Buses

Did Bill de Blasio prove me wrong? Of course not; that’s a rhetorical question with an obvious answer. But just a few hours after I wrote about his lack of plan to accommodate transportation amidst New York’s reopening, the Mayor unveiled 20 miles of new busways and bus lanes that will be added to city streets by October. In doing so, Bill de Blasio managed to fail to meet the MTA’s request by two-thirds and the city’s borough presidents’ by 50 percent. He missed a prime opportunity to drastically reshape miles of city streets amidst an ongoing pandemic where giving people more space is of utmost importance, and while better than nothing, de Blasio’s plan is the bare minimum any mayor could have done. And, oh, the mayor announced, as an aside meriting one sentence of his time, that the 14th St. Busway is now permanent.

First, the details, in handy chart form.

As you can see, the city is getting 3.5 total new miles of busway treatments and 16.5 miles of new bus lanes. The ridership numbers are a bit fudged as, for instance, the end-to-end daily ridership of the M14 was 28,000 before the pandemic, and the 0.8 mile segment from 1st Ave. to Ave. C accounts only for a portion of that. Still, during his comments, the mayor spoke about improving bus service for 750,000. Each rider will benefit from better service, but bus prioritization along only parts of some routes mean most riders will never experience the difference.

As to timing, these lanes will roll out month-by-month through October. The Flushing busway and bus lanes along 14th St. and 149th St. will arrive in June, followed by the Jamaica Ave. and 5th Ave. busways and Hylan Boulevard bus lanes in July. August will see a busway enter service on Jay St. and bus lanes on Merrick Boulevard while the 181st St. busway isn’t due until October. The mayor said the busways will be “similar” to 14th Street, and his press release talks about offset bus lanes in other places. But if similar to 14th St., the busways will still allow cars for a block at a time and the successes will rely heavily on enforcement, whether in person or automated. That’s the plan; let’s get to the thoughts.

The Mayor is still talking past the MTA

Last week, the MTA asked for 60 miles of bus lanes throughout the city. They have to ask because the city controls its own street space, and their request came a few weeks after the city’s cadre of borough presidents requested 40 miles of lanes. The mayor responded with 20, and his lanes and the MTA’s own requests hardly seem to align.

Here's how the city responded to the MTA's request. They're just continuing to talk past each other.

? E 149th
? E.L. Grant
? Tremont
? Fordham Rd
? University

? Flatbush Ave.
? Bay St.
? Richmond Terrace
? 181 St.
? Main Street

? Archer Ave
? Livingston St.

— Second Ave. Sagas (@2AvSagas) June 8, 2020

Many of the bus treatments the mayor announced yesterday weren’t even among those requested by the MTA, and even more confounding is how thoughtful the MTA’s request was. DOT, for instance, has bus lane designs for E.L. Grant and University Ave. on ice, just waiting for the go-ahead to proceed. The MTA seemed to be considerate of DOT in making its own request, but the mayor hasn’t responded in turn. When asked by Streetblog NYC’s Gersh Kuntzman about the differences between the MTA’s request and the city’s plan, the mayor responded by not answering the question:

I’m someone who likes to see progress and celebrate progress and then keep making more progress. So my attitude is this is a major step. The fact that we have proven in a way that – you know, the history probably better than me. I don’t think a busway like 14th Street was successfully achieved previously in city history. Maybe I don’t know my facts, but I think I’m right. The fact that today we’re saying 14th Street is now permanent, five more coming in. It is the beginning of something really positive, obviously between the busways, the Select Bus Service, all of these approaches have been working and that opens the door to a very positive future for New York City. And this is a great time to do it because we got to give people confidence to come back to mass transit. So we’re going to do everything we can do, but we’re always going to tell you what we think we can do right now. And then as we see the next opportunity to do more, we’ll of course do more.

It’s a fine answer for a run-of-the-mill Monday three years ago but one that falls apart under scrutiny in the midst of a pandemic.

A Day Late and A Few Months Slow

To that end, why did the mayor wait until Monday morning, hours after the city entered Phase 1 of the restart, to announce new bus treatments? The timing of this announcement shows a lack of urgency on the part of the mayor and the frustration the city has felt with his lack of plans. The time to announce post-PAUSE busways and bus lanes was April, when city streets were empty, and New Yorkers knew they needed more space on transit. Buses, after all, have remained popular throughout the past few months. The city then could have used April and May to implement these lanes so that they were serving essential workers during lockdown and in place as restrictions lifted. That’s what every other city has done, but instead, we’ll get a few lanes this month and a few more by the end of the summer. If we’re in the middle of a public health crisis, you would never know it from the mayor’s slow and deliberate approach.

