Buses

As the political turmoil and debate over the future of the MTA recedes into the past of last week, I’m going to take some time today to talk about some future expansion plans for New York City’s transportation network. The later post will be published this afternoon, and both will focus on surface options rather than underground rail plans.

Our tale this morning starts in the Bronx with something called Select Bus Service. This program is a joint pilot effort between the MTA and New York City’s Department of Transportation. It features dedicated bus lanes and pre-boarding fare payment systems. It has resulted in a 24 percent decrease in travel times, and passengers along Fordham Road love the service.

Next year, as part of this so-called Phase I rollout, Select Bus Service will come to Manhattan. Sections of First and Second Avenues are slated for service. Now, as I’ve discussed now and then in the past, this bus rapid transit system along Second Ave. is a bit of a lightening rod. Opponents of the Second Ave. Subway see it is a viable and cheaper alternative to the expensive and oft-delayed subway line. In terms of capacity, though, a subway line trumps bus service, and for now, the two modes of transportation are both slated for the same avenue.

Eventually, Phase I will include service along Nostrand Ave. in Brooklyn, along Hylan Boulevard and into Bay Ridge from Staten Island and access to the Jamaica Center hub. Each borough will have its own Select Bus Service within a few years.

In an effort to expand the program to the five boroughs, NYC DOT recently announced plans for a series of workshops this summer in advance of Phase 2 of the Select Bus Service program. Streetsblog broke the news last week. The Department of Transportation will host seven workshops across the five boroughs in an effort to identify as many as 10 routes for future Select Bus Service.

As part of the pre-launch for Phase 2 planning, NYC DOT has released an unnecessarily large and poorly optimized PDF file explaining the needs of the city and the goals of the program. In a nutshell, DOT wants to target areas that are both underserved by preexisting transit options and areas that are suffering through overcrowding. They want to target high-traffic streets with the goal of reducing congestion as well.

There are though some obvious problems with the preliminary Phase 2 plans. The maps in the PDF are very borough-centric. While Staten Island SBS connects into Brooklyn and some Bronx service connects to Manhattan, rare are the buses that run legitimate interborough routes. Mostly, these Select Bus lines drop people off at preexisting subway stops and do not offer a real alternative for a ride through Queens and into Midtown.

I have a series of suggestions, then, for the planners of Select Bus Service:

1. First, these routes clearly, as I just said, need to be more than just feeder routes. A Select Bus route up Flatbush Ave., for example, should cross the Manhattan Bridge and run more than just a few blocks into Manhattan. It shouldn’t just be an easier way to get to the Atlantic-Pacific hub. It should be an easier way to get into Midtown.
2. At the same time, some Select Bus routes should be planned as subway connectors. Right now, the Fordham Road SBS service connects to nine different subway lines. Woodhaven Boulevard, for example, could support SBS that connects a series of subway lines and leads to JFK Airport.
3. The easiest way to accomplish point two would be to implement SBS along the Circumferential route. Such a route would intersect nearly every subway line and would bring riders from Brooklyn through Queens and into the Bronx faster than any subway could
4. Feed the airports. This is obvious.
5. Install physically separated lanes, priority signaling and automated lane enforcement efforts. The latter would require action in Albany.

New York City is clearly at a transit crossroads. It needs innovative leaders willing to lobby for plans that challenge the status quo. DOT and the MTA have a blank slate in the form of Select Bus Serivce, and how they proceed this summer will dictate the future of surface transit in the city for the foreseeable future.

Streetfilms, the video arm of Streetsblog, tackled the Bronx’s very own Select Bus Service recently. Nick Whitaker and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign’s Veronica Vanterpool took to the streets of Fordham Road to profile the city’s first foray into bus rapid transit. Bronx riders love this speedy and efficient bus, and as DOT and the MTA have ambitions expansion plans in the works, the rest of the city should soon too. Check it out.

The buses, said Streetsblog editor Aaron Naparstek at a bus rapid transit event on Wednesday, are New York’s “least sexy mode of transportation.”

It’s hard to debate Aaron on that point. He is a man who will battle passionately for the role of buses in urban life. In New York in 2009, though, that is a losing battle. While 70 percent of the city commutes via mass transit, just 10 percent of those riders use the buses. New York, says Naparstek, has the largest bus system in the country but also the slowest. The inefficient operation of the bus systems and the vehicle’s slow speeds serve to discourage use.

Enter Bus Rapid Transit.

The idea is simple. Give buses their own dedicated lanes with priority traffic signals. Make customers pre-board as they do on subways and institute some rather simple measures — ground-level boarding, multiple doors, frequent buses — and voila, for $2.1 billion, the cost of the 7 line extension, a city could implement 200 miles of bus rapid transit routes.

On Wednesday, Naparstek gathered three transit experts — Joan Byron of the Pratt Center for Community Development and co-founder of COMMUTE; Gene Russianoff, staff attorney for the NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign; and Bruce Schaller, Deputy Commissioner for Planning and Sustainability at the New York City Department of Transportation — to talk about bus rapid transit. The meat of the event belonged to Naparstek and Schaller as the former talked up BRT and the latter unveiled New York’s ambitious plans for the program.

Following a film on Colombia’s Transmilenario bus system and Los Angeles’ bus rapid transit pilot, Schaller took the stage to discuss the city’s plans. The Select Bus Service in the Bronx has been a hit despite Albany’s denial of traffic camera enforcement measures, and the city will soon implement BRT service along 1st and 2nd Aves. Pilot programs are in the works for Nostrand Ave. (2011) and 5th and Madison Aves. as well.

The true gem though are the plans for 34th St. The city will turn 34th St. into a modified one-way street — east-bound on the East Side and west-bound on the West Side — with two-way dedicated bus lanes running the length of the island.

