Don't mourn the L train – make the bus cool again

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/26/l-train-closure-new-york

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For a year and a half beginning in early 2019, riders of the L Train, New York’s trendiest subway line, will be cut off from Manhattan. The shutdown, planned in order to repair the tunnel running between Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood and Manhattan’s Lower East Side, has left hordes of weekday commuters wondering how to get to work and an equal number of hipsters wondering where they’ll go to be seen.

What makes the L train so unique is not its nearly 10 million annual passengers. Certainly the 225,000 commuters who take the L to work between Brooklyn and Manhattan every day will be inconvenienced, but they are not the real issue here. Instead, the crisis is one of people-watching. Like most subway lines, the L gets overcrowded during rush hour. But something really special happens on weekend evenings: riding in either direction across the East river has become a scene unto itself.

According to the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), which runs the subway system, L Train use has increased fourfold since 1990, corresponding roughly with the rise of Williamsburg as the center of New York cool.

It runs through all kinds of hipness, from the ritzy cool of the Chelsea-West Village border to Bushwick, the rapidly gentrifying new hub of Brooklyn hipster culture. Lots of people think these kids are insufferable, but I don’t think that’s fair. They get knocked for having no discernible employment, but trying that hard to be cool seems like a lot of work to me.

Just take a trip sometime before January 2019 to the Bedford Avenue station and see for yourself. Every trainload delivers enough cool kids to fill up a concert at the Knitting Factory several times over – and they’ll all have guitars slung over their tattooed shoulders, often along with a skateboard. There’s hair of all colors, shapes and sizes, all the best tattoos and enough skinny jeans to wrap around the Earth three times.

This is more than a subway line. It is a conduit of cool on to the island of Manhattan, infusing New York’s most yuppified borough with enough spirit to keep investment bankers from taking over completely. That scene – the trickle that helps keep Manhattan tolerable for the rest of us – will be wiped off the subway map for 18 months. For those of us who love to put our headphones in with no music on and eavesdrop, the shutdown will be a nightmare, the last victim of Superstorm Sandy, when millions of gallons of saltwater flooded the Canarsie Tube that carries the train under the East river. The MTA conducted a survey and found that riders would rather have the long shutdown than an even longer period – several years – of one-track service and intermittent shutdowns to boot.

The closure will leave us with lots of important questions: where will the cool kids go? To Queens via the G Train or, God forbid, to south Brooklyn? To East New York? Will they transfer to the M Train? Or just stay put?

Whichever way they go, things are set to change. The delicate cultural ecosystem will be disrupted. And so I have a proposal: one of the alternatives put forward by the MTA is to run shuttle buses across the Williamsburg Bridge. Those who relish making the uncool cool now have a new project on their hands: making buses hip.

There will doubtless be a period of adjustment, but your gold-sparkle stretch pants and studied indifference will eventually seem like they were made for the bus. Go for it: you have nothing to lose but your trains.