Daily News from New York, New York • 365

SUNDAYsNEWS NEW YORKS PICTURE NEWSPAPER -local news and features Home improvement YOUR GARDEN WORLD OF ANIMALS CLASSIFIED in Queens FEBRUARY 6, 1977 Peak Trip? It's Still a Subway Stampede i r.1 4 A- i -1 JZ I i -'If Hi I 4 )K JiiHiJ. A By ARTHUR BROWNE In one quick surge, the crowd virtually picked the young well-" dressed mother off her feet In its. stampede to board the subway. One by one they squeezed and shoved their way into the car, forcing the crowd inside to give way, filling every bit of standing space, barely able to move. The young mother came to rest as the doors began to close.

She looked about her frantically. "Billy, Billy," she called desperately, realizing that in the crush she had lost hold of her 9-year-old son's mittened hand. The fright in her voice was clear: Had the boy been left standing alone on the platform as the train pulled away from the station. Seconds later from somewhere in the crowd came the response "Mommy, Mommy." The scene occurred on a Queens-bound IND J2 train at the Lexington St. station last week.

It's the type of thing one might expect to see all too often during rush hours, but this particular incident happened shortly before noon on a Tuesday. The reason for the crowded condition was clear, however. -r 1 Getting off buses, commuters troop into Union Tpke. IND station. Queens.

See below. the change booth on the 95th St side of the Rockaway Blvd. station on the Libetty Ave. IND line. The petitioners contend that closing the booth hns caused intolerably long lines at the station's remaining booth.

Legislators from AVoodhaven. Richmond Hill, Ridgewood, and Glendale have been pressuring the MTA for almost a year to restore service on the BMT line at least during rush hours. Service on the line was terminated to save money. Rockaway residents Ime complained repeatedly about the lack of heat in IND A trains. The shortcoming, they say, is particularly severe as the trains cross Jamaica Bay and are hit by frigid winds.

The heating capacity of trains The same attitude seems evidont nightly in the thousands of people who line up for buses along Hillside Ave. at 169th and 179th as well as in the hundreds of people who wait for the Q44A bus nightly on Queens Blvd. and Union Turnpike. "They get In line and they wait there every night no matter what the weather is like," said Bert Donaldson, a Forest Hills resident who works for a Manhattan publisher. "I go by them almost every night and I'm surprised they never revolt.

They never even seem to get angry." Still, there have been many complaints. In Ozone Park 350 community residents have petitioned the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to reopen ine lengm oi au suDways our-ing non-rush hours, this train had been cut by about 50, forcing the same number of riders to fit into half the space. The cut was made as part of a Transit Authority effort to make a $30 million budget cut mandated by the Emergency Financial Control Board. It was only the latest in a series of service reductions since 1975 that have directly touched the millions of New Yorkers who use mass transit daily: shortened subways, less frequent buses and subways, the termination of whole subway lines, such as the BMT Broadway-Jamaica line, and closed token booths. In Queens the cuts have been felt deeply, aggravating a situation that transit experts have recognized for years: The borough is underserved by-rapid transit.

Major portions of Queens, particularly the southeast and the northeast, are not reached by subways. In those and other areas, hundreds of thousands of people have to take buses just to get to the subways. At the same time they've got to contend with cutbacks on both forms of transportation. RJdershlp Fgores Kidership figures also tell a story. Citywide, the daily subway ridership is slightly under 3.5 million.

According to the TA, approximately 450,000 people start their subway trips at stations in Queens every day. Since the TA does not keep figures on return trips to Queens from outside the borough, however, the 450,000 figure is misleading. on the A line was reduced two winters ago as part of a systemwide reduction to save money during the energy crisis. Because of the city's budget problems, transit officials say that it is unlikely that many of the complaiuts will be satisfied in the near future. The Emergency Financial Control Board has mandated S30 million in cuts over the next 18 months, the officials and without new revenues the cuts ill remain in effect.

S30M in Cuts Mandated The only major service improvements that are now forseen for Queens involve the construction of the southeast Queens subway line, which is now underway. Fiscal problems have not halted the work because the MTA "has set a priority on providing service to the southeast area of Queens, a spokesman said. To understand how Queens got to this point, however, srokesman Don Harold, an amateur transit historian, suggests that we look to the past when the subway system was being built. Most of the Queens subway system was built before the 1930 s. Lines such as the IRT Flushing line and the IN'D to Jamaica were extended to their present terminals even though much of the area surrounding them had not yet been developed.

"I've got a picture somewhere that shows the Flushing line crossing nothing but fields," Harold said. wasn't even much built on Queers Boulevard yet" Harold said that he believes that the lines were built out into largely undeveloped areas at the behest of real estate speculators hoping to open new areas for development. Construction was finished on virtuallv all the lines before World War but It wasnt un til after the war thst the population of Queens began to climb quickly as more and more outlying areas were developed. i Ti iini ii I s- I 1 i ine aciuai riueiamji iu vjuccua much higher, a spokesman said, and In terms of numbers of passengers fected, then, the spokesman said, the effect has been great. How have the people reacted to the cuts? On the train last week most people seemed resigned to coping with them.

ilia nnint In tttiintf TMtA at I one another? We're all in the same boat hbweseS together." said a salesman from Jack "Subway construction just got left behind." a spokesman said. The cost of building subways rapidly Increased and people began to resist having construction in their neighborhoods. The supply never kept up with the demand." son Heights. "How much can you try to fight it? When they've got to make cuts these davs, they've got to make cuts." New photos by Jack Clarity Boarding train, riders wait to squeeze into Jammed car..