Eventually, says Schaller, the city will expand into all boroughs among many arteries, and cost is no problem. “It pretty much pays for itself,” Schaller said.

While Wednesday’s event made me pine for a bus-covered city, shades of the real debate kept creeping into the presentation. Should the city — and the MTA — be paying billions of dollars for new subway lines or should they take that money and invest it into a BRT network that can truly reach areas underserved by mass transit while uniting the boroughs? Naparstek, Pratt and Schaller seemed to think so, but experts disagree. I waffle on the issue whenever I think about it.

Proponents point to the cost and traffic-reducing consequences. Add BRT lanes, and the cars have nowhere to go but off the roads. Suddenly, buses can go fast — up to 55 mphs in Los Angeles, for example — and routes can cover the traditional north-south avenues in Manhattan but also interborough routes that could quickly connect disparate parts of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx.

But opponents will say that buses can’t move nearly as many people as subways. They are subject to the whims of traffic and traffic lights. Opponents also point the benefits of light rail over buses as far as surface transit goes.

No matter the outcome though, the debate is alive and well. The Department of Transportation is moving forward with bus rapid transit just as the MTA will build the Second Ave. Subway and 7 line extension until the projects are out of money. The city will be better off for both of them, but questions will always remain about the costs.

As a coda to the evening, I had to hightail it from the Museum of the City of New York on 103rd and 5th Ave. to another event on 53rd and 6th Ave. I caught the M4 right on 5th Ave., and fifteen minutes later, I found myself deposited at 50 blocks south. It was a trip fast enough to make me believe the gods of the buses, those unsexy buses, were smiling me on.

Bus Rapid Transit has been a hot topic among the transportation-minded advocates in New York over the last few years. While David Gantt and the state legislature denied New York a home rule measure that would have led to efficient BRT lane enforcement, Janette Sadik-Kahn’s Department of Transportation and the MTA have been very aggressive in implementing their version of Bus Rapid Transit in the city.

Tomorrow, some of the city’s leading transportation proponents will gather at the Museum of the City of New York to discuss BRT efforts and goals for the city. The museum’s website offers up a description of the panel, set to begin at 6:30 p.m.:

New York City has the slowest bus system in the country. Getting it to move faster requires re-imagining how buses operate in the city. Explore the options being piloted in New York, as well as successful Bus Rapid Transit models around the world, in a discussion moderated by Aaron Naparstek, editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. He will be joined by Joan Byron of the Pratt Center for Community Development and co-founder of COMMUTE; Gene Russianoff, staff attorney for the NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign; and Bruce Schaller, Deputy Commissioner for Planning and Sustainability at the New York City Department of Transportation.

I’m quite intrigued by this panel. Aaron Naparstek and Streetsblog have exhibited very strong preferences for BRT over new subway lines, and Cap’n Transit and I disagree with it. Bruce Schaller is the guru for all things transit in New York, and Russianoff will provide the rider reaction.

The event starts at 6:30 and carries with it a small cost for a good cause. I’ll be in the audience for most of it, and I’ll definitely report back afterward.

One day, our GPS bus locator system will come.

In a way, the MTA’s on-going, never-fulfilled plan to equip the city’s bus system with a GPS-based locator system is the Second Ave. Subway of our generation. For 13 years now, the MTA has tried to get this system off the ground, and for 13 years, the agency has run up against a series of institutional and technological roadblocks. This plan — active in cities around the world — remains an elusive dream to New Yorkers who look for the next bus by walking through two lanes of traffic and peering down an avenue block.

The latest effort to implement a system that would alert riders of the time until the next bus came to a crashing halt at the end of January. At the time, MTA officials told the City Council that the tracking times for bus arrivals were inaccurate, and they were pulling the plug on the project yet again.

Yesterday, The City Section in Sunday’s Times eulogized the latest GPS attempt. Writes Sophia Hollander:

A blank electronic board at the M15 bus shelter was intended to avert just this situation by providing real-time updates to riders. Instead, it has become the latest failure in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s longstanding attempt to use GPS tracking to manage buses more efficiently and offer riders information about arrival times. Other cities, including Chicago and London, have successfully implemented the technology.

The M.T.A. issued its first contract for the system in 1996. Several companies and more than a decade later, there are no official plans on what to try next. James Anyansi, an M.T.A. spokesman, said the current project had been scuttled by technical problems, and in a dispiriting sign of its demise, all 15 electronic boards are to be dismantled by the end of next month.

Predictably, the reaction among bus riders and those who support the devices has been one of unhappiness. “The public is very unsympathetic to the saga that’s been bus tracking,” said Gene Russianoff, chief spokesman for the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group.

Anyansi told Hollander the MTA is “committed to developing a reliable system,” but when that will come online is anyone’s guess.

At this point, we don’t really know why this system failed. MTA officials have blamed the tall buildings for interfering with GPS-based technology. However, Google’s Latitude, a mobile phone-based locator program, seems to work fine in New York City. Others have suggested that bus officials are to blame. Still others wonder why a cellular-based system that uses each bus to transmit its location to receivers at stations further on down the land can’t be developed.

If Roosevelt Island can sustain a GPS-based tracking system, the rest of New York City should have one too. This is a funeral for an MTA technology that we just shouldn’t be having.

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A Note on the Weather: Supposedly, New York City is in for up to a foot of snow by the time the morning rush hour kicks off on Monday. New York City Transit is well aware of the impending snow, and Paul Fleuranges, the corporate communications V.P. at Transit, sent out an e-mail this evening detailing the agency’s plans.

In a nutshell, NYCT is preparing for a full fleet of subways and buses right now, but they recognize that travel could be significantly slower than usual in the morning. They are station emergency crews near problem areas and plan to keep the above-ground switches as clear as possible. Keep your eye on the MTA’s website for weather-related service advisories.