MTA officials have proven again that they excel — at taking service away from desperate riders.
Brass at the cash-strapped agency have incredibly rejected an offer of a free shuttle bus — financed in full by a local lawmaker — for 7-train riders slammed by 11 straight weekends of service outages.
City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer offered to pay for the $250,000 direct, no-transfer bus from Long Island City to Grand Central while the MTA worked on the signal system under the East River. The money would have come out of his own discretionary funds.
But the agency wasn’t interested and opted for its own three-transfer plan.
“The commute that used to take 10 minutes now takes an hour at least,” the pol fumed.
MTA chiefs balked at his idea, Van Bramer said, because they worried that if they offered it to 7 riders, they’d have to do the same for other communities that deal with serial service outages, like those along the L line.
An MTA spokesman said the agency looked into the plan but found its own meandering route faster.
“It would not save customers time and could actually make their commute longer depending on traffic conditions,” the spokesman said.
The MTA route involves busing frustrated riders from the Vernon Boulevard station — where they’re close enough to see the skyscrapers across the East River — backward, to Court Square, where they can catch an E train to Manhattan or Queensboro Plaza, where they can get an N train.
But unlike the 7 train, neither the N nor the E brings riders to Grand Central, so straphangers have to transfer again, to the 42nd Street shuttle train, to get there.
Van Bramer’s route would simply make loops from the Vernon Boulevard to Grand Central via the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.