Roosevelt Island Tram Shutdown Begins This Morning - Will Commuting From Roosevelt Island Be A Nightmare As Many Fear Or A Minor Inconvenience?

And so it begins this morning - a tram-less Roosevelt Island for what is hoped to be a six month period during which the Tram will be renovated and returned to service no later than late August/early September. NY 1 reported on the last day of the Roosevelt Island Tram:

The Roosevelt Island Tram is set to make its final East River crossing Sunday night before undergoing a six month-long renovation and repair project.

Service on the tram will be suspended beginning at 2 a.m. Monday.

"We'll miss it. We won't be able to go until September again, so that's why we wanted to go today to get one last fun ride," said Upper East Side resident Joe Covey.

The $25 million project will replace everything except the bases of the three towers that support the cars.

Project managers say when all is said and done riders can look forward to more comfortable cars and more reliable service.

In the case of a malfunction, like the one which left 70 passengers stranded for seven hours back in April 2006, cars will run on a backup power system and be able to return to the nearest station.

"It will be far more flexible during operation so it will be easier to load the people from one side to the other, even if there's maintenance operation on the other trams," said Project Director David Aubonne...

There's NY 1 video too.

The Daily News adds that the Tram Shutdown will impact others in addition to Roosevelt Island residents.

... Barbara Oyola of the Bronx typically takes the tram to her job at a Roosevelt Island coffee shop. She's expecting the shutdown to add an extra 75 minutes to her commute.

"I'll have to see the new tram to believe this is worth it," she said. "The F train stinks. Riding it is going to be the worst."

In addition to the F train, commuters can use the Q102 bus or take $1 shuttle buses to the Queens Plaza subway station and the E, G, R and V trains.

The tram carries about 2 million riders a year. City officials warn the work will also affect traffic on First and York Aves., as well as 59th and 60th Sts. and the Manhattan-bound upper roadway of the Queensboro Bridge.

For the record, it should be remembered that the reason why Tram passengers were stranded for hours over the East River in April 2006 was not because of any mechanical malfunction or lack of a back up power supply as implied by the NY 1 report. A prior post, reprinting an editorial from the 8/30/08 Main Street WIRE explained why those Tram passengers were stuck over the East River:

... On April 18, 2006, equipment that was working as designed triggered a routine stop on the 5:15 p.m. trip, leaving two cabins and their evening-rush passengers hanging. Shortly thereafter, a rookie Tramway employee, inadequately trained for such an ordinary occurrence, was unable to execute a standard restart procedure. His incompetence ... was exacerbated by the arrival of NYC emergency personnel - most notably NYPD but also including FDNY units - who were all too willing to undertake some heroic rescue activity in view of helicopter-borne television cameras. Their eagerness was compounded by the interdepartmental rivalry in which NYPD didn't want to be upstaged by FDNY. The rescue effort was summarily removed from the hands of experienced Tramway personnel who had arrived and who were ready to resolve the situation without outside help.

It was later revealed that equipment that should have reeled in the two cabins failed because it had not been maintained and fully tested on a regular basis....

... They blamed the Tram.

The equipment became the scapegoat. Like RIOC presidents before him, Berman had been more interested in building things than in taking care of the things that we already had. For a bureaucrat, it's nice to be able to say, "I built that." There is not as much glamour in being able to say, "I took care of what was already there."

Once the blame was fully misdirected to the equipment, that was rationalized: It's 30 years old was the blanket that obscured all else. But age had vitually nothing to do with the Tram's failure that day. The failure was in components whose maintenance and testing had been slipshod. Put that down to human factors and failed supervision. Hardware can fail, even backup hardware. But that night's hardware failures, as they mounted, clearly had their root in human failures, most notably laxness in maintenance and testing...

But all that is now in the past. Let's hope that lessons were learned and the Tram Modernization is completed on time with service resuming in six months.

The question for the next six months is what will the Tram Shutdown do to commuting options to and from Roosevelt Island. Will the rush hour F Train be horribly overcrowded? Will the Red Bus Shuttle to Queens Subway Station and Manhattan be adequate? We shall see.

Here is the Red Bus Shuttle schedule during the Tram Shutdown and the Tram Modernization Construction Schedule.