How bad is the B?

The B, the temperamental express

The B is the express version of the Sixth Avenue Line, running from Bedford Park Boulevard in the Bronx down through Manhattan's west side to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. It shares the orange bullets with the D, F, and M, and it's the only one of them that pairs express speed in Manhattan with a meandering local crawl in Brooklyn.

The B exists in the shadow of its own cousins. In Manhattan it's genuinely fast along Sixth Avenue, skipping local stops between 59th and West 4th. But its northern end crawls through the Bronx's Concourse corridor, and its Brooklyn end turns local at DeKalb Avenue before heading out to Coney Island's Brighton Beach. That mix means the B is fast when it's express and maddeningly slow when it's not — and it changes character block to block.

Rider well-knowns: the B shares so much trackage with the D, F, and M that when one misbehaves, the B misbehaves with it — 'Heavy congestion at DeKalb, try the D or N if you can' is the eternal B rider's mantra. Its service pattern is also famously inconsistent, with weekend service gaps and interchangeable trains with the Manhattan Bridge set. Don't memorize the B; just check the board and treat whatever orange train shows up as a gift.

If the A is the marathon and the 4 the heartbeat, the B is the understudy — always being swapped in, always doing someone else's job, and never quite the star. That's why it scores low on any given day: the B isn't bad at being a train, it's bad at being anything, predictably, for long.