New York City leaders are pondering ways to address the challenge of encouraging private bus ridership into Manhattan while managing limited street space and growing community concerns. This issue, which was the focus of a recent town hall meeting hosted by NYC Council Speaker Christine Quinn, has the tour bus industry, private bus carriers, and neighborhood residents at odds with each other despite the shared sentiment that tour buses are good for the city’s economy while private bus carriers help the environment and reduce traffic. (60% of MegaBus passengers, for example, reportedly switched from private automobiles.)
But private long-distance providers like MegaBus and Bolt Bus and bus tour operators appear largely unregulated throughout the city, especially in Manhattan. They often park in undesignated spots, idle for long periods at a time, and utilize valuable sidewalk space to load and unload passengers. Several of these issues, along with proposed solutions, were highlighted in a May TSTC report, “Express Route to Better Bus Service.”
Speaker Quinn wants to put an end to the city’s lax enforcement of buses and is working to create an inter-agency task force with NYCDOT and the state Dept. of Environmental Conservation on bus idling. She is also facilitating discussions between the NYPD and community boards in response to community complaints that enforcement agents seldom ticket buses that idle.
Tour buses create additional concerns. Residents are mobilizing against double-decker tour buses and speaker systems that diminish their quality of life. There is legislation pending in the NYC Council to address each.
Poor enforcement and leniency by NYPD and NYCDOT may be rooted in a lack of clarity when it comes to the law. At the town hall, Manhattan borough DOT commissioner Margaret Forgione said that the DOT can only tell buses “where they can have a bus stop and where they can’t.” Speaker Quinn disagreed and is looking at ways to increase the city’s authority. In the meantime, MTR looked at the language to try to arrive at some answers.
How Much Legal Authority Does NYC Have Over Buses?
While it is indisputable that New York City has authority to regulate buses generally, including where they can and cannot park (see Title 34, Chapter 4.08(m)(5), and Chapter 4.10(c) and (i)), legal issues remained, namely whether the city has authority to regulate bus routes to keep buses off narrow residential streets and whether buses fall into the category of “commercial vehicles” that allows double parking under certain circumstances.
The question of whether tour bus routes can be regulated appears to be answered in the Rules of New York City, Title 34, Chapter 4.10(b), which reads:
“Designated routes. No person shall operate or cause to be operated on any street a bus operating pursuant to a franchise or consent of the Department of Transportation of the City of New York which designates the route to be followed, except on the route so designated. No person shall operate or cause to be operated on any street any other bus, other than a charter bus, except over a route designated by the Commissioner [of Transportation] in writing.” (Note that “sightseeing buses” are not the same as “charter buses,” and are defined separately in Chapter 4.10.)
While sightseeing buses are licensed and regulated in areas of safety and registration by the NYC Office of Consumer Affairs, their operation is a different matter. The OCA licensing website states that the bus operators “must comply with all relevant federal, state, and City laws and rules,” including the requirement that routes be designated per 4.10(b).
As to whether a bus is legally a “commercial vehicle,” Title 34, Chapter 4 of the Rules of the City of New York has this: “For purposes of parking, standing and stopping rules, a vehicle shall not be deemed a commercial vehicle or a truck unless: … (B) it is permanently altered by having all seats and seat fittings, except the front seats, removed to facilitate the transportation of property…” Clearly tour buses and charter buses don’t fit into this category. Because the buses aren’t commercial vehicles, they can’t take advantage of a double parking loophole like an unloading box truck can. (A bus can load and unload passengers while “double parked,” so long as safety allows. This rule pertains only to layovers and parking.)
Kyle Wiswall contributed to this article.
You may want to consider the fact that private buses take a giant financial burden off of public transit systems. That MegaBus that is idling (oh woe is me, more environmental crap that’s totally unprovable, especially with the lack of any hard data) carries the same amount of passengers, sometimes more, as a NJ Transit / MTA bus, and because those agencies didn’t have to run those buses to get those people into or out of NYC, that’s a giant chunk of change they didn’t have to waste.
Perhaps we might consider the possibility of slashing tax rates for privately-owned & operated commuter rail and bus lines instead of burning millions of taxpayer dollars on the public option for commuters. Privatize the MTA and NJ Transit and PATH and, oh hell let’s just shoot the moon and privatize Amtrak too while we’re at it. Get the government out of the job of moving people from point A to point B. It shouldn’t take an act of government, be it federal or state, to obtain new cashflow for a business as ridiculously simple and easy to run as a railroad or bus line, and the taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay for any upgrades or repairs or other such things, especially if their input isn’t taken into account when the decisions are made.
@James
Only if you also privatize the highway system.
And there’s a problem with that? Indiana has a budget surplus of over two billion dollars remaining after the privatized ONE highway – and that’s down from the four billion that was there initially, three years ago. NY, NJ and CT could do much better.
James, is this snark? I can’t tell. You are aware that the big private railroads made the decision to divest from passenger service nearly four decades ago, aren’t you? The industry made the collective decision that hauling freight was a more profitable enterprise than passenger service could ever hope to be. This was actually the impetus for the creation of Amtrak.
Re: Megabus and idling – the linking of particulates from diesel exhaust to asthma and other respiratory ailments has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt for quite some time.
They made the collective decision to move away from passenger service because government regulations stifled their ability to work effectively and destroyed any hope of profitability for them. That combined with the rise of union power resulted in the death knell for cheap, efficient, privately-owned passenger service. That’s why they went bankrupt and that’s why they moved to freight instead of passenger service – comparatively low overhead and little to no room for government regulations to jump in and play a role.
Amtrak was created by government fiat. The government made the same decision back then that they did with the private auto industry recently – regulate them down to their knees, buy up as many weakened companies as possible and operate them in a top-down manner. The unions survived bankruptcy proceedings then as they did recently, and today we have a national railroad service with only one weakly profitable line and ravaged by inefficiency and mismanagement, with acts of Congress required to make any changes. Ours is a hallmark of how NOT to operate a railroad of any stripe – government owned or private – and everywhere else in the world, LITERALLY EVERYWHERE, there are railroad systems which make any American system look laughably ridiculous by comparison.
As for idling, whether it affects people’s health is outside the scope of this discussion – I am concerned more with the fact that the government decided it’s OK to restrict where and how long a privately-owned bus legally parks while waiting for passengers or while the driver is off-duty. I’m also concerned with government regulations that are choking the life out of private bus lines just as much as they did with private passenger rail lines.
I think that toll roads are a good thing myself but you can’t have one without the other. Otherwise, there is no chance that a private passenger railroad could compete. That means all of the interstates. Non-freeway arterials like route 17 also need to be included (because it functionally serves as an interstate even though it is neither designated or designed as one).
The Indiana toll road deal was for $3.8 billion over a 75 year concession which amounts to $50 million a year, which is 0.18% of the state’s $28 billion budget.
Private commuter buses are subsidized in NJ in that they use mostly public free roads and mostly publicly owned bus stops. They also, IIRC, get their rolling stock for $1 a year provided that the buses are used for commuter service.
You brought up the health effects of idling so it a fair game issue. Buses idling unnecessarily on the publicly owned and maintained streets pollute the commons of the publicly shared air which has been shown to have a causal link to respiratory health problems.
Does someone have the same right to bury contaminated waste on their property which ends up poisoning the aquifer that provides the water for their next door neighbors?
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