The Humble, Indispensable Bus

I was 7 years old when my parents took a leap of faith, leaving their beautiful home and careers on the island of Jamaica to move to the United States and invest in their children’s futures.

We moved to Laurelton, Queens — not too far from the neighborhood bearing the name of the island my parents had left — on the same quaint little street where my aunt, uncle and cousins lived. My elementary school, P.S. 38, was in walking distance — and I walked every day with my best friend and little brother. Along the way we would meet with friends at the candy store on Merrick Blvd, making our walk a fun, social experience.

But when I entered middle school, I started to take mass transit on my own. It was a stark contrast to go from walking with friends to tackling the solo journey, which required you to know your bus route, the bus stop at which to get on and off, and to try not to lose that precious paper MetroCard. I took the Q85 to Middle School 231 in Springfield Gardens, Queens, and it was a reasonable 20-minute ride.

When I began attending Bayside High School, everything changed. It was just 8.7 miles away, but my commute required multiple bus transfers and took 1 hour and 30 minutes each way. My parents weren’t able to or interested in purchasing a car for their teenager to get to school, so taking the Q111 to the Q31 bus was the only way for me to get from point A to point B. The same remained true when I enrolled in Queens College.

Buses were my lifeline. And a constant source of aggravation.

The current state of New York’s buses

The same can be said of the role of buses in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in America’s largest city. New York’s transit system is the largest in the nation, with nearly 3.8 million riders on its subways and 1.4 million on its buses on any given day. The bus fleet consists of nearly 6,000 vehicles.

No other American city comes close to that scale. Los Angeles County Metro comes in second with a fleet size of 2,320 buses and a daily ridership of 756,700. Chicago is third, with 1,868 buses with 445,445 riders daily. On the international stage, London and Paris are the most comparable systems. In fact, London dwarfs the MTA fleet, operating 9,300 buses that transport 5 million riders daily. Paris has 5,000 buses and carries approximately 3.5 million riders daily.

The COVID-19 pandemic dealt a wounding blow to New York City’s subways and buses alike — one from which neither has recovered. According to reporting from the MTA, bus ridership has “experienced a modest annual increase of 0.3% to 426 million rides, 63% of the 2019 level. This was slower than the 11% growth observed in 2022. Significant factors contributing to slower growth include rising bus fare evasion and the introduction of a fare-free pilot program on five bus routes starting in September 2023.”

Compounding the impacts of the pandemic are the ongoing problems that keep bus speeds slow. In parts of the city where traffic is worst, you can walk faster than you can ride. It’s no coincidence that bus speed and bus ridership are lagging in tandem — because when buses are slower, New Yorkers will look to other modes of transit or perhaps just stay home.

Right now, New York’s buses are the slowest they have been since 2019, with an average of 8.18 miles per hour in the first 10 months of 2023, down from 8.21 mph last year and 8.3 mph the year before. ​​Average bus speeds in Queens are 9.08 mph, 7.81 mph in the Bronx and 7.29 mph in Brooklyn. Most people walk between 2.5 and 4 miles an hour.

Prior to the pandemic, the MTA set many ambitious goals for improving its fleet, while also planning a transition to an all-electric-vehicle fleet by 2040. This goal fell into alignment with New York State’s recognition of the transportation sector’s impact on greenhouse gas emissions. In 2019, the state passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which provides a regulatory framework to cut emissions statewide across all sectors, with target goals of reducing emissions by 50% by 2035 and 80% by 2050. The MTA’s successful transition to an EV fleet will make it a standard bearer for other transit authorities across the country.

But the process is going about as slowly as a typical bus. The transition process began in 2017 with a 10-EV bus pilot project. In 2019 the MTA purchased an additional 15 zero-emissions buses. Another 60 will be brought into service in the current (2020-2024) capital program and another 500 between 2025 to 2026. By 2029, all new bus procurements should be zero emissions in order to meet the 2040 goal of transitioning the entire fleet. If, in the wake of the congestion pricing pause announced in mid-2024, there’s no replacement source of funding, expect all these deadlines to be blown.

How can we make our buses better?

Buses aren’t just equipment. They’re essential conduits that help people — disproportionately lower-income people who are otherwise poorly served by the subways, Citi Bike and other mobility options — get to school and jobs, to museums and parks and medical appointments. The very young rely on buses more than others, as do the very old. In terms of gender, women make up the higher percentage of bus riders.

Plenty of time, buses are tremendous assets to those they serve, especially for those that live in transit deserts in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, who have minimal access to the subway.

But far too often, they leave people in the lurch. A recent report conducted by Transportation Alternatives depicts the ways that waiting for a bus in New York City can be a tortuous experience. Commuters often sit baking in the sun at unsheltered bus stops, contending with extreme heat. Buses far too frequently bunch up — meaning rather than being spaced out so they come every 10 or 15 minutes, they come two or three at a time, then not at all for 25 minutes or more.

