While I’m not much of a beachcomber myself, it seems to me that in the New York area going to the beach isn’t the big deal today that it was in the 1960s when I was a child, let alone in our parents’ generation when just about everyone headed to Coney Island, Orchard Beach or the Rockaways on warm summer weekends. Part of this may be changing tastes, part of it is the decline of on-shore amusements in these areas, but part of it is public relations. Private transit companies were always trying to find ways to entice people to travel during the off-peak hours, weekends and holidays, when there is plenty of capacity and additional customers are pure profit. Many streetcar companies built amusement parks and picnic grounds at the end of the line, to convince city dwellers to go in the opposite direction for an outing. And, until the creation of New York City Transit in 1953, the subway system featured special trains to Coney Island. I suggest that the MTA bring that service, and other special summer services, back.
The Coney Island summer service ran express from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day on what is now the Franklin Avenue Shuttle and the Brighton Express, from Fulton Street in Brooklyn to Stillwell Terminal in Coney Island. On sunny weekend and holiday days, it was extended on the otherwise unused express tracks on the Sea Beach (N train) line into Lower Manhattan at Chambers Street.
With the system, and the city, reconfigured over the past 50 years, I would propose a different service pattern. From 10 am to 3 pm, four “Beach Specials” an hour (one every 15 minutes) could run from Queensboro Plaza on the Astoria (N line) to Manhattan, make local stops on the BMT Broadway line to Canal Street, then travel over the Manhattan Bridge and down to Coney Island as a Sea Beach super-express, bypassing all stops between 59th Street and Coney Island by using the middle track. While traveling to Manhattan during these hours, the trains could run as regular N and Q trains to bring Brooklynites into the city. Between 3 pm and 10 pm, the service pattern would reverse. Trains would run as regular N and Q trains outbound to bring Brooklynites home from Manhattan, but rather than traveling with fewer passengers the other way, they would run as super-express “Beach Train Specials.”
Unless the service were to really take off, it may not even be necessary to run additional trains. Of the six trains per hour running on each line, four running against the prevailing passenger traffic would run in regular service and two as “Beach Train Specials.” This would take advantage of the fact that most people are traveling to Manhattan early in the day, and from Manhattan later on, while travel to Coney Island is the reverse. I’d run the service anytime the temperature was forecast to be over 85 degrees Fahrenheit on a weekday or 80 degrees with no rain on a weekend, from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The uncertainty as to whether the service would be operating would give radio stations, TV stations and newspapers a reason to make announcements when it was. If the service did take off, the Beach Special could become an additional train in each direction, at least during non-rush hours when subway cars and track capacity is available.
Why were beach specials discontinued? Perhaps because they make no practical sense. Whatever time a customer would save by skipping stations, they would lose by having to wait for the “Beach Train Special,” making the tradeoff at best a wash.
However, perhaps because I have now been in the private sector for nearly two years, I’m starting to think of people’s tendency to follow the herd rather than think for themselves as something to be taken advantage of rather than something I could hope to change. I’ll bet that if there were a “Beach Train Special” advertised as such, in flyers distributed in hotels and in eating and drinking establishments patronized by young adults, some tourists and twentysomethings would travel to Coney Island who wouldn’t have thought to have done so otherwise. Some tourists might buy Metrocards who would otherwise have purchased tickets on the double-decker buses. PR and symbolism shouldn’t work that well, but often do.
And while we’re at it, now that it has taken over the route as part of the MTA bus company, could the MTA extend the Q53 “Beach Bus” a little farther to Riis Park during the summer, rather than have it stop at Beach 116th Street? That bus runs express from the Queens subways — the Flushing Line and the Queens Boulevard Line — down the Rockaways, but stops short of what ought to be its ultimate destination, requiring a change of bus and a long wait given limited Sunday schedules. A well publicized “Beach Bus” could bring more Western Queens residents, those less likely to have their own cars, to the ocean.
And how about the Q35, which carries riders from the Junction in Flatbush to Riis Park? If, during the summer, that line were extended west to cross more subway and bus lines (Q/F/D/B68), might it attract enough Brooklyn riders to justify service more than once every 30 minutes on a Sunday? Riis Park may be the most underutilized public facility in the city, which is fine for those of us with a car (it’s where I go in the ocean once a year) but not for anyone else.
MetroNorth and the Long Island Railroad both have summer excursions. New York City Transit can as well. This summer why not give operations planning and marketing something more fun to do that the thankless job of planning and publicizing service diversions. You never know. With global warming, it could be a long hot summer.