‘New York City can have a little busway, as a treat’

While route miles are not always strong indicators of quality, the mayor’s plan is diminishingly small. With approximately 6000 miles of city streets at his disposal, the mayor has opted to put busways on 3.5 of them and buslanes on another 16.5, for a grand total of 0.33% of city streets. Under this perspective, even the MTA’s more expansive ask represents only 1% of city streets, and we should be thinking even bigger right now. Simply put, there is no vision to reimagine street space; these are just scraps under the table of the private automobile which has long dominated the way we allocate public space in New York City.

That said, these lanes are good starts. We have long needed bus lanes across 181st Street, and untangling even just 0.3 miles of Flushing would do wonders for a heavily-congested area. As Transit Center noted, “Short busways can make a big impact if they carve a path through intense traffic congestion.” Still, these short treatments that well-run city would have implemented four years ago seem far too meager for the moment. Brooklyn, after all, a borough that is a city unto itself with 2.3 million people, is getting all of 0.6 miles of a busway as close to Manhattan as possible. This does very little to facilitate travel across greater distances.

Feeder Routes Amidst a Pandemic

Along with the distances is the problem of design. Generally speaking, we want to design transit in this COVID-19 moment to encourage dispersed usage. We want more people on buses so that subways are emptier and social distancing easier. By and large though, these new bus lanes bolster the feeder-route nature of the city’s bus network. The Flushing treatment, for instance, makes getting to and from the 7 train easier, as does the 181st St. route, but outside of destinations in Flushing or for NY-Presbyterian-bound commuters, these new lanes do little to get people from where they live to where they work without relying on the subway. What we need is a massive temporary re-think of the bus network that enables interborough connections in ways the current bus network doesn’t. That’s not a de Blasio per se, but the current crisis exposes and exacerbates the limits of NYC’s bus network.

Getting the mayor to commit to transit is always a fight

The mayor makes improving transit in New York City an exhausting fight. For months, advocates, politicians and even the MTA called for more and more busways and faster. The mayor finally relented, and when he did, it was to grant everyone a fraction of their initial requests. So the politicians and advocates have to line up to issue their praise and then continue fighting for even more miles of busways. This is how the mayor, who ran on an agenda of equality, treated Fair Fares: He refused to embrace it and then did the bare minimum when forced to. It’s exhausting for everyone involved in the advocacy and planning, and it’s no way to run or improve a city.

The mayor had an opportunity to think big, help New Yorkers get around faster and more efficiently during a pandemic, and he did the bare minimum weeks too late. If that’s not Bill de Blasio’s transportation approach in a nutshell, I don’t know what is.

As most of my readers know, when it comes to Bill de Blasio’s transit record, I am not, to say the least, a fan. Although the mayor doesn’t control the MTA, he otherwise sets the agenda for NYC’s streets, and on that front, as I wrote in a piece for Curbed New York last week, his record is a bad one that shows a bias toward planning that goes out of its way to accommodate low-capacity personal vehicles at the cost of transit prioritization and pedestrian and cyclist safety.

The mayor, driven everywhere, has long been a driver in NYC, and his failure to embrace and expand everything from the popular pedestrian plaza programs to a true network of protected bike lanes to bus prioritization has left New Yorkers’ mobility options at least in stasis since the start of his term in 2013, if not worse. My Curbed piece explores this view in detail, and I’d love for you to read it right here. I didn’t hammer the point on expanding the pedestrianization of the city, but to that end, Doug Gordon of Brooklyn Spoke has the topic covered.

What I would like to explore a bit more in depth are buses. The mayor’s agenda essentially set the stage for good (or, in de Blasio’s case, bad) bus service. He decides, through NYC DOT, how street space is allocated to various modes of travel; whether buses get priority, via infrastructure, design and technology, over low-occupancy, private vehicles; and just how many other cars are on the road.

For New York City in 2019, the proliferation of parking placards and placard abuse and the decline in bus speeds go hand in hand. The constant presence of cars illegally parked in bus lanes and buses navigating through slow traffic is one of the greatest failures of de Blasio’s tenure, and we have reached the point where the bus system is now in crisis thanks in no small part to the mayor’s inactions. In fact, when the MTA recently announced service cuts to 11 bus routes with the threat of more to come, the agency noted that certain of the cuts came about so that bus travel times would accurately “reflect current traffic conditions.” In other words, buses can’t meet their schedules these days and service is being cut because the city hasn’t done enough to get cars out of the way, and the buck stops with the mayor.

Lately, the bus crisis has become more of a talking point for New York politicians jockeying to separate themselves from the mayor. Corey Johnson’s transit takeover plan calls for massive investment in buses, and a 2017 Scott Stringer report issued a similar call for more city investment in buses. The MTA is chugging away at operational reforms (unfortunately while cutting service to save dollars), and even the mayor, after years of constituent complaints, put forward something of a plan for buses in April. What’s good? What’s bad? And will any of it be enough before the bus system collapses in on and itself? Let’s find out.

