Buses

[TonyO]

NYTimes
March 30, 2005

Trying to Get Buses to Crawl a Little Faster

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/03/30/nyregion/30rapi.jpg
A Metro Rapid bus in Los Angeles, which is known for its cars but has found ways to speed buses by 22 to 25 percent.

By SEWELL CHAN

After watching New York City bus speeds struggle to the point where some Manhattan buses crawl at 4 miles per hour - only slightly faster than the average human walks - transportation planners now think that if they can make buses move even 10 percent faster, they can revolutionize travel in the five boroughs.

That's right, just 10 percent.

In early May, a group of New York planners will visit Los Angeles to observe a program that has sped up buses there by 22 to 25 percent. The changes include designated bus lanes, straighter routes, easy-to-board low-floor buses, specially marked stations, far fewer stops, the elimination of schedules, and computerized signaling that gives buses priority at intersections.

New York City Transit, whose buses run on some of the most congested streets in the world, says it would be delighted to achieve even half of those speed gains. Thus, 10 m.p.h. could become 11 m.p.h. The agency has teamed up with the city and state Transportation Departments on a $2.9 million study of bus rapid transit, as the improvements are broadly known in the transit world.

Advocates of mass transit, who have been calling for bus improvements for more than a decade, say the study is long overdue.

"Anything would be an improvement because most people can walk faster than the buses run," said Beverly L. Dolinsky, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the transit agency's parent.

"Bus service has grown exponentially because of free subway-to-bus transfers. Now that they've got these customers, they need to keep them," she said.

The study, begun last July, started with 100 of the city's busiest streets. Planners selected 36 bus corridors and presented them for comment at public workshops across the city in December and January. Next month, they will narrow the list to 15 corridors; they intend to begin a demonstration project on 5 routes by 2007.

The transit agency is hardly known for successfully carrying out innovative bus service. In 1996, it began a $4.4 million effort to use satellite-based radio signals to let riders know when the next bus was coming. Technical problems stymied the effort, which quietly died in 2000, although a similar idea is being studied again.

The new rapid-bus project is being approached with caution, but planners say they are serious. "This is not a theoretical study," said Keith J. Hom, the chief of operations planning for the transit agency, which operates about 240 local and express bus routes. "We want practical solutions for speeding buses in New York City using existing technologies. We need to do something now to improve conditions."

Mr. Hom and his staff view the city's roads as a contested battlefield, with pedestrians, cyclists, automobiles, taxicabs and trucks vying with mass transit for control of every spot, from the center lane right to the curb. Progress, they say, can be measured only in small increments.

"You're not going to see a lot of this stuff initially, but maybe there is a mile here, a mile there that we can grab," Theodore V. Orosz, the transit agency's bus route planner for Manhattan and the Bronx, said half-jokingly. "We don't have a lot of money to spend, and there are a lot of constraints in terms of the street and traffic use."

When bus rapid transit is finally in place, the changes will probably include designated bus lanes that will not compete with parked cars for space. The new lanes may be one lane away from the curb, with the sidewalk bulging out at the corner for riders to board.

The agency, which says it does not have enough money to order new vehicles for the speedier routes, plans to draw from the 40- and 60-foot low-floor buses, instead of the older "kneeling" buses, in its fleet. The lower vehicles allow riders to board and exit quickly, reducing the "dwell time" that slows bus trips.

Bus rapid transit routes are usually straight, with few turns, and are best suited for long, wide boulevards. Stops will be fewer, spaced farther apart and specially marked, most likely by a bus shelter with a distinctive color or design. Regular all-stop routes will continue to be operated on the same streets.

Finally, perhaps the best-known feature of bus rapid transit is what planners call "intelligent transportation systems." A device will transmit a bus's position and speed, through centralized computers, to a traffic light as the bus approaches. The traffic light will then remain green for, say, 10 seconds longer than usual, or change from red to green 10 seconds sooner than usual, to allow the bus to pass.

Coordinating bus movements is a complex affair. While New York City Transit operates the 4,512 buses and establishes routes, schedules and stops, the city's Department of Transportation manages the bus-stop signs, poles and shelters, as well as traffic flow, traffic lights and street signs.

That split in responsibilities is one reason New York has lagged behind other cities in exploring bus rapid transit. Under the slogan "think rail, use buses," the Federal Transit Administration awarded grants in 1999 to 10 transit agencies, including those in Boston, Cleveland, Hartford, Miami and Washington.

Los Angeles, seen as an innovator in speedier bus transportation, began a bus rapid transit program in 2000 on two lines and 38 miles. By this June, with federal support, the city will have 28 such lines on 450 miles. The system costs $200,000 a mile, compared with $30 million to $50 million a mile to build light rail and $200 million to $300 million for a new subway, said Rex Gephart, the director of regional transit planning in Los Angeles.

New York officials acknowledged they want to catch up.

"We haven't been as innovative or creative as we probably should have been," said the city's transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall. "The question is, how do you service the needs of goods and services, pedestrians and bicyclists, commercial and for-hire vehicles? From my perspective, it really is about creating viable alternatives for people taking their cars around Manhattan."

The 36 bus corridors being evaluated are distributed across the five boroughs: 12 in Queens, 8 in Brooklyn, 6 in Manhattan, 6 in the Bronx and 4 on Staten Island.

Together, the corridors account for 40 percent of total bus ridership. They include First and Second Avenues in Manhattan - the home of the M15, the busiest bus line, with a daily ridership of 66,000 - and major corridors like Fordham Road in the Bronx, Kissena Boulevard in Queens and Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn.

But the Manhattan crosstown routes most notorious for their maddening slowness - like the M23 and the M96 - are not part of the study. The short distances traveled and the need to stop at every avenue do not make bus rapid transit feasible, planners said.

Several elements that could fit into a bus rapid transit system are already under way in New York. The city plans to install traffic signal controllers at 14 intersections along Victory Boulevard and Bay Street on Staten Island. The state is examining building dedicated busways on the Staten Island Expressway and the Cross Bronx Expressway.

New York City Transit already has 12 passenger bus depots throughout the five boroughs that could serve as terminals for rapid buses. Two more - at Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue and Kings Plaza in Brooklyn - are under construction, and yet another two are being planned. Finally, New Yorkers who already use the 35 bus routes that offer limited-stop service are familiar with the concept.

The task is to build on those efforts and to coordinate them better, said Mr. Hom, the chief of operations planning. "It's really a system," he said of the plans for faster buses. "It isn't putting a fancy bus with a happy face out there and calling it B.R.T. The sum of the elements is greater than the elements individually."

[TonyO]

NYTimes
March 28, 2005

City to Buy Diesel-Electric Buses, Not Natural Gas Ones

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/03/28/nyregion/28bus.1841.jpg
Boarding a hybrid bus, which uses diesel and electricity. The city has been splitting its clean-air purchases with both hybrid and natural-gas buses.

By SEWELL CHAN

New York City Transit, which has been under pressure for years to reduce harmful emissions from its bus fleet, has decided to buy hybrid-electric buses instead of those that use compressed natural gas, a significant shift in its strategy for gradually replacing diesel fuels with cleaner ones.

The decision, to be presented for the first time tomorrow, suggests that the agency will no longer buy both types of clean-fuel vehicles and will focus entirely on the hybrids, which run on diesel and electricity. Hybrid buses began running as a pilot project in September 1998 and entered regular service in April 2004. So far, 325 hybrid buses, or 7 percent of the total fleet of 4,512, have been ordered. Now, the agency hopes to buy up to 500 more.

Officials have argued that the gas vehicles require expensive maintenance facilities and that the hybrid buses are just as clean. But the shift away from compressed natural gas could be controversial. In 1998, Gov. George E. Pataki promised to convert the huge Manhattanville Bus Depot into a compressed natural gas center, a decision supported by West Harlem residents who believed that diesel bus depots had contributed to high rates of childhood asthma, other respiratory ailments and cancer.

Five of the six active Manhattan bus depots are north of 96th Street. In 2000, a local advocacy group, West Harlem Environmental Action, filed a civil rights complaint with the United States Department of Transportation, arguing that the disproportionate concentration of depots amounted to discrimination and environmental racism.

This month, the department, which has jurisdiction because the transit agency gets federal grants, formally closed the case, saying that it had not found evidence of discrimination. But it upheld some of the environmental group's concerns, said Peggy M. Shepard, the organization's executive director.

In an interview yesterday, Ms. Shepard said the group was still negotiating with the transit agency over greater environmental controls at the five depots and participation by community representatives who live near them.

Transit officials first hinted last year that they might renege on the 1998 pledge, saying that cleaner diesel technologies had made the $50 million conversion unnecessary. The agency has two compressed natural gas depots: the Jackie Gleason Depot in Brooklyn and the West Farms Depot in the Bronx.

Ms. Shepard did not directly criticize the proposal to stop buying compressed natural gas buses. "We do understand that C.N.G. and hybrid diesel buses are measuring about the same level in terms of emissions," she said. "But without an agreement in place on a variety of environmental measures that we want them to implement in Harlem, I cannot say we are not opposed."

A transit agency spokesman, Paul J. Fleuranges, said he could not discuss the matter until the proposal was presented tomorrow to the New York City Transit committee of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's board. The board is scheduled to vote on the matter at its monthly meeting on Thursday.

Ms. Shepard added that she was surprised to learn that the board might vote on the proposal so soon. "We had no way of knowing that they were moving ahead with it this week," she said. "My concern is that they have not gone to the community at large to tell them anything about this."

A summary of the proposal, which a board member provided to The New York Times, details New York City Transit's intention to reallocate money that had been budgeted for 120 compressed natural gas buses and 55 extra-long diesel buses. The money would instead be used for 100 hybrid-electric buses, with an option to buy 400 more in the future, and 20 extra-long hybrids.

New York City Transit's clean fuel bus program, begun in June 2000, has relied on both gas and hybrid buses, but the gas buses require special facilities and equipment - like compressors, maintenance bays and fueling stations - that are expensive to build and maintain.

Compared with the compressed natural gas buses, the hybrids have better fuel economy and equal or lower emissions, the agency's chief maintenance officer for buses, John P. Walsh, said in a recent interview.

The buses, which have rear diesel engines as well as lead-acid batteries mounted on the roof, cost $125,000 to $200,000 more than regular diesel buses, but are expected to make up for the added expense through savings on fuel, he said. He added that the buses were quiet and easy to operate and braked smoothly.

Of the 325 hybrid buses that have been ordered, 65 are at the Mother Clara Hale Depot, also in Harlem; 60 are at a depot in Middle Village, Queens; 135 will be assigned to a depot in Fresh Pond, Queens; and 65 will be assigned to the Manhattanville depot, which is on West 133rd Street between Broadway and the Henry Hudson Parkway.

In addition to buying clean-fuel buses, the agency started using ultra-low-sulfur diesel fuel on its entire diesel fleet in September 2000. By the end of this year, it plans to retire two-stroke diesel engines, which produce some of the highest levels of pollution, and to retrofit all diesel buses with particulate filters, which trap the minute fragments of soot that have been linked to respiratory and other illnesses.

[tmg]

The New York Times
5 Bus Routes Picked for High-Speed Runs
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
Published: October 24, 2006

Five bus routes, one in each borough, will be part of a pilot program that will use special lanes, computer-controlled stoplights and other means to speed bus travel, in an effort to change the prevailing image of tortoiselike service.

According to people briefed on the program, which involves state and city agencies, the list was made final over the summer and includes the route on First and Second Avenues in Manhattan. That route, with an average of 61,000 passengers each weekday, is considered by transit officials to be the most heavily used urban bus route in the nation.

The city’s transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall, said this month that two of the routes would be in use by next fall, and plans call for the rest to be in use in 2008. Officials would not identify the two routes. If the pilot program is successful, the city envisions adding more.

The program is known as bus rapid transit, which may seem an oxymoron to people accustomed to buses that crawl rather than sprint through traffic.

The new souped-up service would replace current limited-stop buses on the five routes, but current local service would be retained, according to plans.

