NYC Buses Get Failing Grades Amid Transit Crisis

DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN, NY — New York City's bus system is falling into catastrophe even as the subways inch toward stability, transit advocates said Thursday. Nearly three quarters of the city's 246 bus routes got failing or barely passing grades on new report cards issued by the Bus Turnaround Coalition.

Fewer people are riding the ailing buses as they get slower and less reliable, the report says. The average bus speed fell to just under 7 MPH in 2017 from 7.3 MPH in 2015, while the Metropolitan Transportation Authority recorded 6 percent fewer bus trips last year than in 2016.

That's the largest single-year ridership loss in the last 15 years, and one equivalent to the number of bus ridership in some large cities, said Nick Sifuentes, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign. Subway ridership, by comparison, only fell by 1.6 percent last year from 2016 levels.

"This goes far beyond a fluke, or a few more people taking Uber. If the subway is in crisis, then New York's buses are a bonafide catastrophe," Zak Accuardi, a senior program analyst at the Transit Center, said at a news conference outside Brooklyn Borough Hall.

Manhattan's buses are in the worst shape, according to the report cards based on MTA data. Some 41 of the borough's 43 bus routes got a D or F grade on the coalition's report card. The average bus speed there is just 5 MPH, "no faster than a New Yorker running late for a meeting," Accuardi said.

Only seven of Brooklyn's 56 routes scored higher than a D. The two routes that got a B, the B31 and B84, have some of the lowest ridership in the borough, advocates said.

Some 11.8 of buses citywide were "bunched" in October 2017, meaning they arrived too close together and left a big gap before the next bus. Just 9.4 percent of buses were bunched in October 2015.

The MTA has focused on stabilizing the subway system after it entered a crisis last year. MTA Chairman Joe Lhota developed an $836 million plan to do that, and the agency has billions of dollars more in subway construction projects in the pipeline.

But a parallel crisis has been unfolding for years on the buses, which many people take to and from subway stations, advocates say.

The system's outdated routes, aging fleet and inability to navigate heavy traffic makes it unreliable for the 2 million people who use it every day, many of them working-class New Yorkers who have limited access to public transit, advocates and officials say. The typical bus spends 43 percent of its time stuck at red lights or at bus stops, according to a report City Comptroller Scott Stringer published last year.

Advocates and city officials want Mayor Bill de Blasio to install transit signal priority technology, which lets buses pass more easily through traffic lights, on 20 more routes by the end of the year and put dedicated bus lanes on 10 more routes. They also want the state-controlled MTA to let riders board local buses through front and back doors as the agency phases out the MetroCard in coming years.

The city and state must work together to get the buses moving again, City Councilman Mark Levine (D-Manhattan) said. But much of the onus is on the city, which controls the streets the buses travel and oversees enforcement of traffic rules that could speed them up.

"This is really on us," Levine said. "The MTA is ready to go."

De Blasio's Department of Transportation plans to quadruple the rate at which it installs transit signal priority devices on bus routes. Officials also plan to put dedicated bus lanes on more routes and change the space between bus stops, the DOT says.

The department says it's planning such improvements on heavily trafficked streets like Fifth Avenue and Manhattan, Fulton Street in Brooklyn and Main Street in Flushing, Queens, along which 130,000 people ride buses every day.

De Blasio also announced plans last fall to add 21 routes over the next decade to Select Bus Service, a collection of bus routes on which riders pay fares before boarding. Two to three routes will be added each year, the DOT says.

"The City works to manage congestion, improve traffic safety, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in ways that simultaneously improve the attractiveness, speed and reliability of buses," the department said in a statement.

Andy Byford, the new chairman of New York City Transit, the MTA agency that runs the subways and buses, has been keen on improving the long-neglected buses. He's said he wants to formulate a bus action plan similar to Lhota's plot to repair the subways.

"Getting our buses moving again is absolutely essential," Byford said in a statement Thursday. "Working with our partners at the City to unclog the streets and improve bus lanes, we are committed to delivering for our riders. In fact, I explicitly made buses one of my four equal priorities on my first day in office."

(Lead image: Commuters cram into a New York City bus on January 2016. Photo by Mark Lennihan/Associated Press)