Ridership Snapshot: The Current State of Buses

In a word, the current state of bus ridership is bad. Average weekday ridership in March was just under 1.8 million, and the 12-month rolling ridership average shows a decline of 5%. As recently as 2017, the 12-month rolling ridership average was over 2.1 million, but ridership has been on a steady downward trajectory as travel times have increased. Bus ridership has essentially never recovered from the last fare hike.

To drive home the point, average bus speeds in New York City are 7.4 miles per hour, the slowest among the 17 largest U.S. bus companies, a recent report by Stringer found. In Manhattan, buses average 5.5 miles per hour, and some crosstown routes are slower than a normal walking pace for a healthy adult. Buses are in motion only around 55% of the time with red lights and bus stops accounting for over 40% of travel time. These unreliable and slow travel times have led to an exodus as those who have the luxury of choice no longer see the bus as the best one.

2021 Hopefuls Jockey for Bus Investments: Scott Stringer’s Take

So far, as I mentioned, both Stringer and Johnson, two local pols with dreams of Gracie Mansion dancing through their heads, have focused on buses lately. I explored Stringer’s proposal in early 2018, shortly after it was published. It’s very much a potential platform plank masquerading as a Comptroller’s report as it included 19 recommendations on everything from bus route design to procurement practices to bus lane design and enforcement.

As politicians look to rescue the buses, the focus on bus lane design and enforcement is the hinge. Here’s Stringer’s take:

First, maintenance should be improved. All bus lanes, whether SBS or not, should be marked distinctly and repainted more regularly so that they do not become faded.

Second, the DOT should continue to experiment with greater separation of bus lanes to physically restrict other vehicles from entering the lane. They should also build more lanes in the center of the road…Not only should these median bus lanes serve as a model going forward, existing curb-side and off-set bus lanes should be converted, where feasible. The City should also expand the number of double bus lanes—like those currently proposed on Fifth Avenue—to better accommodate turns and help mitigate bunching by enabling buses to go around those waiting at a stop.

Finally, the City must improve the enforcement of its bus lanes.

Stringer also urged the city to “place greater emphasis on bus lanes outside of SBS corridors. It can also assist with the introduction of new, inter-borough routes by installing exclusive lanes on more city bridges.” He further called on NYC DOT to do a better job designing Select Bus Service lanes. NYC, he wrote should “introduce truly separated bus lanes to ensure they are protected from unauthorized cars and trucks. It should also work to provide exclusive lanes throughout the entirety of the route, not just segments.”

Importantly, as well, Stringer urged the city and MTA to reconsider stop spacing, especially along routes where stops are less than 750 feet together, a distance well below international standards. Lately, the MTA had been considering just that approach along the M14, but local resistance based on a belief that buses should be door-to-door transit options is likely to torpedo that plan. To fix and speed up buses, though, some stops will have to be eliminated. As Stringer noted:

“Shorter distances between stops may well be appropriate in certain sections of the city, like those with a high concentration of seniors. Yet the fact remains that bunched stops lead to slow and unreliable service that repels all bus riders, both young and old. Across the city, there are nine bus routes with stops located less than 650 feet apart. Four are in Brooklyn, three are in Manhattan, and two are in Queens (see Table 5). All but two saw ridership fall between 2011 and 2016 and collectively, they experienced a nine percent drop, more than double the city-wide average.”

Johnson Calls for Fast Bus Lane Expansion

The Speaker’s Let’s Go transit plan devotes a lengthy section to buses. Noting that NYC’s buses are “extremely unpredictable and the slowest of any big city in the country,” Johnson aptly notes that what we’re doing now isn’t working and criticizes the city for dragging its feet on everything. Only 15 new miles of bus lanes, for example, were installed between 2017 and 2018 in all of New York City.

Johnson’s plan is rightly ambitious. He calls for 30 miles of new bus lanes per year and echoes Stringer’s call for better design:

“Every new bus lane should be camera enforced and physically separated from traffic along appropriate corridors where camera enforcement proves ineffective. In addition to the physical separation of bus lanes, the plan should also prioritize the implementation of two-way separated bus lanes in the median along key corridors, to keep buses free from conflicts with deliveries, turning vehicles, and double-parked cars wherever possible.”

He wants every bus route to have camera-enforced lanes and signal prioritization technology by 2030 and wants to push through on current route re-design efforts to drive bus ridership to 16 percent of New Yorkers’ trips within a decade, essentially doubling bus mode share. It’s aspirational but would help free up significant road space by reducing private auto and for-hire vehicle use while bolstering sagging bus service.

