Oh, the New York City buses. They’re great for getting around the city unless you’re actually trying to get somewhere fast. Today, the Straphangers Campaign, the public transportation riders advocacy group, reinforced that age-old New York stereotype in awarding its annual Pokey and Schleppie Awards.

This year, the M23 took home the Golden Snail, the award for the slowest local bus route in New York. The M23, according to Straphangers, averages about 4.0 miles per hour as clocked at noon on a weekday. That’s not much faster than walking, as the East Village Idiot pointed out when his M14 took home the Snail last year.

New for 2007 is the Golden Schleppie award. This one goes to the least reliable bus as based on official transit stats and looks like a parade of elephants. The M1, one of the various buses that head up an down the East Side, took home the inaugural trophy. According to the Campaign, nearly one in three M1 buses have gaps in service or are off schedule.

Of course, the M23 and M1 aren’t alone in providing painfully slow and staggered service. As the Straphangers Campaign noted, numerous crosstown buses in Manhattan seem to crawl across the city, and bus service overall in the city suffers from oppressive traffic numbers and few dedicated bus lanes.

Now, after the Straphangers issued their findings today, the MTA reminded us of a few key initiatives aimed at speeding up bus service. Because bus service is so dependent on surface travel conditions, it’s tough for the MTA to push out 100 percent accurate schedules, but the Authority is trying to work with the Department of Transportation to make travel easier:

NYC Transit is working closely with the NYC Department of Transportation to improve bus service for the city’s 2.5 million daily bus customers. The joint initiatives include signal light prioritization, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and the identification of traffic congestion “hot spots,” where effective strategies can be developed in cooperation with NYCDOT to increase the speed of bus service operating through those areas.

I wrote about these BRT lanes in July, and my feelings still hold today. If the MTA is going to improve bus service through the use of BRT lanes in the city, they will have to ramp up traffic enforcement measures.

How many times are buses delayed because cars are double-parking in bus stops or in the right line? How many cars have opted to ignore laws surrounding the new bicycle lanes popping up on streets across the city? The answers, in both cases, are too many to count.

Buses equipped with the equivalent of red light cameras and more patrol cars looking out for BRT violations is a good place to start. But until buses are afforded the space on the road that they deserve, the Straphangers Campaign will continue to have Pokeys and Schleppies to dole out to motionless buses.

The MTA hopes to win a Nobel Prize for its efforts in combating greenhouse gas emissions. (Photo courtesy of flickr user mss2400)

In the spring of 2004, around the time that the global warming/hybrid car craze really took off, for a class about automobiles, I wrote a paper proposing that taxi cabs in New York City should all be converted to hybrids. My argument focused around the economics of gasoline and cab drivers as well as the environmental impact this move would have on New York City.

This was, by no stretch, a very creative argument. With so many cabs patrolling the streets of New York, it made sense to turn these polluting vehicles into greener hybrids. An abridged version of my essay ended up in my ultimately unsuccessful application for the New York City Urban Fellows program, and I like to joke today that my essay kicked off the currently ongoing effort to convert the taxi fleet into one of hybrids.

This was my first real exposure to urban transportation politics, and two and a half years later, Second Ave. Sagas was born. Today, we revisit that original topic: hybrid automobiles. In this case, we’re talking about buses. The MTA announced this week plans to add 850 new hybrid electric buses to the fleet.

“The MTA’s transportation network makes the entire region sustainable and we are committed to making the system itself a sustainable model,” Elliot “Lee” Sander, Executive Director & CEO of the MTA, said. “Along with the sustainable commission that we launched this fall, the continuing purchase of environmentally-friendly vehicles illustrates this commitment.”

In effect, this new purchase is a contract extension of a 2005 deal between the MTA and Daimler AG. The original deal between the transportation authority and the German auto maker called for 500 buses, 284 of which were to go to MTA Bus and the other 216 to New York City Transit. The MTA picked up a 389-bus option on that contract and negotiated a 461-bus extension. No word if Daimler AG was insulted when the MTA wanted to add a World Series incentive to the contract.

This new order allows for NYCT to take on most of the new buses. Of the 850, 105 of them will go to MTA Bus. The other 745 will end up in the hands of New York City Transit. According to the MTA, these buses will be employed to meet ridership and equipment demands brought about by Bus Rapid Transit lanes. Hallelujah.

“The ability of being able to expand our fleet will help us to increase capacity as we look forward to the implementation of Bus Rapid Transit,” NYCT President Howard Roberts said.

I, of course, love this idea. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the MTA is, by virtue of its public transportation mission, is a green organization looking to go greener. Its trains use energy-conserving breaks similar to those found in hybrid cars, and now the Authority is adding a whole fleet of green buses.

I – and Al Gore – wholeheartedly support this move. More hybrids for everyone.