As half of Bushwick and Ridgewood’s residents are ensnarled in an M train commuting nightmare this summer, the rest of us are waiting with bated breath to see just how bad it’s going to get once 2019 rolls around.
A new study from data company, Teralytics, confirms that the closure we’ve all been stressing about will bring nothing but headaches throughout the MTA system, placing additional strain on already overloaded stations and subway lines.
Georg Polzer, Teralytics’ co-founder says, “We saw significant effect on Penn Station, Court Square and the Williamsburg Bridge. The next year needs to be spent preparing the stations and train lines to cope with the impending changes in traffic.”
For instance, they’re predicting that 17,000 additional people will utilize the JMZ lines. Another 25,000 people might turn to taking cars across the Williamsburg Bridge.
Court Square’s transfer point between the E, M, 7, and G could get a little bit more crowded. Teralytics predicts that the station may see a 7 percent increase in traffic, which also means that the G train could get a lot more crowded, especially if the number of cars per train is not increased, too.
In part, information like this is important because enough planning ahead of time could accommodate these extra travelers. Polzer adds, “Thanks to a new depth and scale of available data, we can accurately forecast the implications. More importantly, we can begin to plan for them.”
Teralytics used information about how people moved through the MTA system during the L train outage on the morning of October 6 of last year. Analysts “were able to look at the patterns in commuter travel and compare to a number of ‘normal’ days, where there was no outage and no other problems across the transport network. This enabled us to associate the change in commuter travel with the L train outage and predict how the city may move when the scheduled shutdown begins down in 2019.”
Fingers crossed that studies like this will help the MTA make decisions to help their nervous L train riders!
Featured image courtesy of Teralytics.