Stops would be spaced from one-half mile to a full mile apart. The bus lanes would be painted a special color, and the buses would get a distinctive paint job, to differentiate them from their pokier cousins. Cameras would be mounted on buses and bus stops to photograph trucks and cars blocking the bus lanes, so tickets could be sent to the vehicles’ owners.

To help speed buses along, on some of the routes they will have devices that transmit their location to a computer system that controls traffic lights: a green light could be kept on a few seconds longer, or a red light could turn green a few seconds earlier, to let the buses pass. At some bus stops, passengers would pay their fare at sidewalk turnstiles rather than on the bus, to make boarding faster.

For all that, the projected increases in speed are less than heart-stopping.

A report prepared for the city’s Transportation Department and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority estimated that the greatest time saving would come on the route along First and Second Avenues, where the new buses would run as much as 22 percent faster than the limited-stop bus service currently available. That means that if a trip on the current First Avenue limited bus takes 30 minutes now, it would take about 23 ½ minutes on the new buses.

The smallest saving would be on a route that would run along Pelham Parkway and Fordham Road in the Bronx, where the projected difference was only 8 percent, according to the study. There, a trip that takes 30 minutes now would take about 27 ½ minutes on the revamped buses.

The other buses are the Merrick Boulevard route in Queens, where buses would move an estimated 16 percent more quickly; the Nostrand Avenue route in Brooklyn, with an estimated time saving of 20 percent; and the Hylan Boulevard route in Staten Island that would run across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge into Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with the time saving estimated at 21 percent.

The transportation authority has earmarked $20 million for the program.

While bus rapid transit has been used successfully in other cities for several years, the city’s Transportation Department and the state-led transportation authority began studying the idea only in 2004. Transit advocates said progress had been slow, in part because any decision involved coordination between separate government entities.

The transportation authority controls the buses, but the city controls the streets and sidewalks, which is where much of the work must be done. Lanes have to be designated bus-only, and new bus stops have to be created, some of which will be configured to extend out into the street so the buses don’t have to take time to pull over to the curb.

One of the greatest obstacles to the program could be political. To clear the way for bus lanes, parking would be eliminated along some stretches of the routes, which could lead to protests from business owners or residents.

Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit group that works to promote mass transit and bicycle use, said programs like bus rapid transit were crucial to keeping the city moving as the population grows and the streets become more crowded.

“It’s going to be about reprogramming our existing street space to get more transportation capacity and performance out of it,” he said.

[tmg]

Website for official BRT study:
http://www.mta.info/mta/planning/brt/index.html

Earlier unofficial studies:
http://www.utrc2.org/research/compproj.php?viewid=83
http://www.transalt.org/info/brt.html

[Eugenious]

BRT works in other cities because they have dedicated traffic lines etc. They are not proposing this here, so basically this is a fancied up limited bus service. They are not planing on any guided busways or graded separated routes...this just a gimmick for the MTA to act like it's doing something about the awful service the bus transit is known for. Also rising fuel costs make this a poor option for the city and MTA.

Yawn.

[tmg]

There's a bit more to BRT than that. Different forms of enhanced bus service work in different contexts. Exclusive right-of-way bus transit isn't necessarily a good fit for NYC (for a wide range of reasons outlined in the studies cited earlier). Meanwhile, LA and London have made significant improvements without physically separated lanes. Let's wait and see what NYC's proposals actually look like.

[Strattonport]

Even without having the entire line separated, I'd like to the city make attempts to see where it's possible. In any case, this is promising and I hope the city makes good on it.

[ablarc]

That Manhattan bus line (#15) is the perfect alignment for the Second Avenue Subway (which should have, incidentally, been the First Avenue Subway).

[Kris]

October 24, 2006
Tracking the Slowest Buses
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Straphangers Campaign and Transportation Alternatives, two transit advocacy groups, yesterday announced the fifth annual Pokey Awards, which are intended to single out the city’s slowest buses. The award is based on data collected by volunteers who time their rides on bus lines in each borough. To calculate the speed of the bus, the total time from the beginning to the end of the route is divided by the number of miles covered.

For the first time, the groups also gave an award for the least reliable routes, expressed as a percentage of the buses on the route that arrive in bunches or with major gaps in service, or that start significantly behind schedule.

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/10/24/nyregion/buslarge.jpg

[Eugenious]

There's a bit more to BRT than that. Different forms of enhanced bus service work in different contexts. Exclusive right-of-way bus transit isn't necessarily a good fit for NYC (for a wide range of reasons outlined in the studies cited earlier). Meanwhile, LA and London have made significant improvements without physically separated lanes. Let's wait and see what NYC's proposals actually look like.

There's nothing more to it then that actually, you either separate the bus traffic giving it priority or you don't. Here's a nice summary of why this doesnt work and wont work in NYC.

from wikipedia;

".... in order for BRT to have greatest effect, it must have its own right-of-way (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-of-way_%28railroad%29) requiring space and often construction costs. In many cases, BRT does not, and shares the road with cars and other local buses. Buses run on an ordinary road surface, hence it is more difficult for BRT to claim exclusive street use. As a result, BRT operating in mixed traffic is subject to the same congestion, delays, and jarring and swaying rides as do ordinary city buses. Furthermore, signal priority systems, which are often the sole factor differentiating BRT from regular limited-stop bus service (most notably in Los Angeles' extensive "Rapid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Rapid)" system), might cause severe disruptions to traffic flow on major cross streets. Opponents argued that this merely redistributes, rather than reduces, the traffic congestion problems that BRT systems are designed to alleviate. "

I rest my case.

[tmg]

I love Wikipedia, but I'd say that entry is overly simplistic.

Of course a physically separated ROW provides faster service. It's just not feasible with the short block lengths, intensive commercial land uses, sanitation challenges (snow plowing, etc.), saturation cross-traffic levels, and narrow street widths found in NYC. The biggest bang for the buck in Manhattan would be from advance fare payment (which MTA refuses to consider), camera-based lane enforcement (which Sheldon Silver will scream about), aggressive headway management, and active inter-agency cooperation on curb access management. Outside Manhattan, traffic signal priority can be added to the mix. There are places in NYC where physically separated ROW would make sense (Grand Concourse, Grand Central Parkway), but those routes would face competition from subway services, so the passenger demand isn't there. Also, please note that the passenger demand in cities like Curitiba and Bogota is far, far higher than it is in NYC, where buses are a secondary, not a primary mode.

Not surprisingly in NYC, the issues are actually complex. Let's hope that the city has developed imaginative solutions to these difficult problems.

[Strattonport]

I just realized you can also improve bus service within the city if you restrict the number of cars in the city. Another good argument for congestion pricing.

[NewYorkDoc]

A Concrete Plan to Speed Up Buses in Traffic



By WILLIAM NEUMAN (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=WILLIAM NEUMAN&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=WILLIAM NEUMAN&inline=nyt-per)
Published: April 27, 2007

(http://javascript<b></b>:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/04/27/nyregion/27bus_CA0.ready.html', '27bus_CA0_ready', 'width=370,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,r esizable=yes'))
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/04/27/nyregion/27islands-190.jpg (http://javascript<b></b>:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/04/27/nyregion/27bus_CA0.ready.html', '27bus_CA0_ready', 'width=370,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,r esizable=yes'))
Cary Conover for The New York Times
A bus stop called a bus bulb at Broadway and Spring Street is one of several being built for faster loading and unloading of passengers.

In a program intended to help buses move more speedily down the traffic-and-construction-clogged streets of lower Broadway, the city is building a series of extensions to the sidewalk that should make it easier for buses to load and unload. In the taxonomy of traffic engineers, these extensions are known as bus bulbs.
Although the Broadway bulbs are rectangular, not bulbous, the term actually comes from the fact that in other parts of the world where bus bulbs have been used, like London, they tend to be rounded extensions near a corner.
The Broadway bulbs are concrete islands set just off the sidewalk. They are about 130 feet long and 9 feet wide.
The first bulb on Broadway was finished earlier this month at Spring Street. Another has been completed at Grand Street. And workers are building two more, at Walker and Franklin Streets.
The idea is that buses lose a lot of time pulling over to a curb and then pulling back into traffic. The bulbs essentially bring the curb to the bus, which does not have to pull over but instead stops in front of the bulbs to let passengers on and off and then continues on its way.
That is the theory at least.
Earlier this week, as this reporter waited at Broadway and Spring Street, a taxi pulled up to the bulb to discharge a fare, just ahead of an approaching M1 bus. The bus had to wait for the taxi to move on before it could pull up. Then, once passengers had boarded, the bus was blocked by a truck that was double-parked just beyond the end of the bus bulb, forcing the bus to pull into traffic to get around.
David Woloch, a deputy transportation commissioner for the city, said that by early July the city will mark the lane that runs beside the bus bulbs as a bus-only lane, from Houston Street to Ann and Vesey Streets. And, he said, the Police Department will enforce the bus-only restriction by ticketing cars that encroach on the lane.
Bus drivers were skeptical.
“I think it’s a waste,” the driver of the M1 bus that was blocked by the cab and the double-parked truck said of the bus bulbs. He would not give his name because he said he did not want to draw the attention of his superiors at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “It’s not going to do anything. Get rid of the cars and that’ll do something.”
On another day this week, a driver on another M1 bus was also skeptical. He said that the police do not do enough to enforce bus lanes elsewhere in the city. “That’s never worked,” said the driver, who also asked that his name not be used. “It doesn’t work on Madison. It doesn’t work on Fifth Avenue because people park in the lane. Or cabs drop off in the lane.”
As the bus continued south on Broadway, the driver pointed to the lane next to the curb, which was marked on the pavement as a bus lane. Despite that, the lane was mostly full of parked cars, most of them with city-issued placards on the dash, showing they were used by law enforcement personnel.
More than one bus stop was blocked with parked cars as well, some with placards, others with drivers sitting at the wheel. While the cars with placards are allowed to use the bus lane under the current rules, parking in a bus stop is prohibited.
“This is always like this,” the bus driver said. “And you know what’s missing? There are no ticket agents down here.”
Paul J. Browne, a deputy police commissioner, said 1,862 tickets were issued last year to drivers for using a bus lane. In addition, 4,205 tickets were issued for parking in a bus lane and 2,669 tickets were issued for parking at a bus stop.
That works out to just under 24 tickets a day in the three categories of tickets combined. He said the tickets were primarily issued in Manhattan.
So far this year, he said, 3,537 tickets have been issued for bus lane or bus stop violations.
“It may be a perception among some drivers, but in fact there is enforcement,” Mr. Browne said of the bus drivers’ complaints. “It may not be at the level they want or in an ideal world the level we want, but the fact remains we do enforce it every day.”
The new bus lane is intended to be different, partly because it will occupy the lane of traffic one lane from the curb, so it is less likely to be blocked by parked cars.
The city will spend $355,000 to create the lane and the four bulbs, which include metal fencing designed to make them more visible.
The bulbs and bus lane on Broadway are intended to encourage bus use in a stretch of Lower Manhattan where a large amount of construction regularly tangles traffic. The city plans to enhance five other bus routes, one in each borough, with dedicated lanes and high-tech equipment to make them more efficient.
“I think it’s great that they narrowed the street for the bus stop,” said Toni Oliveri, who was waiting one afternoon this week at Spring Street for the X27 express bus to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. She said that people would no longer have to jump out from the curb, as they often did, to get the attention of bus drivers.

[Eugenious]

“I think it’s a waste,” the driver of the M1 bus that was blocked by the cab and the double-parked truck said of the bus bulbs. He would not give his name because he said he did not want to draw the attention of his superiors at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “It’s not going to do anything. Get rid of the cars and that’ll do something.”
On another day this week, a driver on another M1 bus was also skeptical. He said that the police do not do enough to enforce bus lanes elsewhere in the city. “That’s never worked,” said the driver, who also asked that his name not be used. “It doesn’t work on Madison. It doesn’t work on Fifth Avenue because people park in the lane. Or cabs drop off in the lane.”
As the bus continued south on Broadway, the driver pointed to the lane next to the curb, which was marked on the pavement as a bus lane. Despite that, the lane was mostly full of parked cars, most of them with city-issued placards on the dash, showing they were used by law enforcement personnel.

lol....only MTA would test something like this in the middle of Manhattan. What a bunch of morons.

