Bus Rapid Transit

Select Bus Service begins on Hylan Boulevard this Sunday, aiming to speed bus rides by 15 minutes between Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and the Staten Island Mall, cutting trip times by 20 percent on Staten Island's second-busiest bus corridor. Mayor Bloomberg, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and MTA Chairman and CEO Joe Lhota marked the occasion at a press conference near the Staten Island Mall this morning.

Crosstown bus service on 34th Street runs faster, more frequently, and has attracted more riders since DOT and the MTA began phasing in Select Bus Service improvements four years ago. Compared to 2008, travel times for buses on 34th Street are down 23 percent, or 7.5 minutes along the full corridor. And according to an update released by DOT yesterday, ridership is up 12 percent, with weekday ridership regularly reaching 20,000 passengers. A quarter of riders say that they use the buses more often because of the service upgrades.

County executives from Westchester, Rockland, and Putnam counties announced their support for Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Tappan Zee Bridge project yesterday, clearing the way for the project to seek federal funding. The executives, who had withheld support until now, received two concessions: A guarantee of rush hour bus lanes on the new bridge, and the creation of a Regional Transit Task Force, which will report back in one year with recommendations for transit connections to the bridge. They also announced the creation of a working group that would focus on project financing and bridge tolls.

How substantial are the benefits delivered by federal investment in bus rapid transit projects, and how can the feds help local governments build better bus improvements? A new report from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office [PDF] looks at the results of BRT projects that have been completed in 20 cities since 2005, when SAFETEA-LU expanded federal funding eligibility for such projects. The GAO found that almost all of the projects have proven successful as cost-effective upgrades to increase ridership, but it also identified a few ways that federal policy provides incentives for local governments to avoid building bus projects that meet the standards for high-quality BRT.

When it comes to building a new Tappan Zee Bridge for drivers, the Cuomo administration says there's no time to waste and only a gold-plated, super-wide span will do. But don't ask them how they plan to pay for it, or how high tolls will be.

The Cuomo administration keeps finding obstacles to Tappan Zee Bridge transit that don't exist. Chief among them is a phony $5 billion price tag, but there are others as well.

Earlier this week, Streetsblog reported that Governor Andrew Cuomo is dishonestly overstating the cost of building Tappan Zee Bridge transit. Cuomo has repeatedly said that building a 30-mile bus rapid transit system would cost $5 billion, and that the state can't afford to spend that much. But that number is inflated by the inclusion of billions of dollars in highway improvements, like new climbing lanes for trucks, many of which are entirely unrelated to providing transit.

At the beginning of the week, Governor Andrew Cuomo launched a media offensive to defend his decision to halt all work on building new transit infrastructure across the Tappan Zee Bridge. "The bus system would roughly double the cost of the bridge," Cuomo told radio host Fred Dicker.

After reporting yesterday that the Westchester and Rockland county executives have the power to put the brakes on Governor Andrew Cuomo's plans for a new Tappan Zee Bridge built without transit, Streetsblog received an email from Cuomo spokesperson Matt Wing. Wing, who has in the past told us that we were not to contact the governor's office for Tappan Zee questions, but send them instead to the Thruway Authority, complained that we hadn't reached out to him and insisted that we include this statement: