No one can quite remember the last time the G train ran from Court Square to 71st Avenue in Forest Hills on a weekend.

"There is almost never service to Forest Hills," said Monica Giza, who knows the whims of the G intimately-she commutes from her home in Forest Hills to her office in Brooklyn daily. "It's been this way as far back as I can remember."

The G is the city's only subway that connects two boroughs other than Manhattan. It originally ran north from Smith and 9th Streets in Brooklyn to 71st Avenue in Forest Hills. When the V was introduced several years ago, the MTA terminated the line at Court Square in Long Island City on weekdays, taking out almost half of the line's stops. It was supposed to still run all the way to 71st Avenue in Forest Hills on weeknights and weekends.

It hasn't done so for months. The now ubiquitous signs cancelling weekend service offer only the vague explanation, "This service change is needed to allow for track work." In addition, the G train service that remains is often broken into two legs by a transfer at Bedford-Nostrand Avenues in Brooklyn, forcing passengers to change trains late at night.

Dierdre Parker, a spokeswoman for New York City Transit, said there have been several different capital projects that necessitated the disruption in service. Currently, she said, the project is to replace the tile work at the Queens Plaza station. The G shares tracks with the E, R and V at Queens Plaza and beyond, through several Queens neighborhoods including Elmhurst and Rego Park. "There isn't room to run four lines," Parker said. Since the G has the lowest ridership, it is the line that was cut. Service will be out for "quite a while," she added.

"The entire G train service has been decimated," said City Councilman John Liu, chairman of the Transportation Committee. "They've abandoned it." The MTA often points out that the G train has fewer riders than other lines, and that's why the cuts are prudent. But if the line wasn't so unreliable, Liu said, riders would use it more.

"It's something we call the murder by death method," agreed Teresa Torro, New York City coordinator for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and co-founder of the group, Save the G Train.

Save the G Train was founded when the V line began replacing local service in Queens, in response to a problem that didn't exist, Torro said. The V train was supposed to alleviate overcrowding on the E and F express lines along the Queens Boulevard line by providing another local option.

But people would rather stand on an express train than sit on a local train, she said, and now the only positive outcome of the change is that passengers can always get a seat on the V-because nobody rides it.

Comments from the Straphangers Rider's Diary message board ranged from the angry, "I can't remember the last time the G actually ran to Continental on a weekend," to the philosophical, "The G is a stepchild of the subway since it doesn't go to Manhattan" to the bitterly sarcastic, "It's taking too long to cut the G permanently from Queens Boulevard."

Indeed the MTA initially proposed cutting G service from Court Square to 71st Avenue entirely in the first draft of its 2005 budget in order to make up for a $436-million cash deficit. The cut was later withdrawn in the face of pressure from lawmakers and the public, who charged the borough's and the city's poorest commuters were bearing the brunt of the MTA's financial problems.

Now, some are suspicious that the service disruptions are simply a de facto way to implement the original plan of halving G train service. "The MTA is expert at end runs around the public review process," Liu said, stopping short of accusing the agency of outright lying to the public.

"It's not personal," Parker said. "If you want to keep the system up to date, you need to make sure the track and switching are all in good repair."

In the meantime, the Long Island City area is undergoing a boom in residential and commercial development, which some people think will work in the G's favor. Gayle Baron, president of the Long Island City Business Development Corporation, which just launched its Business Improvement District this week, said increased demand may force the MTA to reinstate the service. "This may be the case for the time being," she said of the service disruption, "but they are responsive to increased demand."

Torro agreed that the G would prove indispensable soon, but was not as generous to the MTA. "It's not going to be too much longer before the MTA will have to deal with it. Unfortunately they only work in crisis mode."

Copyright 2005 Queens Chronicle. All rights reserved.

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