[TonyO]

lol....only MTA would test something like this in the middle of Manhattan. What a bunch of morons.

It definately makes you wonder, "what were they thinking?".

[Eugenious]

It definately makes you wonder, "what were they thinking?".

In London where they have dedicated bus lanes, there is a network of cameras monitoring every part of the road and any violations recorded result in the driver getting a summons in the mail.

The company that did the study for MTA recommended that this implement ion of BRT be carried out with full cooperation an enforcement of NYPD. It looks like the MTA did not listen and are not getting the NYPD to pay any attention.

[NewYorkDoc]

First-Ever Electronic Bus Status Display Installed in Manhattan (http://www.streetsblog.org/2007/08/24/first-ever-electronic-bus-status-displays-installed-in-manhattan/)

http://www.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/08_20/real_time_bus2.jpg
A camera phone-toting tipster reports seeing workers installing what appears to be New York City's first-ever real-time bus status display board this morning inside a bus shelter at First Avenue and E. 14th Street along the M15 route. We'll put in some calls to the MTA and DOT to get the details.

Update: A Dept. of Transportation source says that the MTA is installing 15 of these real-time bus information displays around Manhattan as a pilot program. DOT is responsible for the shelters, MTA is responsible for the electronic signs. The project is part of the city's contract with Cemusa, the company that builds and sells ads on the new bus shelters as DOT's sub-contractor.

[TonyO]

^ That's great. The only thing worse than wasting time waiting for a bus that isn't coming is wasting time waiting for a subway that isn't coming.

[TonyO]

NY Times
October 4, 2007

The Next Bus Will Arrive in Exactly ...

By WILLIAM NEUMAN

The wait for a bus may seem more predictable at 11 stops where New York City Transit has begun testing electronic signs that show when the next one is due.

The signs relay information from a satellite positioning system that has been installed as part of a pilot project on 168 buses that operate on several routes in Manhattan. The routes include the city’s busiest, the M15, which runs on First and Second Avenues, where seven of the signs have been placed.

Under the system, each bus communicates location data to satellites, which transmit the information to a center in Brooklyn. From there, a radio signal goes to the electronic signs, which post the number of minutes until the next bus.

Robert Walsh, the general superintendent for buses with New York City Transit, said that since the installation began in July, the signs have been working well, despite occasional glitches when a bus loses satellite contact.

A more terrestrial problem occurs when a bus gets stuck in traffic and throws the estimate off temporarily.

The signs can also provide information on route changes.

Four other routes have an electronic sign operating at one stop each, and a fifth route is to have a sign working soon. Three more signs are to be added along the M15 route, bringing the total number of signs to 15.

Mr. Walsh said he hoped to get approval for an expanded program by the end of this year, and to equip about 700 more buses with positioning systems that would feed 35 more signs, which would go on routes in the other boroughs.

New York City Transit has about 4,500 buses.

[Eugenious]

nytimes.com

October 11, 2007, 12:07 pm The Turbine on the Bus Goes Purr Purr Purr

By William Neuman (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/author/neuman/)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/10/11/nyregion/11bus.span.jpg
The DesignLine hybrid bus out and about in the city on a test run. (Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times)


Shhhh! People are riding here!

If you happen to get on a new hybrid bus that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is testing on 42nd Street this week, you may be tempted to shush your fellow passengers, as though the bus were a library.

It’s that quiet.

The bus may purr softly, but it looks a bit like the dog in “The Poky Little Puppy.” (http://www.randomhouse.com/golden/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307103284) It has a rounded snout, dark patches around the headlights and rear view mirrors that look like floppy ears hanging in front. It also has large windows, plush seats and is a little skinnier than the typical New York City bus.

But the real difference is in how the bus runs. The city’s other hybrid buses run like hybrid cars. They run off battery power some of the time and diesel or (in the case of many cars) gas engines at other times. And the braking action helps charge the batteries.

The test bus is different in that it runs on battery power all the time. It has a diesel engine, but that is used only to charge the battery, although the bus also uses the brakes for that purpose. The diesel engine is different too. It is a turbine engine, similar to a jet engine. But much quieter.

Jerry Higgins, the director of new bus technology for New York City Transit, said the manufacturer predicts the bus will get about seven miles per gallon, which is about double the fuel efficiency of the transportation authority’s current hybrid bus fleet.

The bus will be tested here for two months and if the authority likes what it sees, it may consider placing an order. The bus is made by DesignLine International Holdings (http://www.designlineinternational.com/) of New Zealand. The company is building a manufacturing plant in North Carolina.

New York City Transit currently owns about 4,400 buses. Of those, about 600 are diesel electric hybrids.

[ramvid01]

Jerry Higgins, the director of new bus technology for New York City Transit, said the manufacturer predicts the bus will get about seven miles per gallon, which is about double the fuel efficiency of the transportation authority’s current hybrid bus fleet.

7 miles a gallon which is twice the fuel efficieny of the current hybrids.:eek: No wonder the MTA wants a fare hike. I can't imagine the fuel "efficiency" of the regular buses.

[Eugenious]

I wonder why there's no serious efforts in NY state for bio-diesel, ethanol from municipal solid waste. There are many companies working on waste to liquid ethanol tech and I believe Daimler and VW just bought a company specializing in this. If we could convert the buses to run on bio-ethanol we could dramatically increase fuel efficiency and solve the problem of trash and waste in this city.

[brianac]

New York
Manhattan: More Hybrid City Buses

Published: October 25, 2007

New York City Transit (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_city_transit/index.html?inline=nyt-org) announced yesterday that it would add 850 hybrid buses to the fleet it operates with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/metropolitan_transportation_authority/index.html?inline=nyt-org). The agency said it already operated the largest hybrid bus fleet in the world, with 548 hybrid buses in service. The M.T.A., which also operates buses in the city, has 284 hybrids on the road. The new buses, made by DaimlerChrysler Commercial Buses North America, are expected to be put in service over the next two years.

[brianac]

April 16, 2008, 3:09 pm

The Mercedes-Benz of City Buses (This Is Only a Test)

By Jennifer 8. Lee (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/author/jlee/)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/16/nyregion/bus-large.jpg

The 60-foot Mercedes-Benz bus, popular in Europe, will be tested over the next 30 days for perhaps a larger commitment.
(Photo: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times)

It’s sleek. It’s low-emission. It’s made by Mercedes-Benz. And no, it’s not the German challenge to the Toyota Prius. It’s, potentially, a new city bus that could soon be rumbling down your neighborhood streets, thanks to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Today, New York City Transit (http://www.mta.info/nyct/) showed off a 60-foot Mercedes-Benz Citaro accordion bus (http://www2.mercedes-benz.co.uk/content/unitedkingdom/mpc/mpc_unitedkingdom_website/en/home_mpc/buses/home/products/new_buses/new_Citaro_G.html), which will be tested over the next 30 days for perhaps a larger commitment.

The Citaro bus model, introduced in 1997, is immensely popular in Europe, where it is used in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Hungary.

A hybrid version with a BlueTec engine (http://www.daimler.com/dccom/0-5-1059924-1-1065503-1-0-0-0-0-0-14972-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0.html), announced last year, is expected to consume 20 to 30 percent less fuel than its diesel counterparts and has already won environmental applause (http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/01/mercedes-benz-c.html).

The one on loan to New York City is a pure diesel model which seats 48, and is also designed low to the ground, to aid older people and wheelchair accessibility. “It has a simple ramp that flips out so the passengers can roll in and roll off,” said Jerry Higgins, who oversees the purchasing of new buses for New York City Transit.

New York City Transit currently operates 4,500 buses, of which 630 are accordion-style made by New Flyer. It buys between 300 and 400 buses each year as the buses, which have an expected 12-year life span, age out.
On Wednesday, the bus could be seen heading up Third Avenue and across 125th Street along the M101 route. It will be tested only in Manhattan and Bronx, so other boroughs will have to wait.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times.

[NewYorkDoc]

From Streetsblog.com

A Transit Miracle on 34th Street (http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/04/17/a-transit-miracle-on-34th-street/)

http://www.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/04_14/p12_1.jpg
NYC DOT is proposing to turn Manhattan's 34th Street into a river-to-river "transitway."


In what she half-jokingly called "probably the first-ever co-presentation" between their two agencies, Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan stood with New York City Transit President Howard Roberts earlier this week to unveil the city's current Bus Rapid Transit program in its entirety -- including a plan that would "redefine the public realm" on Manhattan's 34th St. by redesigning it as the city's first "transitway."

At a forum co-hosted by the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, Transportation Alternatives, the Pratt Center for Community Development and the Straphangers Campaign, over 100 people gathered at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx Tuesday morning, just a few blocks from where the city is poised to launch its first BRT project (http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/03/25/nyc-to-launch-bus-rapid-transit-in-the-bronx/) on Fordham Road, to hear international experts explain how other programs work, and don't work, around the world. Walter Hook, executive director of New York's Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (http://www.itdp.org/index.php), profiled elements of BRT models in cities like Jakarta, Indonesia and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where his organization has served a consultatory role. Oscar Edmundo Diaz, also with ITDP and once a senior advisor to former Bogotá Mayor Enrique Peñalosa (http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/02/20/penalosa-to-new-york-pols-brt-pricing-benefit-working-class/), detailed the workings of the wildly successful TransMilenio (http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/01/28/streetfilm-brt-in-bogota/), which Hook described as state-of-the-art in Bus Rapid Transit.
Outlining New York's plans, Sadik-Khan previewed big changes for some of the city's major corridors.

http://www.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/04_14/p15_1.jpg

The block between 5th and 6th Aves. would be reserved for buses and people, with cars traveling away from the CBD on either side

34th Street, Manhattan: DOT will repave and restripe for five lanes between Third and Ninth Avenues by the end of this year, with painted bus lanes on the north and south sides and three auto lanes in the center. Service hours will also be extended. Phase 2 calls for a 34th Street Transitway, closing the street to cars between Fifth and Sixth and installing pedestrian plazas. On either side of that block, there would be two lanes for cars heading in one direction -- toward the rivers -- while on the other half of the street, buses would have two extra-wide lanes separated from traffic. In other words, buses would constitute the only through traffic on 34th Street. According to Sadik-Khan, 34th Street BRT will eventually tie in to new East River ferry service (details to be announced next week). Here's the 34th St. slideshow (http://www.streetsblog.org/wp-content/pdf/34thstpresentations2.pdf).
Hylan Boulevard, Staten Island: BRT will run from Richmond Avenue across the Verrazano Bridge. The route will include a reversible center-lane protected busway with raised boarding stations. We hope to have more on this soon.
Fifth and Madison Avenues, Manhattan: On Fifth, dual bus lanes will be installed from 23rd to 59th Street, while dual lanes on Madison will be extended from 42nd Street to 23rd.NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has pledged a unit dedicated to bus lane enforcement, Sadik-Khan said. But she added that the city needs Albany to approve bus-mounted cameras as well. Though the program lost $112 million in funding with the defeat of congestion pricing, Sadik-Khan said the city has applied for federal funds to expedite BRT build-out. While the timetable for some projects is still undetermined, Bx12 Select Bus Service will launch in June as planned, and Phase 1 of 34th Street will be completed this year.

Sadik-Khan and Roberts acknowledged the gap between New York BRT and other world-class systems, where six-door, articulated, level-boarding buses travel in buffered lanes, taking on up to 42,000 passengers per direction per hour. For one thing, Roberts said the MTA has yet to find a manufacturer that can produce a bus that both meets modern BRT standards and can stand up to the city's demanding transit schedule (this bus (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/the-mercedes-benz-of-city-buses-this-is-only-a-test/) wasn't mentioned). So for now, the city is moving ahead with components it can put into place relatively quickly: pre-board payment, signal prioritization, more buses, fewer stops, and painted (mostly curbside) lanes.

"We're not Curitiba (http://urbanhabitat.org/node/344) and we're not Bogotá," said Sadik-Khan, "but we're getting there."

