A New York Magazine illustration highlights the various elements of the MTA's Select Bus Service plan. Click to view the descriptions.

Cut a bus. Add better bus service. That’s the MTA’s mantra this year as the transit authority had to eliminate or scale back numerous bus routes last week as part of the service cuts while Select Bus Service, the city’s abridged version of Bus Rapid Transit, will make its debut along 1st and 2nd Avenues in the fall. As Jay Walder tries to, in his words, “make buses sexy,” the MTA in partnership with New York City’s Department of Transportation is implementing a plan that’s almost there but doesn’t quite satisfy what both politicians and activists want.

This week, the glowing coverage of the city’s Select Bus Service comes from New York Magazine’s Robert Sullivan. He profiles the advances in bus routing that the MTA and DOT are working to put into action, and for the most part, he treads familiar ground. He talks about how buses are cheaper to build out and how bus lanes can truly elevate bus service in the eyes of a ridership used to hearing about elderly and poor bus riders. He pays lip service to the “BRT-as-surface subway” line of thinking that I have shot down in the past.

“When the city adopts a world-class ‘Bus Rapid Transit’ system,” Kyle Wiswall of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, said to Sullivan, “people are going to have a tough time, efficiency-wise, telling a bus apart from a subway—it’s going to be like a subway with a view.”

There are, of course, obvious problems with Wiswall’s claims. Buses can’t go as fast as subways, and unless they run with near-constant frequency, they can’t approach the capacity of one full subway car, let alone a 600-foot train of 8 or 10 cars. As New York has drawn them up, the Select Bus Service lanes don’t cross the arbitrary borough borders and don’t cross over or under the city’s rivers. Without the Holy Grain of dedicated and physically separated bus lanes, few will mistake SBS for a subway, and as Sullivan notes, a world-class bus system is a ways off.

Where Sullivan’s article hits its stride is in its discussions of the conflict between politicians and city planners. Usually planners want to be more ambitious than the politicians, but in the debate over Select Bus Service, the New York’s transite-phobe politicians have embraced calls for a more encompassing plan. He writes:

In this case, however, many lawmakers are more ambitious about buses than the bureaucrats. When the MTA and the DOT were putting together their plans for First and Second Avenues, nineteen legislators—including City Council members, State senators and assemblymen, and U.S. representatives Carolyn Maloney, Jerry Nadler, and Nydia Velázquez—wrote a letter pressing them to “take the project further” and build physically separated lanes. The DOT subsequently made changes, but it argued that external circumstances (i.e., Second Avenue subway construction) makes separated lanes impossible.

“A lot of us think that they are not seizing the full opportunity here,” says Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh, who helped organize the campaign. “They are not thinking broadly enough about how to restructure the service and restructure the streets.” Kavanagh is not anti-car; he believes, in fact, that more buses on First and Second Avenues might make Lexington Avenue better for cars. “We have to get the balance right,” he says. But the shift in balance should not be to increase bus speed slightly; the shift needs to turn buses into a substitute for rail, with rail-like speeds and rail-like reliability. Kavanagh says that his fellow legislators are prepared to take flak for risks. “We are willing and ready to help facilitate the conversations that need to happen and to sell the ideas to businesses.”

It’s an odd moment: The DOT and the MTA are both captained by mass-transit evangelists fluent in urban best practices. They are committed to working together rather than at the usual cross-purposes. They are moving toward a radical revamping of mass transit and the city street. And they are being chided—by Albany legislators!—for their limited scope.

Perhaps it’s post-traumatic-stress disorder. Although Westchester assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a noted congestion-pricing killer and MTA watcher, speaks excitedly about improved bus service, he’s circumspect about overzealous technocrats: “Someone’s got to be like your aunt, saying, ‘No, no, dear, that won’t work.’?” But politicians who are hesitant about the bus future end up groping for an argument against it, and the reflexive populist case for the automobile is difficult to make in comparison with buses.

Sullivan goes on to blame poor leadership from the mayor and no political capital from the governor for the DOT/MTA reticence. Mayor Bloomberg has long been licking his wounds from the congestion pricing fight, and David Paterson is treading water until Andrew Cuomo can take over the reins. Meanwhile, Select Bus Service moves forwards with some positive elements but many omissions that are needed to make the bus system truly rapid transit.

For now, though, we’ll be satisfied with the baby steps and ask for more. With Albany hesitantly granting the MTA the right to use bus-lane cameras, we’ll need dedicated and separated bus lanes. To serve areas without subway access, the BRT plans should include more borough-to-borough connections. As they are right now, the routes are simply faster feeders to subway hubs. And to succeed, the MTA will have to ensure that fare beating remains at acceptably low levels.

Select Bus Service is probably the biggest on-street change to New York since the trolley tracks were ripped up decades ago, and if it works, something good will have come out of a period of MTA service cuts. The road to true innovation remains a bumpy one.