Those Crappy MTA Changes? Hardly a Surprise

Plenty of people seem surprised by the upcoming transit changes on the F line, which start in January, and will mess up service for many commuters until spring of 2012.  This is old news however.  The MTA announced back in October 2007 that the Smith & 9th St. station would be closed for up to a year, for repairs to be made to the Culver Viaduct and to the station itself. Then, in early 2009, future service disruptions at 15th Street & Fort Hamilton Stations - also a consequence of repair work - were outlined.  It's going to be a pretty disheartening time for the F train riders at 15th & Fort Hamilton, but at least they can detour in the opposite direction to get to their destinations.  A pain certainly, but not an insurmountable problem. The people who are really screwed are riders who use Smith & 9th, many of them coming from Red Hook. From January to May of 2011 they'll have to rely on the G train to detour to the F (bad enough), and then for at least a year (May 2011 to the vague & not terribly reliable sounding Spring of 2012) the Smith & 9th Street station will close completely. For Red Hook residents, who these days have just one bus service left in the neighborhood, getting out of the Hook to a train will mean either taking the 61 all the way into the Slope, to 4th Avenue, or in the other direction (even further) to downtown Brooklyn trains.  This is shameful.