[ramvid01]

I always wondered this but... wouldn't it speed things up if a person could just swipe their card like at a turnstile when they get on the bus instead of having it waste 5 seconds as it sucks in your card? Or is there some other reason as to why this couldn't be done?

[brianac]

May 22, 2008, 12:48 pm

M.T.A. Might Bring Back Double-Decker Buses

By William Neuman (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/author/neuman/)

Updated, 4:10 p.m. | Double-decker buses — a fixture of the streetscape in London and other international cities — could be making a comeback in New York City. Officials at New York City Transit said today that the agency was considering bringing back double-decker buses, similar to ones that used to run in the city decades ago.

The officials said the buses could seat as many people as an articulated bus — the double-length buses, each pivoting around a joint in the middle, that are used on some of the city’s busiest routes — while needing less maintenance.

The new double-deckers could run in pilot program on Fifth Avenue. But officials said they had not yet chosen a bus manufacturer and could not say when the pilot would begin. Howard H. Roberts Jr., the transit agency’s president, said at a meeting of the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the transit agency’s parent entity, that double-decker buses were in regular use on Fifth Avenue as recently as the 1970s.

(Several readers have expressed surprise that double-decker buses were used as recently as the 1970s. According to New York City Transit, double-decker buses were the norm on Fifth Avenue for decades, until they stopped being used in the early 1950s. They returned in 1976 when the eight British-made double decker buses went into service again on Fifth Avenue as part of a test program. But the buses did not hold up well, said Charles F. Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit, and were taken off the road after about two years.)

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/mta-might-bring-back-double-decker-buses/

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[brianac]

Making City Buses Run Cleaner Yields a Big Bonus: Fewer Trips to the Gas Pump

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/06/14/nyregion/14busses.span.jpg Andrew Henderson/The New York Times
John Walter at work at the Manhattanville Bus Depot. Rising prices are making fuel efficiency more important than ever.

By WILLIAM NEUMAN (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=WILLIAM NEUMAN&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=WILLIAM NEUMAN&inline=nyt-per)
Published: June 14, 2008

When you buy 55 million gallons of diesel fuel a year to power some 5,000 buses, even small improvements in fuel efficiency can make a big difference.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/06/14/nyregion/14buses.4.pop.jpgAndrew Henderson/The New York Times
Trevor Wills, standing, and Narine Gandharry, eye batteries.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/06/14/nyregion/15buses.battery.190.jpg M.T.A.-New York City Transit
A lithium battery that will go in many city buses.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/06/14/nyregion/14buses.3.pop.jpgAndrew Henderson/The New York Times
The use of nitrogen in bus tires helps to improve fuel efficiency.

For several years, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/metropolitan_transportation_authority/index.html?inline=nyt-org) has been on a mission to cut the amount of pollution coming from its buses, buying ones with hybrid engines and switching to a cleaner type of diesel fuel. As part of that drive to cut emissions, it has also pushed to get more mileage out of every gallon of diesel fuel. And now with the price of fuel soaring, the authority is reaping an additional benefit from that greater efficiency.

“All this was done for emissions, and fuel economy came along with it,” said Gary A. LaBouff, the director of research and development for the department of buses at New York City Transit (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_city_transit/index.html?inline=nyt-org). “We didn’t anticipate $4 a gallon diesel.”

The authority is in the midst of a financial crisis, with declining tax revenues pinching its budget from one side and increased fuel costs from the other. In April alone, the authority spent $8.7 million more than it had budgeted for fuel (including for diesel locomotives), which was 56 percent above the budgeted amount.

That puts a premium on fuel efficiency.

One of the ways the authority hopes to improve its fuel efficiency is through a new type of lithium-ion battery for its hybrid buses.

The 824 hybrid buses currently on the road power their electric motors with batteries similar to traditional acid and lead car batteries. Those batteries weigh a lot and require more maintenance than officials had anticipated when they first began deploying large numbers of the hybrids about four years ago.

The new lithium-ion batteries, which were not available at the time, are similar to the batteries in rechargeable drills and other hand tools. They have been installed on four buses that have been on the road as part of a test program since January.

Earlier this week, at the Manhattanville bus depot on 133rd Street, mechanics removed a metal cover on the top of bus No. 6401 to reveal a large container that the mechanics call a battery tub. Inside were more than 2,000 paper-wrapped batteries about the size of a typical C battery, stacked up in neat rows.

“It’s like a whole bunch of flashlight batteries put together,” Mr. LaBouff said.

While they might evoke jokes about the Energizer Bunny, the lithium cells work better than the older acid and lead batteries. They charge faster, Mr. LaBouff said, deliver more power and, it is hoped, will last longer and require less maintenance. The authority has ordered 850 new hybrid buses. The first ones, scheduled to arrive this summer, will have the old-style batteries, but by next year they will begin arriving with the lithium-ion cells.

Mr. LaBouff said that a tub of lithium-ion batteries was lighter than a tub of the old acid and lead batteries and would shave about 3,000 pounds from the weight of a 16-ton hybrid bus. That promises a significant boost in fuel efficiency, since a lighter vehicle gets more mileage from a gallon of fuel.

The authority’s old-fashioned diesel buses get about 2.5 miles per gallon, Mr. LaBouff said. The current fleet of 825 hybrid buses gets 3.2 miles per gallon (the buses thrive on stop-and-go traffic, since the braking action charges the batteries). The authority expects the lithium-ion hybrids to get about 3.5 miles per gallon.

The lithium-ion batteries cost more than their predecessors, but the authority hopes to come out ahead. It estimates that fewer hours spent on maintenance and better gas mileage will result in $50,000 in savings per bus over their 12-year life span.

Another initiative that could eke a little more distance out of each gallon of fuel is under way in Brooklyn, where sharp-eyed passengers may notice that many buses now have green caps on the tire valves.

The green valve caps indicate that the tires have been filled with pure nitrogen, a gas that is a component of air. Special compressors at several bus depots extract nitrogen from the air and store it in tanks to be pumped into the tires.

Studies have shown that nitrogen is better for tires than plain air, according to Stephen Martini, the assistant chief officer of maintenance for the department of buses. Nitrogen leaks from the tires at a slower rate, meaning they have to be filled less often. And the pressure in nitrogen-filled tires is more likely to remain constant despite fluctuations in temperature. Normally, the pressure in air-filled tires rises as they heat up and falls as they cool.

Maintaining an optimum pressure should increase the life of tires by about 10 percent, which is a primary goal of the program, Mr. Martini said. But it should also mean a small improvement in fuel mileage.

Mr. LaBouff said there were other initiatives under way that could contribute small tweaks to the bus fleet’s fuel efficiency. They include an adjustment to lower the acceleration rate on hybrid buses and a change in the buses’ software to make the engine run more economically. He said the authority had also begun using a fuel additive devised to improve engine efficiency.

For all that, Mr. LaBouff said he did not have an estimate of how much money the fuel efficiency gains were saving the authority, especially with the cost of fuel still on the rise.

“The trouble is,” Mr. LaBouff said, with a bitter laugh, “the dollar savings is getting better every day.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/nyregion/14buses.html?ref=nyregion

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[tommyguy]

One comment you hear over and over when the subject of "taking the bus" (especially in Manhattan) comes up, is how s-l-o-w the buses are. But I think that should be qualified.

Obviously during rush hours the buses are going to get bogged down just like every other vehicle (only worse since the bus has to keep stopping to gorge and ungorge itself of rush hour loads). Obviously at those times the subway is a far superior choice. Outside of rush hour it depends. Sometimes the buses actually move pretty well.

Example-

Thursday afternoon I left a medical appointment at E.23d St and 1st Ave heading for Grand Central Terminal. (I live in the suburbs now so virtually all my trips begin and end at GCT.) Instead of taking a crosstown bus to the Lexington (actually Park) Avenue subway, as I'd always done, I took an M15 bus uptown on 1st Ave. to 42d St. Then an M42 west to Grand Central. I boarded the M15 just before 3:00 PM and was in Grand Central before 3:20. Total trip time (including walking from the M15 stop across 1st Ave. to the M42 stop and then waiting several minutes) was barely 20 minutes. Impressive? Not to me since I've discovered this is about average. In early to midafternoon the buses on 1st Ave usually move right along. Traffic on E.42d St. is usually pretty light as well.

Of course try it a bit later, say on a Friday afternoon, and.....you don't wanna know, trust me. :eek:

Going to the Med Center I had taken the No. 6 train to 23rd St., then to 1st Ave. on the M23 crosstown bus, which is notorious for crawling. Conscious of the time, I noticed we moved along quite well between stops, it was the boarding and deboarding that expanded our trip time. This made me think of something I'd read in this thread. Speeding service by buying buses with extra sets of doors allowing people with unlimited Metrocards to hop on via any door.

[tommyguy]

This article was published March 25, 2008. But the pilot project -- along W.207th St, Fordham Road and Pelham Parkway -- WILL be starting this Sunday morning, June 29, 2008. tommyguy


NYC’s First Bus Rapid Transit Line Debuts in the Bronx (http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/03/25/nyc-to-launch-bus-rapid-transit-in-the-bronx/)

by Brad Aaron (http://www.streetsblog.org/author/brad-aaron/)
http://www.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03_24/IMGP1867_2.jpg
L-R: Assembly Members José Rivera and Adriano Espaillat, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, MTA CEO Lee Sander and Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión at Fordham Plaza today

Mayor Michael Bloomberg this morning unveiled details of the city's first Bus Rapid Transit project, called "Select Bus Service," to debut on the Bx12 line, which follows 207th Street in Northern Manhattan and Fordham Road and Pelham Parkway in the Bronx.
Bloomberg and other officials also tied expansion of the program to the implementation of congestion pricing.

Connecting Inwood to Co-Op City, the Bx12 SBS corridor will allow riders to prepay the fare at vending machine stations along the line. Transit customers will get a receipt, to be displayed upon request to "enforcement personnel aboard buses," according to a media release. At first, vending stations will only accept MetroCards and cash as payment, though credit card functionality will eventually be added.
Speaking at Fordham Plaza and flanked by Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, MTA Executive Lee Sander, and electeds from the Bronx and Northern Manhattan, Bloomberg outlined key components of SBS service. In addition to prepayment of fares, the corridors will feature:


More buses (the Bx12 line will have 10 additional buses running during peak hours, Bloomberg said)
Additional service hours
Boarding at front and back doors
Fewer stops
Transit Signal Priority, a system that keeps signal lights green, and quickens the cycle of changing red signals back to green, to allow buses to move through intersections more smoothly
Terracotta colored bus lanes, with stepped up enforcement to keep cars out
Specially designed "branded" SBS buses, and branded stations with new shelters
The Bx12 SBS will replace the line's current limited-stop service on June 29. Bloomberg said the development of other corridors -- including First and Second Avenues in Manhattan, Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, and Hyland Boulevard on Staten Island -- depend on getting congestion pricing through the City Council and state Legislature. This point was echoed by Sadik-Khan, who described SBS as "almost like a surface subway system."


http://www.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03_24/IMGP1989_2.jpg
The "salsarengue bus"

During a brief Q&A with reporters, Sander characterized MTA service improvement delays caused by slumping real estate returns as a "blip," and encouraged a long-term view. On the same subject, Bloomberg said of yesterday's announcement (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/nyregion/25mta.html?ex=1364184000&en=70661d8203dfdc52&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all): "I think what it shows is there is never enough money to do everything."
Bloomberg pledged to do "everything [he] legally can" to ensure that all pricing revenues are used for transit capital projects even after his second term ends.

