Brooklyn straphangers found themselves in a nightmare commute Wednesday morning on the B and Q lines after the trains went out of service throughout the borough following a branch strike in Flatbush.
The MTA announced that the B and Q were suspended throughout their entire runs in Brooklyn — from Brighton Beach to DeKalb Avenue on the B, and from Coney Island to DeKalb Avenue on the Q — after a train’s brakes were wrongfully activated at Newkirk Plaza. The announcement came at 9:49 a.m. on Aug. 14.
That left many straphangers along the B and Q waiting 30 or 40 minutes for a train that wouldn’t come.
“I don’t know how I’m gonna get to work now,” said Ryan, a straphanger at the Parkside Avenue Q train stop who said she had been waiting for about 30 minutes.
Q riders expressed particular disdain for delays on a line they typically find reliable.
“Today is different,” said Julianna Fordjour, who had been waiting 30 minutes to get on the Q to go to work on the Upper East Side. “Sometimes it’s delayed, but not too long like this one.”
“This is the first time this has happened to me here,” added Ryan, who just moved to Prospect Lefferts Gardens and declined to give her last name. “So I’m more just perplexed.”
An MTA spokesperson said that a train had struck a tree branch on the local tracks that shot its brakes, but trains could not be easily rerouted to the express tracks because of an ongoing project at Church Avenue to make that station accessible for people with disabilities. Local and express trains will be skipping Church Avenue through the fall.
As such, the Q had to be rerouted to the N line and the B was switched to the D line.
Tree-related delays are particularly common on the Brighton Line, which in much of Brooklyn is situated in an “open cut” — where tracks are situated below ground level but still exposed to the open air, typically under overhanging trees.
More than a third of tree delays in the past four years have been on the Q line; overall, more than 80% of tree delays since 2021 have taken place on lines situated in open cuts: the Brighton (B/Q) and Sea Beach (N) lines in Brooklyn and the Dyre Avenue (5) line in the Bronx.
Tree delays have grown this year on the Brighton Line, the nonprofit news outlet The City reported. The Brighton Line, in fact, has seen 139% more tree-related delays in the first seven months of 2024 than it did in all of 2023.
