By Ivan Pereira
Shuttle busses replaced regular F train service again this weekend — and a “screw-up” by the Metropolitan Transit Agency left Brooklyn straphangers frustrated and confused.
As The Brooklyn Paper reported last month, riders between Church Avenue and Jay Street had been told that such shuttle service was done for the year.
So imagine the surprise of F riders to find the telltale yellow tape and “Shuttle Bus Stop” signs at every station between Kensington and Downtown Brooklyn. The snafu, it turns out, was the MTA’s fault.
“I screwed up,” the agency’s spokesman Charles Seaton told The Brooklyn Paper on Monday. Seaton was the official who had originally said that the ongoing track work on the elevated portion of the line between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens would no longer require the use of shuttle busses.
The humble admission of guilt did come with some caveat: Seaton said commuters could have learned about the service interruption on the MTA’s Web site, in stations or the popular MTA podcast “TransitTrax.”
Few Brooklynites got the memo — and they were furious at enduring another Saturday and Sunday on the shuttle bus.
“The trip takes too long. It sucks,” said Katisha Figueroa who was on the bus in Park Slope.
Another long-suffering rider said it took him and his kids one hour and 40 minutes to get from Bensonhurst to the Christmas spectacular at Radio City Music Hall, a popular venue in Manhattan, an outer borough.
The MTA never told me about the work the F train was having,” Marcello Ocello posted on BrooklynPaper.com after the Web site broke the news about the shuttle buses. “Indeed the MTA is a bunch of knuckeheads.”
Riders will have less to complain about this week, according to the MTA’s online service advisory schedule. There will be no shuttles this weekend, though Seaton could not say when the F line’s service interruptions would end.