Also on hand were Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión and state Assembly Members José Rivera and Adriano Espaillat, all supporters of congestion pricing. Espaillat, who represents Northern Manhattan, cited the success of Bogotá Bus Rapid Transit (http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/01/28/streetfilm-brt-in-bogota/), and said he sees no reason it can't be replicated in New York. The "salsarengue bus," as Espaillat called the Bx12, referring to the music favored in the largely Dominican and Latino neighborhoods it serves, is the perfect place to start, he said.
The three also had strong sentiments for those who would cast congestion pricing as a "right-wing conspiracy," in the words of Carrión. Rivera said he has asked Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, an opponent of both the commuter tax and congestion pricing, what he is willing to contribute to the Bronx, which Rivera described as a border between Lower Manhattan and suburban car commuters. "I have yet to receive an answer," Rivera said.
"We're not afraid of park-and-ride," said Espaillat, whose district skirts the asthma-plagued South Bronx and includes "the poster child of buckling platforms" (http://poopcity.typepad.com/inwoodite/2008/02/amny-has-cited.html) at Dyckman Street on the No. 1 line.
"This [congestion pricing] is not a bogey monster," Espaillat said. "This is a rational, practical solution to a very serious problem."

Photos: Brad Aaron
http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/03/25/nyc-to-launch-bus-rapid-transit-in-the-bronx/

[The Benniest]

City bus patrons being taken for a ride by MTA failures - Straphangers group

By PETE DONOHUE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Tuesday, July 8th 2008, 10:47 AM

It's not just subway riders who are packed in like sardines.
A report released Tuesday claims that NYC Transit (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Metropolitan+Transportation+Authority) has failed to match higher bus ridership with additional service - a claim transit officials vigorously rejected.

According to the Straphangers Campaign (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Straphangers+Campaign) report, average weekday bus ridership on local routes rose by more than 450,000 - 22% - over a decade-long stretch ending in September. During that time period, bus service - miles traveled by on-duty coaches - went up just 15%, according to the report.

Approximately 2.5 million people ride local buses on an average weekday.
"Crushed by crowds? Have to wait for more than one bus to go by? It's not your imagination, transit officials have never caught up to the waves of new bus riders," said Gene Russianoff (http://www.nydailynews.com/topics/Gene+Russianoff), the advocacy group's senior attorney.

The Straphangers group reviewed the amount of scheduled weekday service for 185 local bus routes.

Transit officials defended the service and conditions.

Enduring crush-level crowding and being unable to board jam-packed buses "does not systemically occur" on routes, NYC Transit countered in a statement.

"It is equally untrue that NYC Transit has not kept pace with the increase in ridership which resulted from free bus-to-subway transfers and discounted fares," the agency stated.

Between 1997 and 2007, the bus fleet grew by more than 1,000 buses, or nearly 30%, according to the agency.

Copyright 2008 New York Daily News

[NYC4Life]

NY1

Transit Police To Crack Down On Fare Evaders

Updated 1:26 PM

http://img123.imageshack.us/img123/5093/52664052oy1.jpg

Transit and police officials said today that they will begin cracking down on those who try to beat the bus fare, after a new study identifies where it occurs the most.

New York City Transit officials said that they are targeting the approximately 130,000 riders each week who get on the bus without paying fares – costing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority millions of dollars each year.

Transit officials say they've identified the routes and stops where the most freeloaders are getting on. The worst is the B46 in Brooklyn, where an estimated 4,000 people beat the fare each week.

Riders who spoke with NY1 said they are glad the issue is finally being addressed.

"The bus comes and some people just get on in the back and that's about it," said one passenger. "If the people on the bus don't say anything, then I don't say anything. It's not for me to say."

"That's not fair," said another. "If I have to pay $2, they should have to pay $2, too."

"Every time you turn around they're always trying to beat the fare," said a third. "It's not fair to those who pay."

Most of the offenders board the bus through the rear door, while others simply walk right past the driver. Drivers are instructed not to confront fare-beaters to reduce the risk of being assaulted.

"Sometimes people are abusive to the people who drive the bus," said one passenger whose boyfriend in a city bus driver. "They're doing their job just like the people going to work and they have to realize the bus driver is already at work."

The crackdown is expected to begin in a week or two, once Police Commissioner Ray Kelly signs off on a final plan.

In June, the MTA raised the fine for those that try to evade the fair. The fine went from $60 to $100. Those caught can also face arrest.

[brianac]

September 5, 2008, 4:10 pm

M.T.A. Shows Off New Hybrid Buses

By Sewell Chan (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/author/schan/)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/09/05/nyregion/hybridbus-533.jpg
The new generation of Orion VII hybrid-electric buses have an updated appearance and technology. (Photos: Mary DiBiase Blaich for The New York Times)

Has the Metropolitan Transportation Authority suddenly gone literary on us? A news release from New York City Transit today struck City Room as unusual, both for its writing flair and for a certain degree of self-effacement. It began:

Sleek, modernistic and efficient. These are hardly the words one usually uses when describing a bus, but that could soon change with the introduction of a new fleet of Orion VII New Generation Hybrid-Electric buses, which are now making their first runs on Staten Island.
The new buses were put on display this morning at a news conference on Staten Island attended by elected officials. The new buses, among 850 that have been ordered, are part of a generation known as Orion VII. It has “a traffic-stopping, modern design aimed at appealing to bus customers” — not to mention hybrid-electric technology that uses much less gasoline and emits fewer tailpipe gases than conventional vehicles.

These buses represent a huge step forward for New York City Transit,” said Joseph Smith, senior vice president for buses at New York City Transit, the arm of the authority that runs the city’s buses and subways.

Of the 850 buses, 125 will be assigned to Staten Island, replacing buses built in the early 1990s. All 850 buses are scheduled to be delivered by 2010.

When completed, the 850-bus order will bring the authority’s diesel-electric hybrid bus fleet to nearly 1,700 buses, the largest diesel-electric hybrid fleet in the world.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/09/05/nyregion/statenislandofficials-533.jpg
Several Staten Island officials spoke at a news conference at which the new buses were unveiled. From left: State Assemblyman Vincent M. Ignizio; Allen P. Cappelli, a newly appointed member of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s board; State Senator Andrew J. Lanza; State Senator Diane J. Savino; City Councilman James S. Oddo; and City Councilman Michael E. McMahon.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/mta-shows-off-new-hybrid-buses/

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[NYC4Life]

NY1

09/06/2008 11:05 AM

Rider Say City Bus System Needs Improvement

http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/1939/58677066da2.jpg

City bus riders said in report cards that the bus system needs great improvement.

New York City Transit says more than 22,000 riders responded and gave the entire city bus system an average grade of C-minus.

Customers gave overall C grades to the buses’ cleanliness and smoothness of ride, while bus operators got a C-plus for courtesy
Riders say wait times for buses need the most improvement, and that they need to run more on schedule.

[NYC4Life]

NY1

Updated 3:49 PM

MTA Test Drives Double-Decker Buses

http://img115.imageshack.us/img115/8398/42648338mb8.jpg

Some double decker buses are being rolled into service in the city for a 35-day trial run.

Officials say the 13-foot buses are cheaper to maintain, carry more passengers, and are more efficient than the extra-long buses currently in use.

"This bus is used around the world. It does a great job in both express and local. We're try it on several routes in the city," said MTA bus president Joseph Smith. "We have to get a few trees trimmed here and there, but this bus, from an environmental standpoint, carries more people that any other."

"I think it's great. It's one of the best buses they've had so far and they've been testing a few buses out, which is good," said a New Yorker.

"It's progressive management here and I think they're really on the right track.

Buses like these disappeared from city streets in the 1950s and made only a brief return in the 70s.

The new buses will run on select routes along First, Second and Fifth Avenues in Manhattan, and they will be on Staten Island as well.

[brianac]

With Nostalgia in Overdrive, Double-Decker Bus Gets a Trial Run

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/09/09/nyregion/09doubledecker.600.jpg David Goldman for The New York Times
When Darrayle Williams drove a new double-decker bus on Monday, he got looks from pedestrians. “They’re aghast,” he said.

By APRIL DEMBOSKY
Published: September 8, 2008

At 6-foot-7 and 400 pounds, Darrayle Williams might just be the perfect man to drive New York City’s newest bus.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/09/09/nyregion/09doubledecker-2.650.jpgDavid Goldman for The New York Times
Two bus maintainers, Floyd Codrington, left, and Anderson Belgrave, examined a television screen on the bus’s upper level.

On Monday, Mr. Williams slid behind the wheel of a double-decker coach, the first two-story public bus in New York since it made a brief and ill-fated return in the 1970s. It was impossible to be subtle about the moment, and Mr. Williams did not even try. “Big guy, big bus,” he said.

He proved himself adept at maneuvering the king-size vehicle.

“It’s a very solid, steady ride,” Mr. Williams said. As the air-conditioning beat down through individual vents over each upholstered seat, the bus took the corner at 34th Street with minimal tipping sensation, giving riders upstairs a privileged view of the skyscrapers down 34th, then Fifth Avenue, and a sense of majesty, mixed with mild dissociation, above the street-level world scurrying below.

Because of increased ridership and higher gas costs, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/metropolitan_transportation_authority/index.html?inline=nyt-org) is thinking of bringing back the double-decker, which until now had been the sole province of tour bus companies.

Beginning on Thursday, the authority will rotate the bus through designated routes for 30 days. The authority will solicit opinions from passengers as well as Mr. Williams, to gauge how the bus handles in city traffic.

The bus drew a fair number of stares during a demonstration on Monday, with reporters on board (most of whom chose to sit on top). But Howard H. Roberts, Jr., the president of NYC Transit, said, “This is not just a show.”

He added, “It’s not a movement to titillate the public.”

If the trial goes well, the authority will buy an unspecified number of double-deckers for an expanded test. The bus now being used is on loan from the ABC Bus Company, a partner with the Belgian manufacturer Van Hool. Each double-decker costs roughly $650,000, said Elliot G. Sander, the executive director and chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The agency is also considering a hybrid low-floor “articulated” bus — with an accordion-like middle — that costs $920,000.

The test double-decker bus has a lavatory, but the authority intends to have it removed if it decides to purchase the buses. Once it is taken out, the bus will seat 83 passengers, 21 more than the New Flyer, the articulated buses now in use. The new two-level bus also has a low floor, eliminating the need for a wheelchair lift. Mr. Sander said the new buses, which would use ultralow sulfur diesel, are expected to run more efficiently and help the authority reduce its carbon footprint.

“There is a very real chance that New Yorkers will see this in the future,” Mr. Sander said at a press conference on Monday. “We hope it passes the test.”

Double-decker buses were taken out of service in the 1950s, Mr. Roberts said, in part because there were not enough manufacturers in the United States to update and improve the mechanics and keep costs reasonable.

“Unless you build your own bus, you’re a victim of the market,” Mr. Roberts said.

If things go well, the authority hopes other manufacturers will make competing models that can handle the city’s harsh operating conditions.

Monday’s unveiling of the new bus revealed some nostalgia for the double-decker. The authority brought along the Queen Mary, a double-decker that operated along Fifth Avenue from 1938 to 1953. The ripped vinyl seats, sloping aisles and old-house smell offered a stark contrast to the sleek modern version. The two were parked by Madison Square Park.

The newer edition is deep blue with gold trim, its seats upholstered in blue synthetic fabric, accented in canary yellow. Besides an air vent, each has its own seat belt and reading light. TV screens hang over the seats every few rows on the top level.

“It’s very well put together,” Floyd Codrington, 40, a bus maintainer for the authority who drove the Queen Mary to the event, said of the new double-decker. “I love sitting up high and looking down on the world.”

For the next month, the 13-foot-tall, 45-foot-long bus will alternate on local and express routes: the BxM3 from Yonkers to Manhattan, the X 17J between Staten Island and Manhattan, and the M5 on Fifth Avenue, provided the trees have been pruned enough to let the bus pass. If not, the M15 Limited, on First and Second Avenues, will substitute.

As Mr. Williams took the bus for a spin on Monday, some pedestrians looked up in puzzlement. A group of red-vested Gray Line tour representatives on the corner of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue pointed accusingly at the double-decker.

For all his practice driving the double-decker through the streets, Mr. Williams is used to the befuddled expressions. “They’re aghast,” he said.

“They’re like, ‘Is this the bus of the future?’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/nyregion/09double.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&oref=slogin

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[NYC4Life]

I can only imagine the entire MTA bus fleet being double deckers.

[ramvid01]

Yea I can imagine it now, twice the capacity, twice the delay. :rolleyes:

[Ninjahedge]

No.

