For me, one surprise in the Manhattan Bridge brochure was the announcement of rush-hour W express service on the Astoria line. I hope it succeeds. I predict complaints from the passengers to/from the skipped stations. As a system-wide rider, I like the idea of evening rush-hour running center track to Astoria Blvd center platform, getting people as far north as possible a few minutes more quickly. However, we then run into the typical New York problem of the jammed terminal. So frequently, and for so many decades, we have had crowded trains stalled one station short of a terminal, as nightly on Sutphin on the E. The Wakefield and Van Cortlandt Park solution has sometimes been maddening: taking trains out of service one station before the terminal.
I hope that Astoria Blvd is an appropriate unloading station, and that a crowd of travelers will be pleased to hike it home from there.