A new report shows that NYCDOT and NYC Transit are sprinting ahead with expansion plans for the city’s successful Select Bus Service bus rapid transit program. As part of these plans, the agencies will hold a series of workshops in the coming weeks to get input on potential new routes.
The first route in the Select Bus Service program, the Bronx’s Bx12, opened last year and has gotten top marks from riders. It uses signal priority, bus lanes along part of the route, and off-board fare collection to speed trip times by an average of 19%. Along with the Bx12, the “phase I” bus rapid transit plan includes improvements in Jamaica, Queens, and future routes on 34th Street and 1st/2nd Aves. in Manhattan, Nostrand Ave. in Brooklyn, and Hylan Blvd. in Staten Island.
Planning for the second phase will focus on dense neighborhoods far from the subway, transit trips that are long and slow (like crosstown bus routes in Manhattan), areas where subways are extremely crowded, and rapidly growing neighborhoods.
The city is also looking at more dramatic bus service improvements like median bus lanes, improved stations and buses, and real-time bus arrival, a project which has run into difficulties in the past (all of these improvements are present in the rendering above).
According to the report, NYCDOT and NYC Transit will announce 8-10 corridors for further development later this year, with the next BRT routes being implemented on 1st and 2nd Aves. in 2010, and Nostrand Ave. in 2011.
The first of seven workshops will be held at 6:30 on May 28 in the Bronx, with meetings in all five boroughs. For the entire schedule and directions, click here.
Under the Bushies, Bus Repackaged Transit projects were the only ones in favor. But just last month, the new Secty of Transportation gave the O.K to streetcars. I hope it’s not too late to consider streetcars for most of these NYC routes.
The European experience has been that streetcars always attract more riders than the bus routes they replace — with about a third of the new riders former drivers. And of course, streetcars are more energy efficient and cost less over time, because the steel wheel on smooth rail vehicles outlast the rubber tire on pot-holed road buses.
I can understand BRT on Fordham Road, it’s very hilly and the steep grades would have challenged streetcar construction. But most of NYC is perfect terrain for trams.
[…] in the city’s five boroughs, publicizing a new report on implementing bus rapid transit (via Tri-State Transpo Campaign). It articulates basic corridors f0r bus speed-ups and is the first step in a years-long process to […]
Think twice,
It’s about enforcement and regularity of use. Whenever I take NJTransit I always notice that the buff ticket collectors can kick my ass much faster than the average NYC bus driver. Some thug may get away with knifing a bus driver when he is asked to pay, but that won’t fly with the fare checkers they should have on pre-pay buses.
The other thing is that most regular users will have monthly MetroCards, and for them it will be neither desirable nor possible to avoid paying every once in a while.
Bus rapid transit all the way!
But as far as the Bx12’s “honor system”. Frankly, honor systems are for the antebellum South and feudal Japan. What else is there to expect from a riding public of entitled shuckers-and-jivers.
Other cities with a pre-pay system had the foresight to replace their open-air bus shelters with enclosed, heated/cooled, camera-monitored, comfortable kiosks that you can only enter into from the sidewalk through a turnstile. Also the only way to get on board the bus itself is directly through the kiosk, not the sidewalk. And none of this so-last-century magnetic card nonsense, when they can have touchless/smart cards instead.
[…] During a test run earlier this year, the buses were popular with passengers and proved durable enough for service in NYC. The spacious 62-foot vehicles have low floors and automated rear doors that should speed up boarding on the city’s planned bus rapid transit routes. […]
[…] supporting express bus operations — a recommendation coming out of New York City’s bus rapid transit expansion plans — and opening the Henry Hudson Parkway to small commercial […]
I keep returning and looking at that photo at the top of this post. It illustrates the self-delusion and intellectual dishonesty that pervades the BRT argument.
The illustration above makes room for BRT by carving out space from a 10-LANE STREET. We don’t have those in NYC, unless you cut down all the trees lining Eastern Parkway. The damned illustration is a lie.
We don’t have plenty of room to put bus-wide dedicated lanes on our streets and avenues. So it won’t happen. We’ll get some diluted “mostly for buses” sharing with traffic lanes. So we’ll get bus routes with slower times and lower ridership than promised, leaving us with a great disappointment after wasting major effort and large amounts of money.
Using your own logic, there’s enough space to put BRT on almost every pair of one-way avenues in Manhattan — most of which are at least five lanes wide. So how is it true that “we don’t have plenty of room” to put dedicated lanes on our streets and avenues?
And if we don’t have plenty of room, why do you think we could build streetcars?
So I should have said, “We don’t have room to put THIS KIND of dedicated lanes.” But in any case, the photo is dishonest.
You want to put your dedicated bus lanes on one-way streets.
Of course, you will not be putting your lane in the median of the one-way avenue, as shown above. So it won’t be quite the same as the nice picture, now will it?
But sure, put the bus lanes at curbside, no problem — except from the merchants complaining that the dedicated lanes will interfere with deliveries, not to mention taking away a lane of parking. And your turn lane will be in the middle of the street, not adjoining the curb.
Not exactly like the illustration at the top of this post.
Honestly, we need a more rigorous discussion of Bus Rapackaged Transit, and not allow such trafficking in illusions.
I’ve been to Curitiba. Nice city. I wish them luck with their planned rail line. But their Metro BRT is like nothing in the US, and we will not have anything like it in NYC. Some of their bus routes pre-empt the entire narrow street. Any city in the US turned over a street to a busway? Fulton Street in Brooklyn, kinda, sorta? Any city in the US moved on from BRT to replace it with rail, the usual dishonest promise made by BRT advocates?
It’s one thing to work up a nice illustration of idealized BRT service. Not too hot, not too cold, but in the pictures, always just right. But we’re way short of real world BRT success stories in this country. But after 8 years or so of this Bushie favored program, we have several failed efforts around the country to give us caution.
[…] in the city’s five boroughs, publicizing a new report on implementing bus rapid transit (via Tri-State Transpo Campaign). It articulates basic corridors f0r bus speed-ups and is the first step in a years-long process to […]