, which ran express to Midtown, was the least used route over the bridge. Since then, however, outlying neighborhoods like Bay Ridge and Sunset Park have increasingly become bedroom communities, and their information showed that residents there overwhelmingly wanted to get to Midtown more quickly.

"Our ridership model shows when we bring the N back on the bridge, it's going to be one of the more popular routes," Mr. Cafiero said.

At the same time, however, a significant proportion of riders still liked the old Avenue of the Americas option. So a centerpiece of their new plan is allowing both options for riders on the Brighton line during weekdays: either an express B train up Avenue of the Americas, or the local Q up Broadway.

Meanwhile, with the replacement of the W train in Brooklyn by the D, planners puzzled over what to do with the W line, which was routed to Astoria beginning in 2001 for operational reasons. They decided to keep it, however, because of how busy the stations in Astoria, Queens, also served by the N, had become. Instead of running to Brooklyn, however, they decided to end it at Whitehall Street in Lower Manhattan.

One of the most controversial aspects is the swapping of the old B and D lines, with their return to Brooklyn. Many residents remember growing up near the lines and will have to remember the switch.

In the end, this was a decision based mostly on trying to simplify things, planners said. The B train in the Bronx currently runs only during the weekdays because of station rehabilitation work along the route and less demand. Planners decided that they wanted to connect this to the weekday-only line in Brooklyn. Planners conceded that they could have simply switched the designation in the Bronx, but they decided that would only confuse riders there.

"There will be initial confusion, but there's a definite benefit in a simpler service plan that is easier to explain to our riders," Mr. Cafiero said.