The Mayor Finally Releases a Plan

And what of the mayor? Over a year after Stringer released his report and a few weeks after Johnson’s plan was unveiled, the mayor finally acknowledged that something had to give on buses. To that end, he released his Better Buses Action Plan [(pdf)] last month. As bus plans go, it’s a fine one, but a better fit for a first-term mayor looking to leave an imprint on the city rather than a term-limited mayor who’s seemingly lost interest in the city.

A full list of the specific improvements are available in the press release, but on specifics if pales in comparison with Johnson’s plan. At a high level, the mayor wants to “improve” five miles of bus lanes per year and install 10-15 new ones annually, or at best half of what Johnson proposed. The mayor wants to bring TSP to 300 intersections per year (rather than the 1000 Johnson proposed) and has suggested piloted just two miles of physically separated bus lanes this year. Why we need such a modest pilot of a design that works the world over is a good question.

On enforcement, the mayor spent a good deal of time during his press conference highlighting the seven new NYPD tow trucks. It’s unclear if anyone has seen these tow trucks in action, and they certainly aren’t aggressively removing cop cars from bus lanes yet. Just walk down 2nd Ave. in the East 20s any weekday and count the placards. He doesn’t seem to understand the breadth of the problems with placard abuse — including abuse of real placards, use of fake placards, and traffic enforcement agents willing to overlook illegal parking if you scribble something on a napkin and stick in your dashboard — and can’t comprehend how these cars interfere with speedy buses and mobility in the city.

The mayor’s goal is to increase bus speeds by 25% by the end of 2020, but even that increase — from an average speed of 8 mph to 10 — seems unlikely with a plan as modest as the mayor’s. Maybe it can move the needle on certain routes, but when the mayor’s own action plan highlights just five miles of lane upgrades as a headliner, I see a piecemeal approach to bus improvements rather than a holistic, citywide effort to reform the network.

What’s Next For Buses

For now, we’re stuck with de Blasio’s plan and the MTA’s ongoing network redesign efforts while Johnson’s and Stringer’s proposals remain aspirational at best until after the 2021 mayoral election. That doesn’t mean buses are doomed, but it does mean that projects and lane upgrades and, yes, buses themselves will continue to move slowly. The MTA’s redesign effort has seemingly slowed the rate of ridership loses, at least for Staten Island, in the early going, but routes are just one part of this puzzle. The city needs true bus lanes, real enforcement and faster and more reliable bus service. We know what needs to be done; we just need a leader to do it.

The following post is my longer analysis of New York City Transit’s bus action plan. I originally wrote this up for Gotham Gazette, and you can read it here. I’ve expanded it for this post with some additional deep-dives into the plan itself.

In the Big Apple’s transit circles, Andy Byford has quickly become the hottest U.K. import since the Beatles. New York City Transit’s new president, brought in this winter from his job as the head of the Toronto Transit Commission, faces the unenviable task of fixing the city’s ailing subway system and restoring faith in its vital transit network. Just three months into the job, Byford is moving at a breakneck pace, and on Monday, he unveiled an ambitious plan to speed up New York City’s snail-like local buses and fight the tide of declining ridership.

The plan sets the bus system on the right road toward improvement but will require city and state cooperation and a change in NYPD culture, two elements in short supply these days that could torpedo Byford’s best efforts. It is also likely to require more money, which is also in short supply.

The New York City bus system is a curious thing. It is notorious unreliable with buses that crawl through city streets stopping every two or three blocks and with average speeds that barely exceed eight miles an hour. With infrequent and unreliable service, ridership has declined by nearly 10 percent since 2012 and 15 percent since 2002. Still, over 2 million riders a day rely on the city’s buses, and the bus system needs to be fixed.

Byford’s Bus Plan comes after nearly two years of heavy lobbying from the Bus Turnaround Coalition, a joint effort by the Transit Center, Riders Alliance, Straphangers Campaign and Tri-State Transportation Campaign. In 2016, this group called for an overhaul of the way buses work in New York City, and in 2018, Byford acknowledged their work in unveiling his plan. “We’ve listened to our riders’ concerns,” he said, “and are working tirelessly to create a world-class bus system that New Yorkers deserve.”

So what exactly is the plan? For now, it is an aspirational approach to better bus service with a 28-point agenda. The images embedded are from the plan, and I have added commentary as appropriate.

Byford wants to redesign the network by optimizing routes based on ridership needs while eliminating some stops to speed up service and expand off-peak bus frequency. Notably, he wants to expand off-peak service on what he calls “strategic routes” to better provide the last-mile connections a reliable bus network can provide. These types of redesigns require MTA action (though DOT will have to be a partner in improving street design).

