How bad is the R?

The R, the local of four boroughs

The R is the yellow local of the Broadway line, running from Forest Hills in Queens, under the East River into Manhattan, and out to Bay Ridge–95th Street in Brooklyn. It's the line that's local nearly everywhere — and in covering four boroughs (Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and a token of Staten Island spirit via the Bay Ridge-end Amtrak corridor) it does a lot of work without ever being the star.

The R is the dependable local half of the Broadway trunk, the counterpart to the express N and Q. Where the N flies, the R stops — 125th Street-south Broadway local through Times Square and Union Square, then a long slog down the Brooklyn end to Bay Ridge. For riders in Bay Ridge and the Ridgewood-adjacent parts of Brooklyn, the R is the everyday ride to Manhattan.

Rider well-knowns: the R has the longest end-to-end slog of the Broadway lines, so it's the one that feels the slowest. Its Queens end shares the express tracks of the E a little and the local tracks of the M more, which means it's constantly jostling with neighbors. The stretch through Brooklyn — 36th Street, 45th, 53rd, 95th — is a proper end-of-the-world terminus that serves the waterfront neighborhoods nothing else reaches.

The R is the underrated workhorse of the western loop. It's not exciting, it's not fast, it's not famous — but it's local-everywhere and four-borough broad, and the neighborhoods it serves have nothing else. On most days the R is the quiet local that simply gets the job done — and that's a perfectly respectable score.