I can imagine it as less actual busses on the road for the heavier lines. None of tehse stretch accordion kind of busses blocking traffic because they can't make it through the yellow on Lexingtion....

We do not need ALL the busses to be DD, just the high-occupancy areas that need it.

Hell, we might even do better to REDUCE the sizes of some of the fleet in areas/times when ridership is low.

Why drive around a 50 seater when you only have 3 people on it?

[Optimus Prime]

They could definitely convert all the crosstown routes from the articulated, accordion style buses to the double decker if this works out. I think it would even help on-time performance, because those articulated buses are terrible.

The only problem I see is idiots getting on the second floor and then being too slow to get up and make their stops.

[Ninjahedge]

Yep, I see that too.

But, chances are, the infirm/handicapped will not be using the upper deck...

Maybe there should be a sign saying "express" for the top level? ;)


BTW, I think the DD's would make much better robots, don't you OP? ;)

[brianac]

City, M.T.A. Launch Less-Slow Buses on 34th Street

by Eliot Brown (http://www.observer.com/2007/author/eliot-brown) | September 15, 2008

http://www.observer.com/files/imagecache/article/files/selectbusservice.jpg M.T.A.

The city and the M.T.A. officially kicked off their "select bus service" on 34th Street today, a higher-speed service that sets bus-only lanes on the street, from First Avenue to 11th Avenue.

The initiative, which ultimately envisions a partition between the bus lanes and car lanes, has been highlighted as a way to increase capacity to the far West Side as the area develops. It is now illegal for most other vehicles to travel in the bus-only lanes, recently painted red.The state Legislature did not act on a bill pushed by the city that would have allowed cameras to ticket drivers who venture into the lanes illegally, so the enforcement is left to the police.

Buses on 34th Street are some of the slowest in the system, and the lanes with limited traffic would presumably increase speeds noticably.

The city established a similar system in the Bronx earlier this year; however, that route featured off-board fare collection, where passengers all can buy a ticket and rush onto the bus as opposed to waiting in line as each passenger inserts money or a Metrocard.

The initiative has been pushed by both M.T.A. chief Lee Sander and D.O.T. commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who have targeted First and Second Avenues for more routes.

Release below.



Commissioner Sadik-Khan, MTA Executive Director Sander Introduce 34th Street SBS Bus Lanes

Enforcement along high-visibility lanes today, aided by cameras to catch NYC Taxis that violate the lane, will help speed cross-town bus service

NYC Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and MTA Executive Director and CEO Elliot G. Sander today announced that NYC Transit buses have started using new, Select Bus Service (SBS) bus lanes recently installed along 34th Street from 1st to 11th Avenue in Manhattan-the first step in a series of bus-mobility improvements planned for 34th Street to improve cross-town bus speeds and reliability. The high-visibility lanes, which will be enforceable by the New York City Police Department from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays, are part of a joint effort by the agencies to bring improved, SBS service to targeted corridors and areas citywide, and they are a critical component of the sustainable transit agenda called for in Mayor Michael Bloomberg's PlaNYC and in the DOT's strategic plan. In addition, the City is installing cameras at key locations to catch NYC Taxis using the lanes improperly and to issue rules violations to the medallion owners. About 30 bus lines use 34th Street, carrying about 17,000 local bus passengers and 14,000 express bus passengers daily, as well as a great number of private buses. Dan Biederman, president of the 34th Street Partnership, also attended the event.

"Cross-town buses are too often a punch line for slow, unreliable transit service, but today, we are saying that Select Bus Service now has the priority on 34th Street," Commissioner Sadik-Khan said. "Investing in our transit system is one of the best ways we can improve mobility in the City and to provide more effective service on our bus network."

"Just days after the double-decker bus returned to New York for the first time in a generation, this dedicated lane will help us build on the extraordinary success of Select Bus Service on Fordham Road in the Bronx," said Elliot G. Sander, MTA Executive Director and CEO. "While significant investment in bus service would once have been seen as a miracle on 34th Street, today the MTA has prioritized numerous innovations for our three million daily bus customers."

"Following our success with Select Bus Service along Fordham Road, the creation of the 34th Street bus-only lanes will mean a significant improvement in travel times in cross-town service along this corridor," said NYC Transit President Howard H. Roberts, Jr. "More than 30,000 bus customers will benefit each day from this joint effort to make bus transportation quicker and more efficient."

"We continue to be impressed by the vision shown by, and quick implementation of, projects aimed at improving pedestrian life in midtown Manhattan of NYC Department of Transportation," said Dan Biederman, executive director of the 34th Street Partnership. "We believe that setting aside the curb lane for buses on 34th Street will work, and will speed the flow of bus traffic, helping many New Yorkers get to work faster."

A major transit corridor, 34th Street is used by the following bus lines along all or portions of the nearly two-mile street: M4, M16, M34, Q32, BM5, QM1, QM1A, QM2, QM2A, QM3, QM4, QM10, QM11,QM12, QM15, QM16, QM17, QM18, QM21, QM22, QM23, QM24, X22, X23 X24, X31, X51, X63, X64, X68.

34th Street was restriped this summer from six lanes to five, with the two curbside lanes wide enough to accommodate buses painted bright terra cotta, and overhead gantry signs are being installed over the lane, clearly marking the lane for exclusive bus use. Non-transit vehicles in the bus lanes which are not making right turns will be subject to citation by police.

Starting next month, a turn-signal priority system will be installed at 34th Street and 7th Avenue, which will give the M4 and Q32 buses priority in turning left onto southbound 7th Avenue, with a brief, exclusive signal. In addition, a "soft barrier"-perhaps dots-will be tested along the corridor, providing a visual and physical deterrent to vehicles improperly entering the lane. The long-term plan for 34th Street also calls for a transitway to be built from the West Side Highway to the FDR Drive, with protected bus lanes kept entirely separate from other traffic. Between 5th and 6th Avenue, the street will be closed entirely to non-transit vehicles and building a pedestrian plaza. As part of that plan, all non-bus traffic will be modified to one-way west from 6th Avenue to 11th Avenue, and one-way east from Fifth Avenue to 1st Avenue. An overview of the plan is available at nyc.gov/dot.

This fall, DOT will begin a six-month pilot program in which video technology will be used along three locations on 34th Street to show evidence if taxis are violating Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) rules that all traffic laws be observed, by violating bus lane rules. Taxis are permitted to enter a bus lane only to make the next right turn or to expeditiously pick-up/drop-off passengers. To show a

violation, DOT will submit video to TLC showing the evidence, along with an affidavit from the video reviewer. TLC will then use the video to prosecute a rules violation against the taxi medallion owner in front of their administrative law judges. The cameras will also be used to identify official city government cars that violate bus lanes. DOT will be able to move the cameras to other parts of 34th during the trial and will be able to gather general data on what types of vehicles are violating the bus lanes rules.

Announced by the agencies and Mayor Bloomberg in March, SBS was inaugurated on Fordham Road in the Bronx in June, with other enhanced bus corridors and locations announced for each borough. The new Fordham Road service has already resulted in a 14 to 24% improvement in trip times on the Bx12 line, with high-visibility bus lanes aided by off-board fare collection and Transit Signal Priority. DOT and MTA/NYC Transit intend to open SBS service on 1st and 2nd Avenue in early 2010, followed by a corridor on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn to come online in 2011.


http://www.observer.com/2008/real-estate/city-mta-kick-fast-buses-34th-street

© 2008 Observer Media Group,

[brianac]

How a Plan for Bus Fuel Grew Expensive

By WILLIAM NEUMAN (http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=WILLIAM NEUMAN&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=WILLIAM NEUMAN&inline=nyt-per)
Published: September 24, 2008

Five years ago, as they were signing a contract for a cleaner-burning bus fuel, some officials with New York City Transit (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_city_transit/index.html?inline=nyt-org) foresaw the day when similar low-sulfur fuels might become more common and less expensive.

That fuel was custom-made, and over the last two years, fuel suppliers warned transit officials that it might become difficult to get and urged them to consider a cheaper alternative.

But the transit agency never switched.

So last month, it found itself caught off guard when there were no bidders for a new fuel contract. As a result, it rushed through a stopgap agreement with its previous supplier at a much higher price.

The tale of how officials signed a contract that increases the fuel costs for their bus fleet by what could be tens of millions of dollars over the next year, at a time of budgetary crisis, helps show how well-intentioned efforts can go awry and end up affecting riders.

The custom-made fuel costs about 20 cents a gallon more than the more common ultra-low sulfur diesel that suppliers recommended. The fuel also requires special handling that in the new contract adds about 45 cents a gallon to delivery charges. On 50 million gallons of fuel to be delivered over the next 12 months, the extra costs represent an additional expense of more than $30 million.

The transit agency was a pioneer in 2000 when, to combat pollution, it switched its bus fleet to a type of diesel fuel known as ultra-low sulfur kerosene. It arranged for the fuel to be produced at a refinery in Pennsylvania and delivered by a company that is now known as Sprague Energy (http://www.spragueenergy.com/). In 2003, it renewed its contract with Sprague, this time for five years.

Dana Lowell, who was the head of research and development for buses at the transit agency at the time, said officials knew then that the federal government was preparing to require that all diesel engines switch to ultra-low sulfur fuel.

The wider use, they believed, would lower the cost of the fuel.

“The idea was that the five-year contract would take New York City Transit all the way through the transition, and on the other side of the transition they’d be able to buy fuel in a more natural process because it would be the standard,” said Mr. Lowell, who left the agency in 2004 and is now a vice president of M. J. Bradley, an environmental consulting firm.

Instead, in 2006 the federal government chose a slightly different fuel, commonly known as ultra-low sulfur diesel. Today the fuel can be bought at most gas stations.

The kerosene fuel used by the transit agency is produced only at a Pennsylvania refinery owned by Sunoco, and the agency is now the only large purchaser. Because of its unique characteristics, the fuel cannot be shipped by pipeline but has to be moved by barge and stored in separate tanks, adding greatly to costs.

Nonetheless, the agency decided to stick with the kerosene fuel, which is similar to jet fuel. Officials cited problems with diesel fuel in cold weather as one reason.

On Tuesday, when asked whether the transit agency should have moved earlier to switch fuels, Howard H. Roberts Jr., the president of the agency, said, “In hindsight, absolutely.”

Back in 2003, only two companies had bid on the transit agency’s kerosene fuel contract, and at about the time the federal requirement took effect in 2006, the agency began talks with refiners and suppliers to gauge their interest in future contracts, according to a four-page summary of the issue provided to board members of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/metropolitan_transportation_authority/index.html?inline=nyt-org).

The summary said that there was little if any interest in providing the kerosene fuel but that many companies indicated a willingness to provide the more common diesel.

One of those companies was Metro Fuel Oil of Brooklyn. Robert J. Leavy, Metro’s manager of supply and distribution, said on Tuesday that the company had warned the transit agency last year that it could have problems obtaining the kerosene fuel in the future.

“We explained to them that we think that U.L.S.D.” — ultra-low sulfur diesel — “would be a better choice,” Mr. Leavy said. “It’s less expensive and readily available.”

But when the agency made its request for bids public in July, it was once again for the kerosene fuel.

Officials at the agency said that after lengthy discussions this summer with Sprague and Metro, they believed both companies might bid. Neither did.

Mr. Leavy said one reason Metro was unable to bid was that the fuel produced by Sunoco did not meet the standard set by the agency for a component known as cetane, which is similar to octane in gasoline. The agency had told the bidders that it was not willing to alter its specifications.

In a letter to the agency dated Aug. 20, Metro said it would not bid and asked the agency to re-evaluate the contract “in light of its excessive cost.” In a second letter, dated Aug. 27, Metro asked the agency to notify it if it was going to change its specifications or seek a new round of bidding.

Mr. Leavy said he got no response.
The materials provided to the authority’s board state that after the bidding process failed, the agency started negotiating with Sprague, reaching a deal on Aug. 29. But Sprague imposed what agency documents described as “onerous conditions,” more than tripling the handling and delivery charges.

The agency estimated that the one-year contract would cost $206 million. The transportation authority’s board approved the contract on Wednesday. The board materials also state that the fuel that Sprague will provide does not meet the cetane rating and will require an additive, which will cause an adjustment, presumably upward, in the price.