Here, NYC DOT takes on a more important role. Byford wants to implement infrastructure upgrades that prioritize buses over other vehicles, including dedicated lanes and a signal prioritization system that allows buses to hold green lights or shorten reds. He wants exclusive busways — proposals that have more or less died in the face of driver opposition in recent years — and he will need DOT’s help. He calls for NYPD cooperation and effective traffic enforcement to keep buses moving through dedicated lanes.

Importantly, he proposes a faster boarding process, currently a main source of delays. To reduce bus dwell time — the minutes a bus spends sitting at a stop while riders dip their Metrocards or scrounge around for $2.75 in nickles, quarters, and dimes — Byford suggests all-door border, similar to London’s bus system; a tap fare payment card; and cashless bus fares. The final parts of the plan involve customer-focused improvements including more real-time bus countdown clocks, redesigned system maps, and more bus shelters along with some clean-tech buses to replace New York’s current gas-guzzlers.

On its surface, the plan is exactly what New York needs. Byford has shown that he understands the problems and drawbacks with the current bus network and is willing to propose a multi-part solution that involves every stakeholder and seemingly transcends the dysfunctional politics of the relationship between the city and state. But unfortunately with such an aggressive plan in play, each of these stakeholders are going to have to work together for this bus revitalization effort to succeed.

And to that end, except with respect to the all-door boarding and other technological upgrades to the buses themselves, Byford is now almost a bystander as he has shifted the onus to the city Department of Transportation, the NYPD, and Albany lawmakers to work together to realize his vision of a better bus network. But it’s his plan, and he will have to be a forceful advocate for it. Still, let’s look at the other players involved.

Let’s start with the city’s Department of Transportation. Since DOT controls the city’s streets, any changes to the way street space is allocated will have to start with DOT. Thus, additional bus lanes, dedicated bus corridors and the queue-jumping benefits of signal prioritization require DOT buy-in and support, and so will reducing the number of bus stops and changing street design to better support bus infrastructure. NYC DOT Commissioner and MTA Board member Polly Trottenberg voiced support for the plan during Monday’s meetings, but her boss, the mayor, a reluctant and infrequent transit rider who virtually never takes the bus, will have to be a forceful ally supporting these changes.

And then we have the NYPD. Currently, the NYPD seems to view the city’s bus lanes as, well, parking spots. Take a ride down the East Side’s avenues, and bus lanes will inevitably be filled with cops who have decided to park in curbside bus lanes, thus negating their intended purposes. The MTA, on the other hand, expects cops to be willing partners in enforcing bus lane restrictions and generally helping to ensure that other vehicles are not in the way of buses, impeding speeds and progress through congested city streets. (During a Twitter chat on buses on Thursday, Byford acknowledged that cops should not park in bus lanes. He seems willing to challenge the NYPD more than recent city leaders have.)

But cops alone are a poor and inadequate enforcement method, and NYPD culture is tough, if not impossible, to change. Thus, Albany takes center stage as bus lane enforcement should be automated and camera-based. Until now, the state Legislature has resisted giving the MTA carte blanche ability to install cameras that can assist in automated bus lane enforcement, but to truly tackle the problem of cars in bus lanes, Albany will have to act, and forcefully.

Finally, the elephant in the room is the cost. We do not yet know how much the bus plan will cost. It relies in part on moving pieces that are partially funded (such as a new fare payment system) and others that are not, and it will again be up to the governor to champion transit improvements in New York City so that they receive adequate funding. Facing the pressures and, more importantly, the headlines of a primary challenge, Andrew Cuomo has lately embraced certain positions he has rejected in the past, and mass transit support should be one of them. Perhaps, then, the time is right for the city and state to prioritize bus travel over car traffic.

Ultimately, the buses need fixing, but more importantly, the bus system needs to work efficiently so that New Yorkers have faith in it again. Buses can solve access problems in transit deserts and can be a part of the transit upgrades that a true congestion pricing plan would require. Byford has a vision that will improve bus service, but that is the easy part. Now he just has to convince everyone else to join him as well.

It has been a two-year battle for transit advocates fighting for better bus service, but a coalition of bus champions secured a major victory on Monday as New York City Transit President Andy Byford unveiled a comprehensive 28-point plan to turnaround the city’s declining bus service. The plan is an impressive first step for Byford as he looks to manage the MTA out of various transit crises, and it involves implementing many international best practices — including all-door boarding and signal prioritization — to improve bus operations and combat steadily declining service. And it can’t come soon enough as average bus ridership in 2017 declined by over 5% against 2016 numbers.

“We’ve listened to our riders’ concerns and are working tirelessly to create a world-class bus system that New Yorkers deserve,” Byford said in a statement. “We’re targeting challenges like traffic congestion and enforcement, undertaking bold initiatives like redesigning the entire route network, and pursuing advancements such as the latest computer-aided management, double-decker and electric buses, all-door boarding, and improved customer service with more real-time data. Our customers will start to see changes this year and we will never stop improving this critical component of New York City’s transportation landscape.”

