Talk:B35 (New York City bus)

Untitled

The junction at Church and Gravesend was first used on April 8, 1900 for a variant of the Marcy Avenue Line to Coney Island.

A Few Comments - the article title &c

The title of the article is kind of clumsy, since it is meaningless to someone who doesn't know upfront that we're talking about a bus line in Brooklyn, New York. If there is a Church Avenue Line elsewhere in the world, then the title is even more ambiguous. Church Avenue bus route (Brooklyn, NY) or something like that would be better.

In terms of local nomenclature, the trolley was the "Church Avenue Line" but when it became a bus, it became the "Church Avenue Route." That was common to all conversions, and is one way that transfer collectors could tell if a transfer for a given service was a bus or trolley transfer.

Also, maybe this is just a trivium, but the current short-route local service that ends at McDonald Avenue is a lineal descendent of the Gravesend-Church route. When trolley service ended in 1956, the buses that replaced the trolleys that formally went to the 16th Avenue Loop ended their runs at Church & McDonald, where you got a transfer to the Vanderbilt Avenue bus, which was extended to Ditmas and McDonald. -- Cecropia 02:45, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

My line of thought for naming this article (and other similar ones) is that the streetcar lines are more "notable" than the bus routes that replaced them, so it makes the most sense to present it in the context of the former streetcar line. I'm not sure if this is the best way, but it's how I ended up doing it. And technically it's not the Church Avenue Route (at least not any more); it's the "Church Avenue/39 Street" Route. It seems like the streetcar lines' names were "cleaner" to some extent. --NE2 04:11, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Yea, I understand the point. A streetcar line is something physical, while a bus route is usually nothing more than instructions to a driver on what streets to drive on. I still have a problem with not being a little more specific as to what we are talking about in the title. Maybe something like "Church Avenue Line (Brooklyn, NY surface transit)". There is a Church Street streetcar in San Francisco, and it seems fairly like that some other transit system might have a Church Avenue Line.

As to route names, I notice they tend to put all the major streets a bus runs on in the route name in NYC now. I recall "back when" that people had a tendency to call a bus or trolley line by their local street. Good example: the people in East Flatbush used to call the B6 the "Avenue D Bus" and would give people directions that way. "Get to my house by taking the Avenue D bus to East 54th Street." But, while the bus ran for quite a distance on Avenue D, the route was named 18th-Foster. -- Cecropia 04:58, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

The style I've been using is "Church Avenue Line (Brooklyn surface)". However, from a search on Google and Google Books for "church avenue streetcar" -brooklyn and variants, it appears that this was in fact the only one. --NE2 05:09, 14 March 2007 (UTC)