Over the last few months, I’ve written about the joint effort between New York City’s Department of Transportation and the MTA to expand the city’s nascent bus rapid transit program. As part of the planning for BRT Stage Two, NYCDOT is hosting seven borough-specific workshops designed to identify travel corridors ripe for this transit expansion.
Last week, the traveling BRT show hit up two locations in Queens for feedback from the borough’s most underserved borough. While Queens enjoys the benefits of numerous subway lines, intraborough travel is very disjointed, and the quickest routes often involve heading into and back out of Manhattan. If any borough stands ready to enjoy the increased connectivity between subway lines and transit hubs that bus rapid transit can provide, it is Queens.
As expected, the reports from the workshop were fairly routine. Local store owners are concerned that decreasing street capacity for cars and parking lanes will negatively impact business. Increased transit though should improve efficiency and encourage mixed uses of the very same streets held hostage by automobile traffic and congestion.
DOT officials and transit advocates painted a sunnier picture. “If people are looking for short-term improvements to their transit service,” Joe Barr, NYCDOT’s direct of transit development, said, “this is really a good way to deliver that.”
While the usual suspects offered up support, more encouraging were the words from elected officials at last week’s event. Both John Liu and Eric Gioia, city council members representing various parts of Queens, recognized the impact BRT could have on the burgeoning borough. BRT, noted Liu, could link Flushing and Forest Hills, and Gioia praised it as a way to alleviate transit problems in Long Island City.
This is definitely good news. The city’s council members have a tenuous history of lukewarm support for break-through transit programs. Congestion pricing wasn’t embraced, and many have questioned the wisdom of spending billions of dollars on seemingly limited subway expansion plans. If council members are prepared to embrace BRT proposals, NYCDOT and the MTA should do all it can to exploit that support.
As megaprojects move slowly in New York City, bus rapid transit lanes could institutes quickly and cheaply. When the studies are through in a few weeks, the city’s agencies should move fast to act. We’ll all benefit from it.
4 comments
Indeed! A route that I hope gets considered at some point would be an Express version of the M60 bus between Upper Manhattan and LGA. Stops at LGA, 31st St in Astoria (N/W transfer), and the four subway transfer stops in Harlem. A faster version of the M60 would be very heavily used, I suspect.
Does the M60 still run every 20 minutes? The quickest way to cut the travel time would be to run these buses every 5 or 10 minutes. After I waited 15 minutes for the g.d. bus I always hailed a cab. But now I don’t try it at all. Forgetaboutit.
The MTA could also easily improve service by having the lazy ass driver announce the stops, like, “Exit here and walk a block ahead to American Airlines.”
Without that announcement, a first-time passenger will likely stay on the bus for a complete tour of the airport facilities. The next stop will be the NWA/Delta terminal, then the USAirways terminal. At last then comes the main terminal, finishing with a stop sort-of-near American Airlines, about 15 minutes after the bus first drove past those departure gates.
These two small changes, however, would require a bit of intelligence and attention to the needs of the passengers at the MTA, rather than an enormous expenditure of taxpayer funds, so I don’t expect to see them implemented in my lifetime.
For a start I’d incorporate BRT with the existing Express and Commuter Bus lines. On the Long Island Expressway I’d build a bus only corridor (that’s camera-enforced or fenced off) that goes through the Queens–Midtown Tunnel. Like the Lincoln Tunnel it should be a “congestion buster” for all the current Express and Commuter Buses that use the LIE and tunnel.
As a newly-minted E Bronx resident who is living without a car, I can say that transit between Jamaica and Flushing is very unrepresented. The only ways to get back and forth are the Q44 which is crowded and long, or take the LIRR and change in Woodside which is expensive and long. An SBS connection between these two hubs will go a long way in making travel between the Bronx and LI easier. Not like the current 2.5 hour Bellmore-Throgs Neck journey I am on now (by car, it’s about 30 minutes)