The plan — available here as a PDF — aims to tackle bus reliability, dwell time due to a slow fare payment process, real-time information regarding bus arrival times and overall service patterns. It will require cooperation from DOT and a new mentality from the NYPD on both enforcing bus lanes and not using them as parking spots for police cars and cops’ personal vehicles. And after years of MTA foot-dragging, the agency committed to all-door boarding as part of the new fare payment system. This ain’t, in other words, cosmetic; it’s the real deal.

This initiative is the culmination of nearly two years of advocacy work that began with a report issued in 2016 and tireless work by Transit Center, Riders Alliance, Straphangers Campaign and Tri-State Transportation Campaign. In fact. Byford credited these activists’ work in an interview with amNew York on Monday morning. Someone is listening.

The report though is a first step. Many of the improvements — a streamlined bus map, more real-time information signs — will arrive this year, but others — including the all-door boarding via the new fare payment systems — won’t be in place for a few years. The bus network redesigned to improve connections and usefulness may not be ready until 2021. So patience will still be key, and small improvements should lead to bigger ones.

I’ll have a full post with my analysis and thoughts tomorrow night, but as Byford’s first major operations announcement goes, this is a very promising one.

New York City’s subway crisis built very slowly over the past few years before cascading into a disaster in early 2018. So far, in the early going this year, nearly every rush hour commute has been plagued by delays on multiple subway lines, and the MTA’s subway action plan, as Nicole Gelinas recently detailed, hasn’t been a single dividend yet. Delays are, in fact, up since Cuomo announced this initiative.

This is of course the well-covered transit crisis, but the city is suffering through another transit crisis as bus ridership and service reliability has been tanking in slow motion over the past decade. In fact, based on trends through the end of October, without a massive influx in riders in November and December, average weekday bus ridership for 2017 will be below 2 million riders per day, a low mark not seen since the early part of the last decade, and a decline of over 170,000 riders per day since the high-water mark in 2012. Buses serve a key segment of New York City, and regular riders are less wealthy and more dependent on transit than the average subway rider. That ridership is cratering amidst worsening service and few are focusing on the issue is alarming.

A few weeks ago, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer released an extensive report on improving the bus system. “Falling ridership, major slowdowns, and a bus infrastructure in decline is having an effect across the five boroughs,” he said in a release accompanying the report. “If we’re going to have a thriving economy tomorrow, we need to rebuild our bus system today. By unleashing innovative technologies, as well as honing in on strategies that improve reliability and service, we can change the game for New Yorkers. This cannot be a problem that is swept under the rug – this is an economic and social imperative that is critical to our future. The status quo is unacceptable, and we have to do better.”

The report covers some familiar ground — New York city’s buses average, for instance, 7.4 miles per hour, slowest among the United States’ major bus networks and average speeds in Manhattan aren’t much faster than walking. In fact, thanks, in part, to these slow speeds, Manhattan has seen a 16 percent decline in ridership since 2011. Stringer’s report rightly places this decline in a larger economic context of shifting job centers as “residents of every borough are now more likely to commute within their home borough than to,” a reality the subway network cannot accommodate but one the MTA has not considered as part of a badly needed update to the bus network.

I’ll come back to the issue of network design shortly, but first, a glimpse at how technology is affecting speed and service. Stringer’s report finds that buses are in motion only around half the time. Much of the travel time is attributable to waiting at red lights (21%) and waiting at bus stops (22%). Bus stops are, of course, unavoidable, but dwell times can be reduced through a pre-board fare payment system or all-door boarding. The MTA hasn’t definitively committed to such approach when it phases out the Metrocard over the next few years, but without this promise, buses will continue to be slowed down by the MTA’s own choices. Meanwhile, signal prioritization on major bus routes, a long-sought-after reward, has been slow in coming, as NYC DOT and the MTA have not coordinated particularly closely on bus technology. Truly dedicated lanes with aggressive enforcement should also improve speed and reliability. This is of course hardly a secret, but one worth hammering at every opportunity.

And what of that network design? It’s totally inadequate, Stringer charges. Here’s Stringer on the long and winding bus routes:

In Budapest, the typical bus route does not exceed 25 minutes from end-to-end. There is a clear logic to this policy: the longer the route, the greater likelihood for delays to accumulate and cascade down the entirety of the line. New York City buses do not follow this standard. Routes can span nearly two hours and travel well over ten miles. In fact, the average local route in Staten Island is 10.6 miles and the average citywide is 6.8 miles. Of the ten longest routes in the city, four are in Staten Island and three are in Brooklyn.

