Buses

With the recent murder of an MTA bus driver — the first since 1981 — the MTA is going to begin a bus partition pilot program. Ideally, the partition would separate vulnerable bus drivers from threatening passengers.

William Neuman reported on this plan late last week. He wrote:

The partitions will be tested on buses operating out of the Flatbush Depot in Brooklyn, where Mr. Thomas worked. There are 252 buses assigned to thedepot, according to Paul Fleuranges, a spokesman for the transit agency. He said it was not yet known how many buses would get the partitions as part of the test. They need to be designed, and it was not clear when the program would begin…

The pilot program was proposed by a committee studying bus driver safety and composed of representatives of Transport Workers Union Local 100 and the transit agency’s management.

The committee also proposed other changes that were still being considered. One would eliminate the paper transfers issued on buses to people who pay their fare in cash, according to a person briefed on the committee’s work.

It’s worth noting that eliminating paper transfers would also help the MTA capture more revenue from bus passengers.

I can’t argue against supporting safety for bus drivers. While it may seem as though the MTA is overreacting to its first murder of a bus driver in nearly 30 years, the agency reported 236 assaults on bus drivers between January 1 and December 9 of this year. That’s not a good number by any means, and if the authority can install something as simple as a partition to keep drivers safer, then they should do so.

Getting across town in Manhattan is something of a nightmare. While buses run down the major thoroughfares fairly frequently, it’s often faster to walk from one end of the island to the other than it is to sit in crushing traffic while on a bus.

To that end, the Regional Plan Association thinks they have a solution: Eliminate fares on crosstown buses. The logic is really quite simple. Most riders on crosstown buses will eventually pay for a connecting subway ride, and by eliminating the fare, the MTA would speed up travel times to the point that the agency wouldn’t really be losing money.

Pete Donohue first reported on this proposal in the Daily News last week:

Eliminate [the fare] process on routes like the M34 and the M42, on 34th and 42nd Sts., and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority still might not absorb a big loss, according to the Regional Plan Association…

For most crosstown bus riders, the trip is just one leg of a larger one that includes the subway. Transfers between the buses and subway trains are free. So, bus riders can simply get on without paying, according to an association report on possible mass transit upgrades.

“Most of the people riding those buses are taking the train, so you capture the revenue anyway,” said Jeffrey Zupan, senior transportation fellow at the association. Any revenue losses probably would be offset by improved efficiency, Zupan said. Bus trips would become quicker, meaning fewer buses would be needed.

I’d have to see the numbers, but it sounds like a good plan. Of course, with money tight and a fare hike on tap for 2009, the MTA probably won’t institute a measure that would, in the short term, result in less revenue for the agency. The authority is more likely to explore pre-boarding fare payment options.

Still, ideas like these could help improve surface transit in the five boroughs. Until New York can adequately enforce bus-only lanes, proposals from the RPA and other like-minded organizations should get their days in the sun.

With the news late yesterday that Ronald Lauder, the champion of New York City term limits, now supports Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts at overturning the term limits, four more years of a Mayor Bloomberg seems almost inevitable. While my mom, among others, is rather outraged as this news from a populist perspective, the transit buff in me is thrilled with the idea that Janette Sadik-Khan could be around for a few more years.

Sadik-Khan is the current head of the city’s Department of Transportation. The department has long been car-friendly and seemingly anti-transit in its policies. With Sadik-Khan behind the helm, NYCDOT has vastly increased the bike lane mileage in the city and has ushered in an unprecedented era of cooperation between DOT and the MTA.

Last week, when I spoke with New York City Transit President Howard Roberts, he praised Sadik-Khan for her approach to transit. While in the post, the two agencies worked together in an atmosphere of what Roberts called “grudging cooperation,” under Sadik-Khan, the partnership between DOT and the MTA has been “extraordinary,” he said.

Tops on that list of course is the debut of bus rapid transit — or as the MTA calls it, Select Bus Service — in New York City. With preboarding measures and dedicated lanes, DOT and New York City Transit are trying their hardest to speed up notoriously slow bus service in New York City. It is, as Roberts said, “the real future on the bus side.”

It hasn’t all been wine and roses though for Select Bus Service. When David Gantt killed a potential home-rule BRT enforcement measure, the MTA and DOT had start from scratch and figure out how to initiate effective lane enforcement. “That hurt a lot,” Roberts said.

But over the next few years — and even longer if Bloomberg pulls off another reelection — DOT and the MTA are aiming to expand this bus service. The two agencies have their eyes on the East Side. As Roberts related, they would like to give two lanes to buses along 5th Ave., and in fact, studies have found that car traffic flows better if buses have their own lanes along the avenue as well. With less interference from buses that are unwieldy and slow to accelerate, cars can move uninterrupted.

In the end, I’m on the fence with regards to this term limit issue. The term-limit foes should put this vote to a referendum, but at the same time, the last vote on term limit was skewed by the fact that term-limit proponents outspent and had the resources to outcampaign the term-limit foes by a significant amount. On another level, I would welcome four more years of pro-mass transit policies from the Bloomberg Administration, and we’ll probably get just that.

Those fancy new bus stops that keep poppig up all over the city come to us from Cemusa, a Spanish company that forked over millions of dollars to build New York’s new street furniture. While these bus shelters have been vandalized and bright, fluorescent beacons of light on otherwise dark city streets, nothing is worse than the one, above, Vanishing New York reported on earlier this week.

Cemusa, in printing up their new signs, noted a bus stop at the corner of Prince St. and Bowery St. At no point in the city’s history was the Bowery ever a street. Once upon a time, prior to 1807, the boulevard was called Bowery Lane. Today, it’s just The Bowery. Time for Cemusa to brush up on its New York City history.