On April 27, 2019 the L train in New York City will shut down for 15 months between Manhattan and Brooklyn to repair damage caused during Hurricane Sandy. Leading up to the closure, VICE will be providing relevant updates and proposals, as well as profiles of community members and businesses along the affected route in a series we're calling Tunnel Vision. Read more about the project here.
Although it doesn't start until late April, the L train shutdown’s fallout has already been far-reaching. It has spurned serious concern among small businesses fearful of surviving with less foot traffic. It has launched a grenade of frustration among residents, who may not agree on official mitigation efforts, but are unified in recognizing that the shutdown could end up being a shitshow. And it has become an easy-to-digest symbol to the public of a larger transit crisis, which drags New York’s political actors into the mix.
But the Great Silver Lining of It All, optimists say, is that New York’s streets will be undergoing massive and much-needed changes to absorb that fallout. And those changes, coming in an age of mind-numbing congestion and heightened climate change worry, will benefit New Yorkers long after the L train shutdown is over. What New York will look like during the L train shutdown is a New York that hasn’t yet been seen before, with dedicated bus-only transit on major corridors for the first time, and a wholesale effort to prioritize mass transit and people over cars.
Nearly four months out from the shutdown’s start, VICE visited the streets in the three boroughs that will be hugely affected by the shutdown: Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. There, we checked in on the areas where those changes are taking place to see how things are shaping up. Here’s what we found:
Queens
Union Square West between 14th and 15th Streets will no longer see car traffic, and neither will University Place, between 13th and 14th Street. One-way protected bike lanes were planned for 12th and 13th Street, to make way for the expected spike in cyclists. And perhaps the most ambitious experiment of them all is 14th Street itself, where Manhattan will see its first-ever “busway”: barring emergency vehicles and local pick-up/drop-off for local residents, the main crosstown road will be shut off from 5 AM to 10 PM to private cars, seven days a week.
While the busway will not go into effect until April, the red paint can be seen spanning 14th Street, from Ninth to Third Avenues. A DOT worker at Union Square West said that the pedestrian-only street there would be completed soon, and then work will commence on University Place. And on both 12th and 13th Street the protected bike lanes are in place and heavily used. Although, again, they were seen repeatedly blocked by trucks and cars during a recent visit.
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