These ten routes are not only long, they are also meandering, averaging 13 turns each. Frequent turns along a route will slow down a bus, forcing it to wait for an opening in traffic and carefully maneuver onto a new road. This can be dangerous, as turns carry a higher likelihood for collisions. Most importantly, turns are indicative of indirect, slow routes that are riddled with detours. On dozens of the city’s routes—particularly in Staten Island, Queens, and Brooklyn—buses will intermittently exit a major road to do a quick loop around local streets. This can be infuriating for riders, who wish to get to their final destination as quickly and directly as possible.

The MTA has, in fact, acknowledged the efficacy of straighter routes, stating that “bus service is more reliable when operated in a straight line than when many turns exist along the route.” Unfortunately, they too rarely follows their own dictum. Among the city’s 220 local routes, 38 feature at least 15 turns and 97 have ten or more.

To solve this problem, Stringer urges the MTA to take Chicago’s lead. The Windy City has implemented a streamlined grid approach with shorter routes and less duplicative service. By offering more frequent service and well-timed connections (as well as a robust transfer policy), a better designed bus network can offer better service. (And this doesn’t even begin to touch upon stop spacing, another problem Stringer highlights in his report, as bus stops are too close together and spacing is largely inconsistent throughout the city.)

Ultimately, the report includes numerous recommendations across a variety of topics, and I’m hitting only the highlights in this post. I’d urge you to browse through the entire report and digest the findings. In the end, the current bus network is not designed to provide good connections to the subway and hasn’t been restructured to get people from where they live to where they work (or otherwise want to go). The technology to speed up buses lags behind global leaders in the field, and the MTA and NYC DOT haven’t committed to creating a bus infrastructure that will combat the massive ridership declines. Meanwhile, with regular bus riders making on average just $24,000 per year, this sagging infrastructure and collapsing mode of transit hits hardest those who can least afford another route home.

So while the subway collapse is spectacular and very public, borne out through daily delays and the general frustration of a city at its wits’ end, the bus crisis is an insidious undercutting of the city’s most vulnerable. Stringer’s report garnered some headlines late in the fall, and it deserves to be rebroadcast, but are the right people listening? Are they ever?

In 2002, New York City Transit recorded some substantial bus ridership numbers as 762 million people paid to ride the bus. It’s been all downhill since then, as only 650 million people used buses last year. Meanwhile, over the same period of time, New York City’s subway ridership has grown from 1.413 billion rides to 1.762 billion last year, and the population of the city has grown by around five percent. When it comes to buses, something isn’t working.

This isn’t, of course, a new development. A few weeks ago, a NYC DOT report showed how slow travel speeds, among other issues, has led to less reliable and less popular bus service, and we’ve seen how some fairly minor enhancements to bus service — dedicated lanes and pre-board fare payment — can reduce travel times. Now, a coalition of transit advocates and New York City politicians are putting pressure on both the city and MTA to do something to improve bus service and prioritize the bus network.

In a report issued last week called “Turnaround: Fixing New York City’s Buses” [pdf], the Transit Center, Riders Alliance, Straphangers Campaign and Tri-State Transportation Campaign have called for a redesigned bus network with service enhancements and best-in-class infrastructure including pre-board fare payment and dedicated street space. It’s almost revolutionary for New York but standard practice the world over. Full-scale implementation should combat the causes that have depressed bus ridership over the past decade and a half, but it will take a multi-agency effort across city and state agencies to see through.

Tabitha Decker, Transit Center’s NYC Program Director, summed up the recommendations. “Many of New York’s global peers, such as London and Seoul, have turned around bus systems that were in decline, even though these cities have large-scale urban rail too. They have done this by making bus travel fast, frequent, and reliable using tools like smart card based fare payment and the use of real time data to keep buses on schedule.”

The recommendations are broken down into segments. First, the report urges redesigning the bus network for more frequent and efficient service. Today’s bus network is a relic of New York City’s old streetcars, and the routes are often twisting and turning paths that end at borough borders rather than a transit hubs or other popular destinations. The coalition wants to straighten out routes for faster travel times and, as the report states, “rightsize the distance between bus stops. New York is a global outlier in terms of how closely stops are spaced, and on many routes, stops are even closer together than our own standards dictate. Optimizing the number of stops will speed trips for riders.”

The second section focuses on fare payment and boarding. Obviously, a tap-and-go system will significantly reduce boarding times if a pre-board fare payment system for all local buses is too costly. All-door boarding would reduce station dwell times as well. (The Riders Alliance recently issued a different report raising concerns with the MTA’s next-generation fare payment plans that could have ramifications for buses as well.) Continued investment in low-floor buses should improve the boarding process as well, the report noted.

Next, the report urges the MTA to change the way it dispatches and controls buses that are en route to ensure buses arrive on schedule and avoid bus bunching. In addition to dispatching buses on time, the MTA should hold buses en route to improve service. This is a bit of a controversial recommendation as it could lead to delays for passengers during their travels, but the coalition feels a more proactive, headway-based control process should improve service for everyone.

