MTA Station – Bergen St

No crossover! No crossover! No crossover!
You pays your money and you takes your chance. The reason this review needs to be written is (Ash, no, it’s not an SOS but – ) as a WARNING. Unlike the extreme other end of the MTA transit station spectrum in this part of Brooklyn (I speak of the diabolically complex Court Street station) this deceptively-​humble, humane, cutsey, little Lionel-​train-​set station at Bergen Street presents the opposite quandary. The nearby Court Street is a maze; but the fiendish MTA engineers of long ago chose to wield their black arts in the other direction, when it came to designing Bergen St. It’s a coin-​toss.
This station is for the F and the G. So far so good. Now look: there’s only four entrances; (two staircases which lead you to the trains Manhattan-​bound and two which lead you to the trains Coney-​Island bound. What’s the problem? There’s no underground crossover! Commuters, beware. Here’s what will happen. You’ll be ankling along Smith St in a hurry and boy howdy! There’s the GREEN BALLS of Bergen St station! Lessgo lessgo lessgo – I hear a train a-​comin’. Hustle down the steps. Swipe yourself through the turnstile. Oh what a pretty station. Hey! OOOOOP. What? Huh? Wrong side! Wrong side! See? We don’t want to go back to Manhattan (~or~) Wrong side! Wrong side! This is headed to Brooklyn! We don’t want to go to Brooklyn!
Rush over to the agent’s desk «Sir, will you please let us through so we can cross over to the other side without swiping again? Pretty please?» The look on his face says it all. What crossover? There isn’t any! There never was any! There never will be any! SCREWED.
Ouf! Dejection sets in with a vengeance. Boy you don’t know the meaning of the word heartbreak. Lemme tell you what. Anyway, so. Nothing else to do. Exit the platform, wearily trudge back up the stairs and shuffle back up topside to Smith St and – thoroughly humiliated –cross the street using the pedestrian crosswalk to find the identical GREEN BALLS on the other side of Smith St (a distance of 28 feet) and once again down a staircase and over to the turnstiles to get on the correct platform… only…only…now what. To add insult to injury, YOU HAVE TO PAY AGAIN. Mounting a pile of woe the way only New York can make for you: you’re being *charged double* because the MTA omits the most basic feature of even the poorest, meanest, most-​rudimentary-​transit-​stop-​anywhere-​else-​in-​the-​world: ability to change from one side to the other depending on the direction you wish to travel.
So this is the next predicament which will inevitably sweep over you: «hey my swipe isn’t working». Wha? Huh? Oh yerrr. ‘Card just used’. Well, Mister-​Know-​It-​All has the lowdown on that. What’s the story? «Oh, yes, you need to wait 15 minutes before your metro-​card will let you use it again…» (Even though you have yet to take a train anywhere and you’ve been attempting to do just this very thing, for 12+ minutes). Still… remember that rule? Yep. You must hold still and not move a muscle for fifteen minutes. Torture. Solution: do you have a backup or ‘spare’ MTA card? You do? Well then just swipe it and let’s be on our way.
OOOOP. ‘Insuffiicient funds’. Jerk. Fool. Idiot. Shoulda been monitoring it. Oh well, fear not, all is not lost – the station has ticket vending machines – just go over and dig out some cash and… and…hey?.. well, I thought I had more than $ 2.75 on me… shit…wtf…guess we’ll have to go find an ATM… must be one up on Smith Street somewhere… hey what time is that concert supposed to start?
Behold. The Bergen St Transit Stop ‘coin-​flip’. You had a ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ chance of getting it right when you entered. You lost.