No L Trains Between Broadway Junction and Canarsie Until 10 P.M. Sunday — Free Shuttle Buses Are the Way Through
The eastern end of the L is dark for track work all weekend: no trains from Broadway Junction to Canarsie-Rockaway Parkway until Sunday night, and the free shuttle bus is the only ride on that stretch.
Canarsie's train is a bus this weekend. The MTA has suspended L service between Broadway Junction and Canarsie-Rockaway Parkway from 3:30 a.m. Saturday through 10:00 p.m. Sunday while crews replace tracks, and free shuttle buses are covering the closed stretch. L trains themselves are still running on the rest of the line — between 8 Av in Manhattan and Broadway Junction, about every 8 minutes during the day and evening and every 12 minutes overnight.
The practical shape of the trip is a transfer nobody chose. Riders coming from Manhattan or Williamsburg ride the L as far as Broadway Junction and change there for the shuttle; riders starting in Canarsie, Flatlands or East New York start on the bus and meet the train at Broadway Junction. Either way, the bus leg is the slow leg — it runs on surface streets, in the same traffic as everything else, and the honest advice is to add real time, not hopeful time.
The work is the unglamorous kind the system runs on: track replacement on one of the line's oldest stretches, concentrated into a single weekend shutdown rather than spread across weeks of late nights. The MTA's pattern is the same one behind this fall's J and M weekend closures — take the whole segment at once, run buses, and hand the line back for the Monday commute.
Service is scheduled to return at 10 p.m. Sunday, in time for the Sunday-night trip home and well ahead of Monday morning. Until then, anyone whose trip starts or ends east of Broadway Junction should check the MTA's alerts before leaving, because the shuttle's timetable is a plan and Sunday street traffic gets a vote.
