Transit

Spurred by transit activists demanding improvements to 125th Street buses that often crawl slower than walking speed, DOT and MTA have been moving forward with a project to improve bus service along the major crosstown corridor. But last month, State Senator Bill Perkins sent DOT a letter [PDF] in which he said Select Bus Service improvements were a "failure" and demanded that "the agency slow down" the process of bringing better service to bus riders on 125th Street.

For years, crosstown bus riders on 125th Street -- more than 32,000 per day -- have had to put up with a ride that's slower than walking. After months of planning, fixes are in sight, but State Senator Bill Perkins is objecting to the city's effort to bring faster bus service to Harlem.

Four of the Democratic mayoral candidates appeared on MSNBC with Chris Hayes Sunday morning, and for a short while the subject turned to transit. About two minutes into this segment, Hayes prompted former City Council member Sal Albanese to discuss his proposal to band together with other mayors to lobby Washington for more transit funding. John Liu, Bill Thompson, and Bill de Blasio then took turns discussing their various ideas for getting the feds and/or Albany to direct more funding to the city's transit system.

If you live close to a transit station, chances are you’ve weathered the recession better than your friends who don’t.

There’s a new global benchmark for rating bus rapid transit projects. Yesterday the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy released the BRT Standard 2013, which lays out the requirements for bus routes to qualify as BRT and scores 50 systems in 35 cities around the world as basic, bronze, silver, or gold based on various criteria. The idea, which ITDP has been refining since a beta release in 2011, is to provide a concrete definition of what BRT is, and a reference for politicians, planners, and advocates who are interested in creating new BRT routes, as well as to rate the quality of existing systems.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley are zeroing in on what irks transit riders so much they stop riding.

As driving continues to stagnate in America, transit ridership keeps rising. Last year saw the second highest annual ridership since 1957, despite the fact that the nation's busiest transit systems had several days of blackout due to Superstorm Sandy.

Friday's transit forum hosted by Transit Workers Union Local 100 and a coalition of rider advocacy groups offered an opportunity for a more more detailed discussion of transit policy than this year's mayoral race has seen so far. While the candidates offered few specifics about how they would improve transit for the millions of New Yorkers who depend on trains and buses, clear differences emerged, especially on the question of how to increase funding for the debt-ridden MTA.

Just hours before her final State of the City address today, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn released a report on the challenges facing middle-class New Yorkers. But her vision has a conspicuous blind spot: the transportation costs consuming more than one in ten dollars of the average NYC household budget.