As a result, buses are sometimes too empty and often overcrowded, leading to unsafe travel experiences with people packed like sardines even in the stairwells at the entrance. At times, passengers can watch crowded bus after crowded bus bypass their stop.

As often happens, times of crisis can teach us how to innovate. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, buses were seen as a safer alternative to the subway in terms of ventilation. In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, residents of the Rockaway Peninsula were without subway service entirely. They had to rely on shuttle buses to get to where they needed to go. The storm had damaged 3.5 miles of the A train line, leaving 35,000 mostly low-income residents of color without a direct connection to the rest of New York for an astonishing seven-month period.

These emergency interventions can and should pave the way toward permanent strategies to provide better bus service. An example of this can be seen in the development of the 14th Street Busway in Manhattan. When Sandy damaged critical tunnel infrastructure and interrupted normal operations of the L train, the idea of a “bus train” arose. The busway pilot was made permanent in June of 2020, and has successfully increased bus speeds on that route by as much as 24% and ridership by as much as 30%.

Making our buses work better isn’t that complicated if we learn from experience.

Recommendations

The National Association of City Transportation Officials has laid out three major actions required to improve transit bus service nationwide, and all are relevant in the bus capital of America. One: Offer frequent, all day service. Two: Redesign streets to prioritize bus service. Three: Adopt local policy reform that supports transit. Here are a few ways to translate those vague directional recommendations into concrete policy in New York.

1. Build many more bus lanes. In 2020, my organization, the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, released a series of fact sheets on the importance of bus prioritization, with detailed analysis of how bus routes could be made better. Bus lane enforcement goes hand in hand with the creation of more bus lanes. Mayor Eric Adams’ administration’s goal is to implement 150 bus lanes in four years. By law, they are required to build 30 miles of protected bus lanes each year. But they’re way behind: New York City is slated to build only seven miles of bus lanes by the end of this year, according to an analysis by Streetsblog. Automated bus lane enforcement, which has been ramping up, needs to accelerate.

2. Finish the bus network redesign: New York City’s ongoing Bus Network Redesign gives us the opportunity to transform routes and improve service. To date, the five-borough initiative, which launched in 2019, has only seen two borough plans completed. Now, working in partnership with community members, the MTA should complete a comprehensive five-borough redesign that prioritizes speed and efficiency.

3. Acknowledge and reorient service based on our postpandemic reality: The MTA has observed the way that commuter patterns have changed post-COVID. Ridership is now highest on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Ridership has also recovered most strongly on weekends. This reflects more hybrid and remote working, as well as an increase in leisure and other kinds of transit trips. We should lean into this change in order to make transit the best way to get around for all needs, not just shuttling back and forth between work and home.

4. Implement all-door boarding. The primary reason buses go so slowly is because of traffic from cars, mopeds, bicycles and other vehicles — but the long bus boarding process is a close second. By allowing passengers to enter and pay their fare at both the front and back entrances — activating OMNY readers that are already installed at the back doors — we can reduce long lines at each stop. The MTA has opposed all-door boarding due to fears of rising fare evasion. That’s shortsighted; increased satisfaction with service and the process of boarding a bus may well increase the likelihood of riders’ commitment to pay into the system they rely on daily.

5. Improve multimodal connectivity. Although our subways and buses combined cover every neighborhood in our city, there’s a lot more we can and should do to connect them to other types of transit, including safe walking and biking infrastructure that allows for faster transfers to and from mode to mode. We still have too many siloed systems, from incomplete sideways to uneven distribution of bikeshare or lack of personal bike storage.

6. Ensure affordability: The Fair Fares program, which provides discounted fares to low-income New Yorkers, has been expanded thanks to a $20 million investment from the City. However the number of recipients needs to increase through better outreach and communications to ensure that those who are eligible for the program apply.

7. Develop more Bus Rapid Transit corridors: There are many national examples of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems which provide more efficient bus service by implementing measures including dedicated lanes, busways, traffic signal priority, off-board fare collection, elevated platforms and enhanced stations. They serve as models for improving transit performance in New York CIty. Eugene, Oregon; Los Angeles; Cleveland; and Seattle have all yielded significant increases in bus speeds through their BRT corridors.

8. Prioritize accessibility. Buses are often the best option for people in wheelchairs — but the way they get on and off the bus is time-consuming, complicated and cumbersome. We need to bridge the gap between the curb and the bus entrance to provide level boarding, as many other cities already do. That will ensure the safety of disabled passengers, while also increasing the efficiency at each bus stop.

Buses deserve much more recognition for the benefits they provide every day. And they deserve every chance to succeed. They are a linchpin of our transit network too often treated as a redheaded stepchild.