One way to measure the success of the new V line is to watch the morning rush-hour trains arriving at the Lexington Avenue/53rd Street station in Manhattan.

If you’re lucky enough to find room on the overcrowded platform, you will see E trains from Queens that are almost always packed.

Tidal waves of humanity pour from subway cars. People look flustered. They carry still-unread newspapers shriveled like chewing gum.

“E train riders have become sardines,” said Michael Doyle, former associate director of the New York City Transit Riders Council.

There’s plenty of room, however, on the V train. There, you can cross your legs and read the paper without folding it into the size of a matchbook.

“V is for vacant,” said a platform conductor at the Roosevelt Avenue station — only half kidding.

Wednesday morning, the conductor was actually nudging people into E trains so the doors could close.

When a V local pulls into Roosevelt Avenue, it’s like someone screamed “anthrax” on board. Most straphangers scurry for the dangerously crowded platform to wait for the E.

Here we are more than a month into a redrawing of the subway map that was supposed to translate into “New Routes, More Options, Less Crowding,” according to New York City Transit propaganda. Hello!

“It’s lousy,” said Richard Caballero, a loan reviewer who lives in Jamaica and works in Manhattan. “They made it worse.”

Caballero is lucky to have a job. He has been late for work everyday since mid December, when V service commenced.

“My boss is very understanding,” he said.

NYC Transit hoped to boost capacity between Forest Hills and Lexington Avenue by luring riders onto the new V local from crowded E and F express trains.

They were banking on many Queens Boulevard commuters choosing extra room over faster service.

It doesn’t appear to be working entirely.

The F train is less crowded. But many of its passengers are now on the E.

“For me it’s a disaster,” said Tony Necakov, an architect from Rego Park whose half-hour commute now takes 45 grueling minutes.

“I can’t take it anymore,” said Yahmeela Aziza Serna, 24, an administrative assistant for a web design firm in Manhattan. “The whole thing is a mess. It doesn’t work.”

None of this, of course, surprises people familiar with the transit system. Rider advocates warned long ago that without a direct connection between the F train and the IRT No. 6 line, more passengers would squeeze onto the E.

The Straphangers Campaign, in fact, recently polled more than 300 subscribers to its Web site. Of the 335 respondents, nearly two thirds rated the service plan as poor or fair.

Some irate commuters responded with language not suitable for a family newspaper.

Thirty-four percent gave the plan good to excellent grades, and these were mostly riders who found the new routing more direct.

The Straphangers Campaign and other groups have requested a meeting with NYC Transit President Lawrence Reuter to discuss problems with the new line.

“The V, the E and the F are like the weather,” said Gene Russianoff, senior attorney for the Straphangers Campaign. “All you can do is complain about them. You really can’t do anything about it.”

Transit officials said they don’t expect to have any meaningful data on the V line for months. That the local line appears unpopular among many Queens subway riders is irrelevant.

“It doesn’t have to be jam packed or even heavily used to be a success,” spokesman Al O’Leary was insisting yesterday. “Even if it takes five percent of the ridership from the E and five percent from the F then it will have done what it was intended to do. That is relieve the pressure of overcrowding on those two lines.”

That doesn’t mean changes are unlikely. “We will make adjustments in the future if we find adjustments that make sense,” O’Leary said.

Platform conductors along the Queens Boulevard line, meanwhile, will be available to nudge riders onto packed E trains.

Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.

This article originally appeared here on the New York Newsday website.