It's Official: L Train to Suck Through 2010

There's good news and bad news about the L Train from the MTA. The good news is that, eventually, there will be more trains and your life will become slightly less unpleasant. The bad news is that there won't be any relief until 2010. At which point, thousands of additional residents along the L corridor could render the service improvements moot. The New York Times reports on a report given to the MTA yesterday that said:

an additional 64 specially equipped subway cars cannot be fully up and running before January 2010. The additional cars would allow fuller use of a new high-tech signal system intended to increase the line’s capacity.

The crosstown L line, which stretches from Eighth Avenue and 14th Street in Manhattan to Rockaway Parkway in Canarsie, Brooklyn, currently runs with 15 trains an hour during the morning and evening rush, or one every four minutes.

Once more of the computerized trains are added, the authority will be able to run as many as 26 trains an hour on the line during the rush...That works out to one every 2 minutes 18 seconds. Mr. Fleuranges said the agency expected to have the new cars up and running by mid-2009. But a consulting engineers’ report to the authority’s board said the system was not likely to be fully operational with the new cars until January 2010. He said that in the interim some conventional trains will be added to the line later this year to increase peak capacity to 17 trains an hour...

The L line has added riders at a faster pace than the subway system as a whole, according to data from New York City Transit. The busiest station on the Brooklyn part of the line is Bedford Avenue, in Williamsburg, which had 4.99 million riders pass through the turnstiles last year, the agency reported. That was a 139 percent increase from 1995, when 2.09 million riders entered the station. Over all, subway ridership increased 46 percent in the same period.

Hey, 2010 is right around the corner.