Select Bus Service for the M60 bus in Harlem launched earlier this week — a move the MTA expects will “speed trips to LaGuardia and across 125th Street” for the thousands of daily riders who use the service along the corridor.

To get a first person perspective of the new service, MTR rode the M60 Select Bus Service on 125th Street Wednesday morning at rush hour to see how the newly-installed bus lanes have helped to increase bus speeds. The M60 bus traveled at an average speed of 2.7 miles per hour prior to the addition of bus lanes on 125th Street.

The ride from St. Nicholas Avenue to Lenox Avenue — where there are no exclusive bus lanes — is .4 mile in length, and took four minutes and 30 seconds, for an average speed of 5.3 miles per hour, largely because the M60 doesn’t make any stops between St. Nicholas and Lenox.

The ride from Lenox Avenue to Lexington Avenue — where exclusive bus lanes have been painted — is .5 mile long, and took four minutes and 45 seconds, for an average speed of 6.3 miles per hour. While that doesn’t seem like much of a difference, during this particular trip, the bus was stopped at the Madison Avenue station for extended period. First the operator had to direct passengers to pay their fare using curbside payment machines (after just three days in service, people are still getting used to Select Bus Service off-board fare payment) and then assist a passenger using a wheelchair. That was more than enough time to capture this video and grab this photo of the real-time bus arrival signage from one of the rear doors. Take away 45 seconds from the total trip time and it’s more like 7.5 miles per hour, nearly three times as fast as before SBS implementation.

MTR then walked back west to see how the M60 measures against walking speed. The M60 moved noticeably quicker on the segment of 125th with bus lanes, with three M60 buses passing us between Lexington Avenue and Lenox Avenue. Farther west, however, MTR passed the same M60 bus twice while it was stopped in traffic between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and St. Nicholas Avenue.

So far, based on MTR’s anecdotal experience, the bus lanes seem to have helped speed up travel, and as riders get used to paying their fare before boarding, rides should become even quicker. But until exclusive bus lanes are extended west of Lenox Avenue as local elected officials Councilmember Mark Levine and State Senator Adriano Espaillat have called for, and cameras are installed to make sure those lanes remain exclusive, the job of speeding up bus service in Harlem remains “only half completed.”