5 weeks of J, M train disruptions on the way

The most important thing they should know is the MTA tries to keep this work to weekends to make it as the disruptions as small as possible. But in this case, it's going to impact weekdays, too. And as you pointed out, these changes begin tomorrow. They're going to impact the JM lines, not just in Brooklyn over here, but service impacted from Queens all the way through here into Manhattan. Now, the MTA is going to be suspending service entirely between this Marcy Avenue subway station here in Williamsburg and the Essex Street stop in lower Manhattan. that's going to be in effect for the next five weekends now free shuttle bus service they will run to try to make up for these suspensions but those buses carry a fraction of the riders that trains do and they have to deal with surface traffic which going over the Williamsburg Bridge can be challenging on a normal day now the MTA says they've got to replace an aging switch system that allows them to move trains between Express and local tracks and that the last time these switches were changed were almost three decades ago back in 1997 for reference back then the president was Bill Clinton now weekday service changes are coming too with J trains principally running locally from 10 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon when we went through the system up here we saw some signs are up including in English and in Spanish but many of the people we talked to not only didn't know the changes were coming but that they begin tomorrow did you know about this no uh does this impact you or do you think it impacts a lot of people oh yeah for sure this is a busy corridor over here right yeah it is it is I take the metro to school every single day, so it probably impacts me a lot. My sister lives in New York, and this will probably very negatively affect her. The best advice from the MTA is if you live in part of Brooklyn where you can access either the L train, the A train, or the C train, or any other train, that's probably what you want to do either way. They say to account for longer travel times and increased crowding. Yeah, and all of this is expected to last until November 23rd. We're live here at the Marcy Avenue subway station in Brooklyn, Arthur Chien, Fox 5 News.