Finally, in a recommendation that would overhaul the way buses interact with the streets, the report urges a massive expansion of dedicated lanes, a renewed focus on bus bulbs and boarding islands to “eliminate time spent weaving in and out of traffic,” signal prioritization and queue-jump lanes for buses. These changes would require DOT and the MTA to collaborate and would likely require authorization from Albany as well. It’s politically tricky but not impossible.

And yet, while an expansive coalition of New York City politics voiced their support for these bus turnarounds, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the Grand Poobah of New York State politics, in comments to Politico New York, dismissed bus problems with a wave of his hand a complete lack of understanding. “If people in Manhattan are choosing to jump on the subway because the subway is faster, because there’s traffic that a bus has to deal with — that’s not an imprudent choice, right?” Cuomo said.

Cuomo, who thinks a USB charging port on a bus is some form of revolutionary improvement, doesn’t seem to understand the role the bus network could play in New York City, and Ben Fried took it too him in a post on Streetsblog last week. Cuomo’s Manhattan-centric view of travel speeds betrays his belief that traffic is a force of nature that cannot be addressed through rational policies and that buses mirror subways. As Fried writes, “The governor’s theory about people ditching the bus for the train simply doesn’t apply to the vast number of New Yorkers who ride these routes [that cover territory that the subway does not] and would benefit enormously from the recommendations in the Bus Turnaround report.”

In response to the report, the MTA noted that it is in the process of implementing some of these upgrades and that the agency has undertaken certain studies regarding specific routes. But overall, the MTA, DOT and city and state officials need to engage in a concerted effort to reroute and redraw bus routes while improving the infrastructure upon which buses rely. If they don’t, ridership will continue to decline, and buses will forever remain stuck with the stigma of being a second-class transportation option.

As far as bus improvement efforts go, I’ve long maintained that the city’s and MTA’s Select Bus Service is something of a charade. It has so far taken these planners four or five years to identify a route, plan the service, hold the requisite community meetings, bid out the work, build the infrastructure and launch service along what is essentially a glorified express bus line. This isn’t Bus Rapid Transit with fully dedicated rights of way and constant service; this is New York’s “we have to please everyone all the time but especially drivers” middle-of-the-road stumbling toward transit upgrades.

From an assessment perspective, one of the frustrating elements has been the sheer lack of data made public about the success (or perhaps the failures) of the Select Bus Service routes. Are these improvements decreasing travel time while increasing ridership? If rides are faster, why? What is the effect of an SBS route on parallel local bus routes? Recently, in a report on the B44, some of these questions were answered, and the results highlight two simple reasons why buses are faster. We’ll get to those in a minute.

The B44 was one of those long-drawn out SBS routes. It debuted in late 2013 along Brooklyn’s third busiest bus corridor, and it’s a success story in a vacuum. According to the report [pdf], travel times have decreased by 15-31 percent depending upon the time of day and ridership is up 10 percent. Traffic crashes are down as well. Meanwhile, ridership has decreased on the local buses by only four percent, suggesting that the SBS route is a net gain. We don’t know how overall local travel times are affected by the shift in service though so it’s tough to analyze the overall impact.

Officials were pleased. “The B44 SBS along Nostrand Avenue is a tremendous success story, among the biggest successes in the eight years that DOT and MTA have coordinated Select Bus Service,“ DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg said.

But this is a lot of back-slapping for two simple infrastructure improvements. Overall, SBS B44 travel times have decreased by an average of 17 minutes, end-to-end, but times in motion haven’t changed. Buses move for around 37 minutes out of every hour, but instead of sitting at stations for nearly 26 minutes and stuck in traffic for 20, buses are stopped at stations for 15 minutes and stuck in traffic for only 12 minutes. Why? Pre-board fare payment, dedicated bus lanes and signal prioritization. It’s not exactly a secret combination, and improving bus service is as simple as that.

DOT and the MTA have made better bus service into a big deal and something that warrants special consideration during the planning process and special treatment after. It involves branded buses, painted lines and special infrastructure. But it shouldn’t. It should just involve the recognition that buses shouldn’t be subject to the whims of surface traffic through busy corridors and that our fare payment system is horrendously antiquated and inappropriate for city buses. If DOT and the MTA wanted to, they could improve bus service tomorrow by significant amounts simply by giving buses their own lanes, and the fare payment problems should be a part of whatever comes along to replace the Metrocard.

For all the handwringing about declining bus ridership and the need to expand transit access, the answers are right in front of our collective faces. That DOT and the MTA haven’t been aggressively pushing these measures is a stain on their records that deserves a closer look. Improvements and faster travel times don’t need to come through such a torturous process.