Subway passengers are seeing the same old R train service in Brooklyn after repairs to an underwater tube damaged during Superstorm Sandy promised to improve the ride, Councilman Vincent Gentile said in a letter to New York City Transit.
Since the underwater Montague tunnel reopened in September after a 14-month repair job, Gentile said his Bay Ridge constituents have complained to his office that they cannot feel the improvements. Gentile’s letter calls on New York City Transit to do a full review of the R train.
“Leaving riders with old trains that are overcrowded and significantly late in operation is just unconscionable,” Gentile said in his Oct. 16 letter.
The MTA has done such reviews for the F, G and L lines and is working on one for the A and C lines.
In the year that the Montague tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan was closed, the limited R line ranked at the top for the average number of trains arriving on time without major delays and it was more reliable than the year before the closure, according to the MTA’s most recent operations data.
Now that the full line from Forest Hills to Bay Ridge is back in service, the R train has been lagging.
MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said the agency’s five-year capital program will address reliability issues.
