Another G Train Shutdown Means Greenpoint Needs Better Bus Priority

They need a rescue from Rudolph the Red-Painted Bus Lane.

The MTA’s plan to shut down the G train this holiday season should motivate the city to clear the way for bus lanes or even a busway in Greenpoint, the neighborhood’s state senator said on Thursday during a press conference where she implored the MTA to delay the closure until January.

“We are urging the MTA to move their December dates to another time to January because we know that December is another set of peak weekends for these small businesses,” said State Senator Kristen Gonzalez (D-Greenpoint).

Whenever the shutdown happens, though, the state legislator also urged the city to make more room for the shuttle buses that run instead of the train.

“We’d love to see more bus lanes, more protected bike lanes in this neighborhood as well,” she said.

Elected officials and local shop owners in Greenpoint gathered on Thursday in front of a local ceramics shop to decry an MTA plan to shut down the G train in the north Brooklyn neighborhood for the first three weekends in December, during the busy Christmas shopping season — a schedule they say will severely damage their bottom line when they can least afford it.

“Every closure hurts,” said Perri Salka, the owner of the store Wonder Mart and and the lead organizer at Shop Small Greenpoint. “But today we are specifically advocating for changes to the MTA’s proposed December shutdown schedule: three back-to-back weekend shutdowns during the very month that keep small businesses afloat all year.”

“At the Wonder Mart alone,” she continued, “holiday shopping in the month of December brings in a quarter of my annual revenue, enough to cover four to six months’ worth of rent. That is not revenue I can afford to lose this year or really ever.”

The MTA’s weekend-long G train shutdowns, when the G train doesn’t doesn’t run north of Bedford-Nostrand Avenue, have become a sore spot for neighborhood merchants. The G is the only train that provides direct service to Greenpoint. The MTA originally asked the neighborhood to deal with summer weekend G train shutdowns in 2024 and 2025 as the agency upgraded old fixed block signals to modern CBTC signals, which will allow the MTA to run more frequent and reliable service on the line.

But this year the MTA added more weekend shutdowns to the schedule because the agency said it had to repair leaks in the train tunnel under Newtown Creek that were improperly plugged after Hurricane Sandy damaged the passageway.

The MTA replaces G service with free bus shuttles. But those buses simply hold fewer people than trains, and they must contend with weekend traffic on narrow streets.

In much the same way that the MTA sent shudders through Williamsburg when the agency announced his plans to shut down the L train in 2018, the G train shutdowns have inspired an apocalyptic mood in its crunchier neighbor to the north. Salka said that a survey of small business owners in Greenpoint reported sales dropping by an average of 20 percent during weekends without G trains.

But there are important differences between how the city and state handled the looming shutdown in 2018 and how they’ve handled the rolling G train shutdowns. Eight years ago, the MTA and DOT spent a great deal of time and resources planning how to move people who otherwise relied on the train between Brooklyn and Manhattan — all before then-Governor Andrew Cuomo cancelled the shutdown altogether. No such plans exist for the G train shutdowns. The MTA and DOT expect Greenpointers to figure it out for themselves.

In response, neighborhood residents have called for better logistics to give shuttle bus riders a better trip since the subway repairs started in 2024, but DOT has so far not engaged with the idea during any of the shutdowns. Those same residents and visitors have also had no luck getting around with Citi Bike: people biking into the neighborhood consistently encounter docks that are completely full on weekends, leaving them nowhere to actually end their rides.

Rider advocates also called on the city to make more room for the shuttles, in order to create something as close to subway service as possible while fixing the pressing problems under Newtown Creek.

“To keep as many folks in transit as possible, the buses should move as quickly as they can and move like trains as much as possible,” said Riders Alliance Director of Policy and Communications Danny Pearlstein. “It’s a huge waste of time to ride a shuttle bus, and it’s not competitive with taking the train. We all agree the signals should be upgraded so we don’t waste people’s time, but we don’t want to waste people’s time on a slow unreliable bus.”

DOT did not respond to a request for comment.