More weekend subway service is coming to Brooklyn

Beginning June 2023, riders on the G, J and M will notice more trains arriving (fingers crossed)

Our buses will still be a mess for the foreseeable future, but at least some near-term improvements are being promised to Brooklyn subways.

Beginning in June, subway riders will notice more weekend service on several lines that snake through Brooklyn, according to the MTA. However (there’s always a catch), those improvements will come in exchange for fewer trains running on Mondays and Fridays. The MTA announced Monday the schedule changes to “better meet post-Covid travel trends,” that has some people commuting less because they’re working from home.

“Discretionary travel has led the subway recovery from the depths of its pandemic dip, with weekend ridership recovery outpacing weekdays,” said New York City Transit “Weekend Subway Czar” Jose LaSalle, said in the release.

More scheduled trips will be added the G, J and M with headways improving by approximately two minutes. Currently, trains run about every 10 minutes. The MTA said that those three lines were targeted for improvement because riders use them to “transfer to other subway lines and have longer waiting time between trains on the weekends than many other lines.”

To make that possible, the MTA is making “strategic reductions” on Monday and Friday service on seven lines, with three of them — the F, L and Q lines — running through Brooklyn. The agency said that on these lines “subway ridership overall has been consistently lower on Mondays and Fridays” because of hybrid office-home work.

Subway ridership has been slow to bounce back to pre-pandemic levels, especially on weekdays. For example, data collected by the MTA for a recent Wednesday in December shows it about 64 percent comparable to the same day in 2019. In contrast, ridership on a recent Saturday is about 77 percent comparable to pre-pandemic times.