Another day, another busway delay.
The Adams administration has shelved plans for a busway on Tremont Avenue, Streetsblog has learned, the latest in a long string of decisions to ice bus priority projects.
The decision won't surprise anyone who's been paying attention: In March, the Department of Transportation told the local Community Advisory Board that car restrictions on Tremont between Third Avenue and Southern Boulevard would be installed as early as that month.
But that never happened. And one administration official finally told Streetsblog this week why:
"We were given a hard red light," the source said.
Another administration official said the decision to block the project was especially troubling because all the prep work — including community engagement, planning, and even creating a brochure to explain the new traffic patterns on the busway — was done.
"This is as ready to go as a project could be," this person fumed.
It's unclear when the decision to shelve the busway was officially made. According to the Internet Archive, as recently as July 5, the DOT's "Busways" page listed Tremont Avenue as complete, the same way every other busway in the city is listed. But by July 19, a parenthetical "(Planned)" had been added to the project listing.
Shelving yet another bus priority project will not help Mayor Adams in an effort to break his three-year streak of not coming close to fulfilling the Streets Master Plan requirements to install 30 miles of bus lanes in the city each year. It also adds to a number of Adams administration policy reversals since former Giuliani-era éminence grise Randy Mastro joined the administration as first Deputy Mayor, such as the decision to rip up some of the Bedford Avenue protected bike lane, kill a long-awaited plan to build affordable senior housing where the Elizabeth Street Garden is squatting and the mayor's decision to veto a minimum wage for grocery delivery workers after Mastro lobbied hard to kill the bill.
Residents of the area who worked with the DOT to bring faster buses to the area were perturbed to find out that they were getting ghosted by the Adams administration.
"I'm extremely disappointed," said Lucia Deng, the Municipal Services committee chair for Bronx Community Board 5. "This was a project that we were looking forward to and we had several meetings about it.
"I wish we had more transparency as to why, because this just feels like a waste of time," Deng added. "This lack of any follow up, lack of transparency, it just breeds skepticism for the entire process."
The neighborhood's City Council representative, Oswald Feliz, did not respond to a request for comment on the status of the busway, after offering tepid support for the vague idea of better bus service in the area last year. But Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson said that she was going to keep pressing the city to actually finish the project.
"Our office has held multiple meetings with DOT to discuss the busway proposal along Tremont Avenue and will continue working with them to shape the proposal, ensuring it delivers the best outcomes for our residents and merchants," said Gibson. "This project is a priority for our borough and we will continue to push DOT to move it forward without delay."
Streetsblog visited Tremont Avenue last week and found it no different from when our last visit in 2024: buses remain blocked by trucks and other vehicles, whose volumes would have been decreased in a busway configuration.
Indeed, according to DOT, the Bx36 route was primed for busway treatment: it's the fifth-busiest bus route in the Bronx, but buses crawl along at speeds of less than 5 miles per hour during weekday rush hours. In addition, 72 percent of the households on or near Tremont Avenue do not have access to a vehicle, and 57 percent of people said they got around the area by using the bus, DOT surveyors reported.
Bus advocates, who have watched the city fall short of the legally required number of bus lanes every year of the Adams administration, decried the time and effort put into a project that is dead under this mayor.
"Our city planners spent years working to improve service on Tremont," said Riders Alliance Director of Policy and Communication Danny Pearlstein. "The MTA and DOT did exactly what they were supposed to do, and bus riders should be enjoying faster service today."
By choosing to not to do a project that would benefit bus riders, again, Pearlstein said the mayor is using his power to waste the time of people who are less powerful than him both outside and inside government.
"This is about powerful people wasting the time of people who are less powerful than they are by keeping bus riders in traffic. That is time wasted, that is opportunities missed, basic needs that are harder to access, and people whose lives are inconvenienced for years. It's unconscionable. And for the DOT planners, it's over two years, a significant investment of public resources. These are folks who are public spirited, and they're called to do this work. This is not the sexiest work in government or out and yet they become bus planners and bus lane designers, and they deserve to see their work built," he said.
The Tremont Avenue busway is now the second killed project that was announced at a "Transit Improvement Summit" held by Mayor Adams with MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber, joining the canceled offset bus lanes on Fordham Road in the graveyard of bus ambitions.
Other projects announced at the time have also taken years to come to fruition, or just simply never got off the ground. The Northern Boulevard bus lane was delayed thanks to internal politics favoring NIMBY elected officials, a bus lane project on Flatbush Avenue was finally revealed earlier this year after a year in City Hall purgatory, and a bus project on upper Broadway in Manhattan mentioned in the transit summit press release has undergone a single community board meeting, meaning its installation is virtually impossible before the end of Mayor Adams's term.
The Adams administration also just got finished flip flopping on the 34th Street busway, first pausing the project earlier this summer and then agreeing to include it as part of the Midtown South rezoning deal that was reached last week.
MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber said he had not been made aware that Tremont was axed, and expressed frustration with yet another bus priority project biting the dust.
“I have not been made aware,” Lieber said at a press conference on Monday. “I think that we all recognize that it is time for everybody who has a role in bus performance to take steps to make good on the commitments that we make, but also the city of New York City, included in a law to make sure that buses can move more quickly. So we do need cooperation from the folks who control the streets, and that means the city of New York, on making buses faster.”
Lieber added that he’d been hearing about issues with the bus from his own family.
“My brother's doing a lot of work where he's moving east-west in the Bronx, and he's talking about a problem of traffic and how buses are bunching and they're being delayed because they're mixed in the general traffic. So this is actually a personal conversation we had this weekend, and we do have to make buses like Tremont faster,”he added.
The DOT did not respond to a request for comment.
