Buses

We often describe the importance of transit in numbers, like the fact that 54 percent of New York City households don't even own a car. But even the most convincing stats can get a little dry. To help capture what the subways and buses mean to a city where the transit system is the closest thing to a shared experience for eight million people, the Straphangers Campaign and Transportation Alternatives are launching a photography contest. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all.

We missed these when they were first released in late March, but DOT has come out with its preliminary recommendations for improving bus service in downtown Jamaica [PDF]. The plan calls for adding roughly a mile and a half of new bus lanes and beefing up an equal amount of existing lanes. It would also redesign two intersections and create new pedestrian space.

Not so long ago, it was common to hear NYCDOT staff say their job was "to keep the traffic moving." Engineers working from "the motorist's viewpoint" ran the show, much like they did in the 1950s. Those days are thankfully over. Today's DOT prioritizes safety and sustainability and has compiled a lengthy track record of innovation in a few short years. But as the transportation committee of Manhattan Community Board 6 learned last night, the old emphasis on keeping the traffic moving still restrains how far the department will go to improve conditions for other modes.

Last week we wrote about how the looming $10 billion deficit in the MTA's capital plan could lead to a $3.00 fare and $137 monthly pass within three years. That's not the only way the transit authority could decide to respond to a lack of funding, however.

With each passing month, the MTA comes closer to the day of reckoning on its unfunded capital plan -- the maintenance work that keeps trains and buses running and the expansion projects that provide more access to the system. While the first two years of the 2010-2014 capital budget were funded, there is a $10 billion deficit in the remaining three. So far, there doesn't seem to be any plan from the city, state, or federal government to find this funding. In fact, between the State Senate's goal of repealing the MTA payroll tax and the House GOP's budget-slashing, there may be more obvious paths to the MTA losing revenue than gaining it.

"Consensus" and "process" were the buzzwords last night when NYC DOT presented its new concept for improving transit on 34th Street [PDF]. Gone was the plan for New York's first physically separated busway -- scuttled by local property owners and residents seeking drive-up curbside access. In its place was a package very similar to Select Bus Service on the East Side of Manhattan: bus lanes offset from the curb, off-board fare collection, camera enforcement, and bus bulbs to speed boarding and relieve sidewalk crowding.

As the New York Post continues its increasingly tedious assault on pedestrians and crosstown transit riders, its writers always seem to suggest that giving priority to buses in an important retail area is both radical and self-evidently bad for business. If they bothered to look just one borough away, they'd see that nothing could be further from the truth. The eight bus- and pedestrian-only blocks of downtown Brooklyn's Fulton Mall make up the most successful retail strip in the city outside of Manhattan.

In the media hyperventilating over plans for 34th Street that led up to last night's cancellation of the pedestrian plaza between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the biggest constant was the fear of change. An editorial in the Observer on Tuesday summed up the strange preference for the status quo: "From river to river, 34th Street moves cars, trucks, buses and pedestrians as efficiently and quickly as humanly possible in one of the world's most crowded pieces of real estate."

Nassau County's unwillingness to pay for its own buses is ending in disaster for Long Island Bus riders. The MTA has announced that it plans to cut 25 of the 48 LI Bus lines and axe weekend service on two more.