Mr. Leavy said his company was never given an opportunity to make a competing offer at these new terms. A representative of Sprague did not return telephone calls.

Stanley Grill, the agency’s head of procurement, said that when the bidding process failed, he tried to get an extension to the old arrangement from Sprague and Sunoco, but was told that the refinery needed an immediate commitment to ensure supply.

At that point, he said, he did not have the option of seeking a new round of bids. “I don’t have the luxury of doing that any more,” he said. “I have to turn to my supplier who can ensure I have continuity of bus fuel.”

Mr. Grill said transit officials had been hesitant to switch to the more commonly available diesel fuel because they worried about how it might affect their engines and pollution levels. There was also concern that it might violate warranties on the engines.

The agency is currently testing the diesel fuel. Officials said the buses need little or no adjustment to use the different fuel.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/nyregion/25fuel.html?ref=nyregion

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[brianac]

Double-Decker Bus Makes Trial Run, Delighting Riders and Avoiding Branches

By MARTIN ESPINOZA
Published: September 27, 2008

Because of a height issue — which would seem to be a built-in obstacle — the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/metropolitan_transportation_authority/index.html?inline=nyt-org) has had to put off its plans to test its double-decker bus on two routes, including one that traverses Fifth Avenue.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/09/28/nyregion/28double.enlarge.jpgChristian Hansen for The New York Times
Morning commuters from Staten Island getting off the double-decker bus at a stop in Manhattan.

The reason? Tree branches on Riverside Drive and Fifth Avenue are in the way.

Instead, the authority is currently limiting the trial to one route, the X17J from Staten Island to Manhattan.

Even on a good day, it can take about an hour and 45 minutes to complete its journey, from Huguenot Avenue on Staten Island to East 57th Street in Midtown, during peak commuting hours.

One morning last week, Gabriella Pettinato got out of bed determined to track down that bus. As her husband drove, she watched for the 13-foot-tall, 45-foot-long behemoth.

She spotted it near the Staten Island Mall.

“We drove two stops ahead of it to make sure I made this bus,” said Mrs. Pettinato, an accountant, sitting on the upper level of the coach as it approached the Goethals Bridge. “Anything different is exciting.”

Most of the passengers who first boarded the bus headed straight for the upper level, lowering their heads as they walked up the narrow stairs.

While the height clearance on the first level is 5 feet 11 inches, the upper level’s clearance is only 5 feet 7 inches.

Yara Lantigua, a planner for a New York media company, had no trouble making her way to the front seat on the upper level.

Ms. Lantigua, who is 5-foot-1, said she got up a little earlier to make sure she caught the bus, which started its run from Huguenot Avenue and Woodrow Road at 7:16 a.m.

A wide smile revealed her excitement as the bus rolled along the Staten Island Expressway.

“I like sitting in front,” Ms. Lantigua said, putting on her sunglasses. “It makes me feel in control. I like to see the traffic so I don’t get anxious. I like to know what is happening.”

The authority has high hopes for the double-decker as a way to save on fuel while moving more people.

Such buses, currently the domain of sightseeing tours, were common before the 1950s. The buses came back for a brief period during the 1970s.

The new double-decker coach, built and loaned to the transportation authority by the ABC Bus Company of Belgium, is sleek, quiet and powerful. Equipped with a 450-horsepower diesel engine, the $650,000 giant moves effortlessly through New Jersey’s and New York’s highway infrastructure.

A typical city bus has about 40 seats. The double-deckers seat 59 on the upper level and 22 on the lower level, where a portion of the rear is taken up by electrical boxes, a storage area, its fuel tank and a bathroom, which is locked during the trial run, and would be removed if the authority decides to buy the buses.

Andy Mieles, a 6-foot-tall accountant, tried to open the bathroom door after he carefully made his way down the rear stairs of the bus.

He did not need it, he said, but was “just curious.”

Most riders gave the bus positive reviews on one trip last week, though a few complained about the low ceilings. Transit advocates also welcomed the trial.

“Given the huge increase in ridership, it makes sense to try vehicles that can move more people,” said Gene Russianoff (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/gene_russianoff/index.html?inline=nyt-per), staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/straphangers_campaign/index.html?inline=nyt-org), an advocacy group for transit riders.

The transportation agency had planned to test the double-decker on two other lines, the M5 and the BxM3, an express route from Yonkers to Manhattan. But the bus would have run into branches on Riverside Drive, which is used by the M5, and on a stretch in Harlem along Fifth Avenue, which is used by the BxM3.

Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_city_transit/index.html?inline=nyt-org), said it was unclear whether the bus would be tried on another route during the one-month trial. “I would love to be able to put that bus on Fifth Avenue,” he said.

As the bus approached the Lincoln Tunnel last week from Weehawken, N.J., a G.P.S. signal triggered a valve in the coach’s air-suspension system, which lowered the bus by about two inches. That created a slightly more generous four inches of clearance between the roof of the bus and the ceiling of the tunnel.

By then, the novelty of the ride had mostly worn off. As is typical on the X17J route, many passengers had nodded off.

They began to come to around 9 a.m., rubbing their eyes and stretching their arms as Midtown traffic greeted the double-decker, its height proving no advantage in navigating through blocked intersections and honking taxis.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/nyregion/28double.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&oref=slogin

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[NYC4Life]

NY1

11/04/2008 10:56 AM

GPS System For City Buses May Lose Support

http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/6812/62608625ai3.jpg

A plan to outfit city buses with satellite tracking devices could reportedly soon be grounded.

The Daily News says transit officials are considering killing the program which tracks buses and provides arrival time information to riders using information screens at bus stops.

The paper says transit officials have stopped work while they decide whether to go forward with the program.

The contractor for the project is two years behind schedule and has been delayed by software problems.

The signs that have been installed have been shut off because the data is inaccurate.

In 2005, New York City Transit signed a $13 million contract to outfit 185 buses in Manhattan with the technology.

The city has the option of expanding the program to the entire system for $99 million.


Copyright © 2008 NY1 News. All rights reserved.

[NYC4Life]

NY1

Updated 11/12/2008 10:19 PM

M96 Bus Named City's Slowest Service On Wheels

http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/5910/44038861gf7.jpg

The Straphangers Campaign and Transportation Alternatives released their annual "Pokey" and "Schleppie" Awards Wednesday to point out the city’s slowest and least-reliable bus routes.

The Straphangers Campaign and Transportation Alternatives, two riders' advocacy groups, awarded the Pokey Award, which is shaped like a golden snail, to the crosstown M96 bus for being the slowest line.

The M96 bus was clocked in at just 3.7 mph.

"An excruciating speed. That's just barely faster than a human being walking, which is 3 mph," said Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign.

The slowest buses in every other borough also garnered an honorable mention.

The B63 bus between Bay Ridge and Cobble Hill in Brooklyn travels at 4.9 mph.

The Bx19 line between the New York Botanic Garden in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan goes at 5.3 mph.

The Q56 bus between Jamaica, Queens and East New York runs at 6.1 mph.

Lastly, the S42 line between New Brighton and the St. George Ferry Terminal goes at 11.4 mph.

The group also handed out the Schleppie Award, for least-reliable bus service, to the M101, 102 and 103 buses, which run on Lexington, Amsterdam and Lenox Avenues.

According to MTA statistics, more than a quarter of buses on those routes were either bunched together or had big gaps in service.

But Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, said recent adjustments to bus routes are proving useful and there is hope for improvement.

"Luckily, the MTA and the New York City [Department Of Transportation] are moving on Bus Rapid Transit in New York City. They need to do much more but the early returns are very positive," said White.

The Bx12 line along Fordham Road has riders pay before getting on the bus at curbside machines, which speeds up the boarding process.

"Bus speeds have improved by about 14 to 24 percent on Fordham Road, as ridership has increased, so that's a very positive sign that even as ridership is increasing, buses can go faster," said White.

Transit officials hope to expand the program, called Select Bus Service, to Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, First and Second Avenues in Manhattan and Hylan Boulevard on Staten Island.

However, the changes will take years, meaning that the next few Pokey Awards will still have a lot of competition.

MTA-New York City Transit issued a statement regarding the awards, saying the buses must compete with other city users, parked and double-parked vehicles, moving vehicles, pedestrians and bicycles.



Copyright © 2008 NY1 News. All rights reserved.

[ablarc]

"Bus Rapid Transit" is an oxymoron, right?

[NYC4Life]

NY1

Updated 12/01/2008 10:39 PM

Bus Driver Stabbed To Death In Brooklyn

http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/5362/50938716ei8.jpg

Authorities are offering a $12,000 reward after a city bus driver was stabbed to death while on the job in Brooklyn Monday afternoon.

Police say 46-year-old Edwin Thomas died after receiving stab wounds to the neck and chest.

Thomas was operating a bus on the B46 line along Gates Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Witnesses say a man got on the bus and asked for a transfer.

When the Thomas told him he was not eligible, police say the suspect stabbed him twice: once in the stomach and once in the chest.

Thomas was taken to Woodhull Medical Center where he was pronounced dead.

Police are looking for the suspect, and are offering a $12,000 reward for any information leading to his arrest and conviction.

Anyone with information is being asked to call the Crime Stoppers hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS or send a text to CRIMES and enter TIP577.


Copyright © 2008 NY1 News. All rights reserved.

[NYC4Life]

NY1

Updated 3:14 PM

Police Question "Person Of Interest" In Bus Driver Stabbing

http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/163/48775991vt7.jpg

Police this afternoon continue to question a "person of interest" in the stabbing death of a city bus driver.

The incident happened around noon yesterday on the B46 bus on Gates Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Investigators say a man boarded the bus and tried to swipe an invalid MetroCard. The driver, Edwin Thomas, allowed the man to board, but the two soon began arguing when the passenger asked for a free transfer.

Thomas, 46, refused to give him one, since the man had not paid. The man then punched and stabbed Thomas in the head and stomach before running off.

Thomas was taken to Woodhull Medical Center where he died. He had worked as a bus driver for seven years.

http://media.ny1.com/media/2008/12/2/images/01edwin_th_omas.jpg

"Mr. Thomas was a faithful employee," said fellow Metropolitan Transportation Authority worker Louretha Carter. "He was never out sick.

He was quiet. He came to work. He picked up his work. You didn't hear anything out of him."

"Bus operator Thomas was killed in the line of duty serving the people of New York City," said MTA Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer Elliot "Lee" Sander. "Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Thomas family and this is an extraordinary tragedy for the city and for the MTA."

Thomas is the first bus driver to be killed on the job since 1981.

In September, the MTA revealed the B46 route had the most fare evaders of any route in the city – with an average of 4,000 people a week boarding without paying.

His death is leading for calls for more protections for drivers – including more surveillance cameras and an increased police presence on city buses.

"We're calling on the New York City Transit Authority, we're calling on the mayor of New York City, and we're calling on the governor to institute policies that will offer up opportunities for our bus drivers and conductors on trains to be safe," said Anthony Herbert of the Urban Community Council at a news conference today. "We're asking for you to activate initiatives that will allow police officers to ride the bus a couple of stops so there is a presence given."

The NYPD, the MTA, and the Transport Workers Union are offering rewards totaling $36,000 for any information leading to an arrest and conviction.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Crime Stoppers by calling 1-800-577-TIPS, by texting TIP577 to CRIMES, or by going to NYPDCrimeStoppers.com.



Copyright © 2008 NY1 News. All rights reserved.

[brianac]

GET A RETRO CARD

CITY ROLLS OUT VINTAGE BUS FLEET

By TOM NAMAKO, TRANSIT REPORTER

http://www.nypost.com/seven/12022008/photos/new0g.jpg (http://javascript<b></b>:SLIDES.hotlink())
KNOW YOUR ROUTES: Old-fashioned Big Apple buses are back for the holidays. No tokens required - they take MetroCards.

Last updated: 10:00 am December 2, 2008
Posted: 2:20 am December 2, 2008

The buses are vintage, but the fares are definitely the same.

