It's the final (final) countdown.
The MTA revealed what the agency is calling the absolutely final Queens bus network redesign proposal on Tuesday, almost a year to the day the agency held a press conference to reveal what was then called the final proposed design.
The proposed final final plan includes "more than" $30 million in extra funding for bus service, compared to the mere $30 million announced in last year's announcement, and will now include 17 new local bus routes instead of the 13 announced last year. In the end, 17 routes will provide more-frequent service and eight routes will be longer than they once were, while 29 routes will get a decrease in service due to allocating money somewhere else or to pay for new routes.
And like the original final redesign, the final final redesign's main highlight is the addition of "rush" routes that are designed to more immediately connect bus riders to rail options. The rush routes will provide a combination of local service in areas of Queens that aren't near the subway and then more limited service the closer the bus gets to subway and commuter lines. It was a type of service that MTA Chairman Janno Lieber said was missing in Queens.
"We have local buses, we have an express bus network that primarily ferries people to and from job locations in Manhattan," Lieber said. "What was absent was, in effect, an express system that we call the rush routes, that get people who live a little ways from whatever the rail system is quickly to it so they can get to where they're going."
The changes to the plan, which were based in a few neighborhoods around Queens, were laid out in a Proposed Final Plan Addendum, in which the MTA said were its final tweaks to the plan and a schedule for implementing the change. The redesign will now enter what is supposed to be its final (for real) public feedback and education phase, with briefings for elected officials and community organizations in January, a virtual town hall early next year and a vote by the MTA Board in early winter 2025.
The redesign will then be implemented in the summer and early fall of 2025, in order to avoid making significant changes to the network in the cold weather and in the middle of the school year.
If it is indeed implemented on that timeline, the redesign will have taken almost five and a half years to get done, spanning two governors, two MTA chairmen and five New York City Transit presidents. For Lieber, the long lead was not a knock on the plan, it was just how things need to get done in a borough with 800,000 bus riders.
"We needed to take the time to hear from all of the communities in this incredibly large bus customer population, and to factor it into really complicated operations planning. Every change to a route has an impact on the schedule, complicated issues that needed to be worked through, and we did it. If we were standing here and we'd rushed through something and people were enraged, you would be asking a slightly different question," Lieber said.
It began with a controversial 2019 proposal from then-NYCT President Andy Byford, who proposed ripping up the entire map and rewriting it. That plan was paused due to the lack of outreach opportunities during the coronavirus pandemic and tossed out entirely after Byford left the MTA. It was then replaced with a second effort that started in 2022 that focused on tweaking the existing system map.
The MTA laid out the full painstaking timeline in a single page in the addendum, and made sure to emphasize that people inside the agency paid attention to each and every comment on the project over the last three yers. The MTA even went as far as including a list of changes the agency would have made if it had more money or more buses.
Lieber, NYCT President Demetrius Critchlow and Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, clearly sensitive to the idea that reaction to the plan will involve complaints that there wasn't enough outreach, all made sure to emphasize that the final final plan was put together after dozens of meetings with community boards, bus riders and civic groups over the course of multiple years.
The plan will also need buy-in from elected officials like Richards, who sounded like he was ready to sell the plan.
"There's always going to be somebody who was going to be unhappy, but I feel pretty good about what they came back to me with," he said. "I always want to give the public an opportunity to come back and weigh in, in case there's minor tweaks that need to be made. But we won't be back here in another year. We won't. I'm ready. We're ready."
