New York City's slowest-in-the-nation bus system continues to fail riders, Comptroller Brad Lander charged with the Thursday release of a new report card for city buses.
A whopping 186 of the 332 bus lines across the five boroughs — 56 percent — received a D or F, from the chief bean counter. Manhattan performed the worst, "largely due to heavy traffic," the comptroller's office said. Bus bunching was worst in Brooklyn. SBS routes performed "slightly better," which Lander's team attributed "to stop consolidation and all-door boarding."
None of this is new: We've known for a long, long time that New York City's bus service under Mayor Adams is awful, despite lofty campaign promises.
But Lander's report highlighted some small bits of improvement. Reliability on bus routes in the congestion relief zone, for example, improved by 9.2 percent after the installation of tolls there in January.
But the real contribution of Lander's report is his proposal for the city and MTA to "set performance-based goals for improving bus" service. That may not sound like much, but it shifts the benchmark at faster buses rather than miles of bus lanes or other interventions that depend on enforcement to work. And that matters because, as bus experts Annie Weinstock and Walter Hook have laid out, years of bus lanes and other upgrades failed to make a dent in citywide average bus speeds.
Mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani famously wants to make the city's buses "fast and free." He'd be wise to heed his pal Brad Lander's insights.
Read the full report here. Gothamist also wrote it up.
In other news:
- Speaking of the congestion relief zone, congestion pricing is still working! (Wired)
- The NY Groove spilled some positive ink about Open Plans's "Curbside Restaurant Week," which starts today! (Learn more from NY1 and WNYC.)
- Amazing "open street" safety improvements are coming to Woodside Avenue, as we reported last June. Naturally, amNY is stirring shit up (without quoting a single person or institution in the neighborhood).
- Approvals are moving fast for the groups fighting for NYC's single casino license, with the "final public hearing" for the Coney Island proposal happening next week. (NY Groove)
- Vehicular carnage continues to plague Long Island. (Newsday, NY Post)
- NYC deliveristas dished to DocumentedNY on how to rent an e-bike.
- Related: the city's immigrants must weigh their financial and medical needs with the threat of deportation, NYS Focus reports.
- Assembly Member Micah Lasher filed to run for Jerry Nadler's seat in Congress. (City & State)
- Citi Bikes injured and killed in Midtown blaze. (W42ST)
- Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella opposes universal daylighting. (Via Instagram)
- Sean Duffy and Lee Zeldin have multiple primary residence mortgages. (ProPublica)
- And finally, here's Streetsblog Editor-in-Chief Gersh Kuntzman's comment on this Times opinion piece on helicopter parenting: "This is a great piece, but how does it not mention the greatest robber of childhood independence (especially in cities): cars? Yes, everything David French writes is true, but we must look at much deeper structural problems that have stolen childhood freedom. At the root of it is suburban sprawl enabled by auto-centric policies. Want kids to play in the streets? Give them back the streets themselves! And build dense housing with ample green space so all their friends are nearby and there are places to go."
