Transit Authority
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Q: Labor Day is one of the biggest travel weekends of the year. The question for this city resident is, Should I stay or should I go?
The answer depends on how you plan to travel. Airports, roads, and tunnels will be packed early this afternoon as people look to get a jump start on the three-day weekend. The commuter trains have the good fortune of being able to expand service to meet demand. The Port Authority expects a typical surge in the numbers of travelers this Labor Day weekend and has said forthrightly that tunnels, bridges, and airports will be congested. So expect traffic – everywhere – and allow an extra 30 or more minutes of travel in each direction. The city’s three airports will see 1.3 million travelers, about a million more than last year. Construction at the American Airlines terminals 8 and 9 at JFK Airport will slow travelers. On the roads, nearly 3.5 million drivers will clog the arteries leading out of the city, a number similar to last year, the Port Authority predicted. Whether a hurricane-related surge in gas prices will lead people to stay off the roads, or take automobile trips sooner to avoid even worse gas prices, is unclear.
The best bet for the claustrophobic or particularly delay-averse traveler may be the commuter-rail lines, which will add trains to accommodate Labor Day revelers leaving work early for the East End of Long Island or perhaps the Gold Coast of Connecticut. Between noon and 4 p.m. today, 25,000 commuters are expected to hop on Metro-North trains, 250% the normal passenger load for those hours on an ordinary weekday. As a result, the railroad is adding 12 trains and about 150 cars, its deputy director for operations planning, Eugene Colonese, said. The Long Island Rail Road, meanwhile, will make available nine additional trains heading out of the city this afternoon.
Q: We used to have the D train, then the D and the Q. When the track work on the line started several years ago, we all assumed that we would get back our familiar D train. But instead, we got the B train – and, of course, the two were switched. Do you know any rationale for this?
For most of the time between 1967 and 2001, B trains ran from Washington Heights south across the Manhattan Bridge to Coney Island. D trains ran along the same route in Manhattan but started at the Norwood-205th Street station in the Bronx and split in Brooklyn to provide express service on the Q line out to Brighton Beach. On July 22, 2001, service over the Manhattan Bridge was suspended for track and bridge repairs, severing the connection for many trains between Brooklyn and Manhattan. When service over the Manhattan Bridge was restored in 2004, the B was mysteriously moved to where the D was, and the D joined the M, N, and R lines to run in Brooklyn on the old West End line to Coney Island. Now, the B runs express where the Q runs locally. Why did they do this? To simplify things! One explanation given is that express service on the Brighton Beach line historically ran only during weekdays, as does B service, so it was thought that the two lines could be combined, and that on weekends you would only have to suspend one line, the B, rather than parts of two lines.