How bad is the M?

The M, the orange line with a weekend identity crisis

Orange like the F and the B and the D, but much smaller in ambition. The M is the short one, the line that runs from Middle Village-Metropolitan Avenue in Queens through Ridgewood and Bushwick, over the Williamsburg Bridge, up Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, and out along Queens Boulevard to Forest Hills. On weekdays it makes the whole trip. On weekends it often stops short, turning back before the river and leaving the crossing to the J. Riders have learned that the M on a Saturday and the M on a Tuesday are practically two different trains wearing the same color.

Trace it from the Queens end and the M starts among the low houses of Middle Village and Ridgewood, then slides through Bushwick on the Myrtle Avenue line, where it shares the neighborhood with the L and the J. Marcy Avenue, then over the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan at Essex Street. From there it runs up Sixth Avenue past Broadway-Lafayette, West Fourth, Fourteenth, Twenty-Third, and Thirty-Fourth, threads the midtown cluster around Forty-Second and Forty-Seventh, and heads back into Queens through the Fifty-Third Street corridor to pick up the local stops along Queens Boulevard. It is a genuinely useful diagonal, drawn short.

The M's modern shape owes a lot to a service change that retired another letter. When the V was cut from the map, the M inherited its Sixth Avenue route, and with it a clearer reason to exist: one train linking Ridgewood and Middle Village to midtown and on to Forest Hills. Before that reshuffle, the M was a stranger to large parts of the track it runs today. So it is a line with a divided memory, a short present, and a letter that has meant different things to different generations of riders. Routes here get reborn when the network reshuffles, and the M is one of the clearest examples.

The weekend pattern is what riders complain about most. When the M turns back before the bridge, a trip that had been one seat becomes two trains and a wait, and the J picks up the slack across the river. Frequency is another sore point: the M is not a line you can count on showing up every few minutes, so a missed train can cost you real time. Add the occasional reroute and you get a service that rewards attention. Regulars treat the M less like an appliance and more like a relationship that requires upkeep. Watch the board, learn the pattern, and it will treat you fine.

What the M does connect is a string of neighborhoods with very different personalities: Middle Village and Ridgewood, still stubbornly residential; Bushwick, loud and mural-covered; the Lower East Side around Essex Street, dense and old; then the length of Sixth Avenue, running through the Village, Chelsea, and midtown; and finally the Queens Boulevard corridor to Forest Hills, where the local stops give way to one of the city's quieter residential ends. It is not a glamorous list, and that is exactly why the line matters. Millions of trips are made between unglamorous places, and the M is built for the trip nobody writes a song about.

Transfers make the M work harder than its size suggests. Myrtle Avenue connects it to the J, Essex Street is steps from the F, Broadway-Lafayette and West Fourth open up the entire Sixth Avenue and Eighth Avenue networks, and midtown hands you the big east-west crosstown options. Riders who have figured this out use the M as a quieter alternative to the crush on the F, especially in Manhattan, where the two run side by side. That is the M's real talent: it is often the emptier train on the same route. Knowing which of the two to board is the difference between standing and sitting.

So the M is short, it can be infrequent, and its weekend cutback is genuinely irritating. Weigh that against what it gives you: a one-seat ride from deep Queens to the middle of Manhattan, a calmer version of the Sixth Avenue corridor, and a bridge crossing it shares with the J and the J's slow, scenic stretch. It is not the train you plan a trip around. It is the train that quietly makes a hundred ordinary trips a week possible for people who are not going anywhere famous. For a line that spent years being someone else's route, that is a respectable second act.