Straphangers boarded original buses from the 1960s and '70s yesterday, the first day of a holiday-season tour for the throwback coaches.

Fares, though, remained in modern times - the buses have been retrofitted to take MetroCards.

Just to compare, a single ride in the early-to-mid-'60s cost 15 cents; it was 20 cents until 1969.

The vintage buses had less window space and weaker engines than current ones, but they were actually more fuel-efficient than today's fleet.

The older rides get about three miles per gallon of diesel, said Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit. Today's get about two, while modern hybrids get about four.

While some riders will enjoy the nostalgia of riding a bus from their childhood, the throwbacks could also cause a headache for anyone in a wheelchair: none of them is disabled-accessible.

"Since there's only one for each route, it's very rare they would get it," Seaton said. "If someone in a wheelchair does get a vintage bus, a wheelchair-equipped one will come a few minutes after."

The oldest throwback on the road is a 1959 bus that, at the time, had a "new look" that included angled windows and large windshields. The most recent of the nostalgic buses was retired in 1990.

During the year, the 19 coaches that are part of the MTA's vintage fleet are stored in depots around the city, out of public view.

The buses will run during morning and evening rush hours on the M8, M14, M20, M23, M34, M42, M57 and M79 lines, and the Q32 in Queens, until Jan. 2.

* The MTA will also put two double-decker coaches dating back to the 1930s on display at various locations in Midtown, Seaton said, although those plans aren't finalized yet.

Last year, some of the oldest buses were displayed at Times Square and neat Grand Central Terminal. Similar spots will likely be used this year.

One of the 1930 rides, a Yellow Coach, was ordered for the Fifth Avenue Bus Co. and was later acquired by the MTA.

The agency is also operating a train of subway cars dating from the 1930s to the 1970s on the V line between Queens and lower Manhattan.

The trains, some of which include wicker seats and ceiling fans, will run on Saturdays during the holiday season from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

tom.namako@nypost.com (tom.namako@nypost.com)

http://www.nypost.com/seven/12022008/news/regionalnews/get_a_retro_card_141816.htm

Copyright 2008 NYP Holdings, Inc.

[NYC4Life]

NY1

Updated 7:02 PM

Man Held Without Bail In Fatal Bus Driver Stabbing

http://img123.imageshack.us/img123/8199/29945902ye9.jpg

Police say a man who has confessed to the fatal stabbing a city bus driver in Brooklyn was arraigned Wednesday on second-degree murder charges and is being held without bail.

Police say Horace Moore, 20, admitted to stabbing B46 driver Edwin Thomas in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Monday.

Moore reportedly has a long rap sheet, including an attempted murder conviction.

Police say witnesses identified him in a lineup.

Investigators now believe Moore boarded the bus through the back door without paying, which is particularly common on the B46 route. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority revealed earlier this year the B46 route had the most fare evaders of any route in the city, with an average of 4,000 people a week boarding without paying.

Police say Moore approached Thomas, seen on the right, asking for a free transfer, and when he refused, began arguing with him in the street.

http://media.ny1.com/media/2008/12/3/images/01edwin_th_omas.jpg

According to police, Moore punched Thomas in the head and then followed him back onto the bus and stabbed him before running off. Thomas was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

Thomas' son says he always gave his father a warning before he left for work.

"I always told him, every time he went to work, 'Dad be careful, it's a little crazy out there. Be careful and just let things slide,'" said the victim's son.

"He was like real strict about everything. He loved his job."

One passenger on the B46 said she has seen most drivers wave fare beaters on, just to avoid a fight.

"I take the bus day and night. See it all the time, all the time," said the passenger.

Bus driver Donald Chung, 60, who has driven the B46 route for 14 years, said the MTA discourages confrontations with fare beaters, but encourages drivers to not let them off easy.

"You tell them the fare is $2 and that's that. That’s the best I could do," said Chung.

"[Drivers are] being told they shouldn't challenge anyone but they are still being told to say well the fare is $2," said Transport Workers Union secretary-treasurer Ed Watt. "Well, sometimes people can take that as a challenge as well."

But following Thomas' death, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Transit Workers Union are discussing ways to increase security.

On Wednesday, the Joint Bus Operator Assault Committee, a union-management group, tasked with addressing the common problem of assault on bus drivers, met to discuss new options for protecting drivers.

Among the possibilities: a 911 panic button drivers can press to alert police, and some form of physical barrier, likes the ones used in taxis.

"If we had a plexiglass barrier it would be good, but let's see if they do that. Right now we have to make do with what we have," said Chung.

"Any money that is spent as a result of the decisions coming out of this committee will save lives, will save the authority money," said Watt. "It'll save them money on absenteeism, it'll save them money on health costs."

Officials from both the MTA and the union say they will also call on the state Legislature to strengthen penalties for anyone convicted of assaulting a bus driver.

Meanwhile, a wake will be held for Thomas this Sunday at the Andre Torregrossa & Sons Funeral Home on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. A funeral mass will take place Monday at the Sacred Heart Church in Cambria Heights, Queens.

Thomas will be buried at the Nassau Knolls Cemetery on Long Island.



Copyright © 2008 NY1 News. All rights reserved.

[NYC4Life]

NY1

Updated 12/08/2008 11:20 PM

Hundreds Say Farewell To Slain MTA Bus Driver Stabbed By Fare-Beater

http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/6986/55312281aa9.jpg

Hundreds of bus drivers lined the street for the dramatic send off in Cambria Heights, Queens.

The funeral procession was led by bagpipes and trailed by an out-of-service bus, honoring Thomas' seven years of service as a bus operator.

As Thomas' casket passed by, the drivers fell silent and saluted their co-worker.

During the funeral Mass, Thomas, 46, was described by family members as a "devoted family man" who "lived a joyful life."

"He had a smile you could see coming down the block," said friend Sonja Occident. "You didn't need to talk to him for him to smile. I'd say, 'Edwin, why you keep that smile?' He said, 'That's what keeps me going.' So, he will be missed."

"Edwin is one of the best people you could have as a co-worker," said colleague Jose Lugo. "I can't imagine what the family is going through, because he is the hardest working individual. He encouraged me. He said, don't mess with other jobs. Transit is giving you an opportunity to make money; you come and work."

NYC Transit President Howard Roberts said that part of Thomas' legacy will be a more secure and safer environment for bus operators.

Edwin was to be laid to rest Monday evening in Port Washington, Long Island.

He is survived by his wife and two teenaged children.

According to police, suspect Horace Moore has confessed to the crime. He is being held without bail and faces second-degree murder charges.


Copyright © 2008 NY1 News. All rights reserved.

[brianac]

New York Up Close

With a Colleague Slain, Drivers Talk of Partitions

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/14/nyregion/14bus.span.jpg Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Many bus drivers favor plexiglass shields for protection from violent riders.

By JAMES ANGELOS
Published: December 12, 2008

THE stabbing death two weeks ago of Edwin Thomas, a city bus driver, underscored how little protection bus drivers have from violent passengers. While assaults on drivers rarely prove fatal — the last time a city bus driver was killed by a passenger was in 1981 — drivers are punched, spit at, cursed and kicked with wearisome regularity.

As it turns out, such mistreatment is hardly confined to New York. Spitting was deemed such a problem in some British cities that bus drivers in Edinburgh and elsewhere were issued “spit kits” that include cotton swabs, allowing drivers to collect DNA to identify the perpetrators. And in many of London’s buses, drivers are shielded from passengers by partitions.

Since Mr. Thomas’s killing, there has been increased talk about such partitions among New York bus drivers and officials at Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/transport_workers_union/index.html?inline=nyt-org), which represents the drivers. Many of the drivers at the vast, red-brick Flatbush Depot, where Mr. Thomas was based, like the idea.

“I’ve been punched; I’ve been kicked; I’ve been spit on,” Norris Phillip, a 50-year-old who has driven city buses for seven years, said on the sidewalk outside the depot on Tuesday. “Something needs to be done.”

Ed Watt, an official with the transit union, said that the group had long supported bus partitions, and that several years ago a proposal was put forth to retrofit buses with partial, plexiglass partitions that could open and close like a door. According to Mr. Watt, the proposal was not implemented largely because of the cost.

Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_city_transit/index.html?inline=nyt-org), said in a phone interview that design problems, not cost, were the reason for rejecting that proposal. The partitions, he explained, were too constraining to drivers and reduced visibility.

Mr. Seaton added, “We will be taking another look, which would necessitate coming up with fresh designs, which while protecting bus operators would at the same time address their earlier concerns.”

Despite the enthusiasm of some drivers outside the Flatbush Depot, a few had reservations about the partitions. One driver suggested that the partitions might be troublesome to drivers who suffered from claustrophobia. Another said he liked the idea of partitions as long as they were not too constricting and did not make drivers hot in the summer.

Others said the partitions were long overdue, among them Lynford Fairclough, 58, who emerged from the depot on his lunch break from driving the B46, the same route through Bedford-Stuyvesant that Mr.

Thomas worked on the day he was killed. Mr. Fairclough was wearing a black ribbon on his windbreaker that read, “Mourn for the Dead, Fight for the Living.”

“It should have been looked into not now, but a long time ago,” he said of the partitions. He then told a story about being spit on by a passenger.
Why did the rider do that? “No reason at all,” Mr. Fairclough replied.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/nyregion/thecity/14bus.html?ref=thecity

Copyright 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[NYC4Life]

NY1

Updated 12/15/2008 11:18 PM

Express Riders Get Reprieve In MTA Budget Talks

By: Bobby Cuza

http://img360.imageshack.us/img360/4642/49325390lx2.jpg

Higher fares and fewer trains and buses, that's what riders can expect next year under the MTA's doomsday budget, which was approved Monday by the MTA board's finance committee.

Board members voiced their displeasure during the meeting, including rider representative Andrew Albert.

"I'm just very sorry that this is the only thing that we're left with here. It's not acceptable to me," said Albert.

"This is the best cut that this staff and board can do to reduce the pain to the least possible amount given the circumstances that we're faced," said MTA Chairman Dale Hemmerdinger.

One group did get a reprieve Monday -- riders of express buses, who would've been hit especially hard under the budget proposal first announced last month.

That move would have raised the express bus fare from $5 per ride to $7.50, a 50 percent hike.

The MTA is now proposing a $6.25 fare, a move pushed by Mayor Bloomberg's representatives on the board, who felt express bus riders were shouldering an unfair burden.

"We have to make priorities and the priority I think that this sets is, pain will be shared equally, however bad it may be," said MTA Board Member Jeffrey Kay.

MTA officials are hopeful the proposed fare hikes and service cuts can be scaled back across the board, if the state acts on the recommendations of the Ravitch Commission.

The panel, appointed by Governor Paterson, proposed a smaller fare hike, new tolls on the East River and Harlem River bridges and a new payroll tax to help plug the MTA's $1.2 billion deficit.

"Our fervent hope is that the legislature will adopt the Ravitch recommendations, that we will not have to do this. We share your outrage," said MTA Executive Director & CEO Elliot "Lee" Sander.

The MTA's doomsday budget is expected to be approved by the full MTA board at its meeting on Wednesday. But that still leaves the state legislature about three months to come to the rescue. That's because a final board vote on the increase won't happen until March, with the hikes taking effect in June.

Of course, by then, the MTA's finances could be in even worse shape, given that tax revenue in December came in $27 million short of projections made just last month.

"It does show how frightening this economy can be in terms of our sensitive taxes," said MTA Chief Financial Officer Gary Dellaverson.


Copyright © 2008 NY1 News. All rights reserved.

[ZippyTheChimp]

DOT Says Bus Bulbs Are a Hit on Broadway; CB1 Pans Them


http://www.tribecatrib.com/photos/news/dec08/bus%20bulb-w.jpg





By Matt Dunning
POSTED DECEMBER 16, 2008


The city has determined it did the right thing when it installed a “buses only” lane 18 months ago down the west side of Broadway between Houston and Fulton Streets. It was an assessment not shared by Community Board 1 members, who heard the report Dec. 9, by Department of Transportation’s borough commissioner for Lower Manhattan, Luis Sanchez.

In an effort to turn a lane of the street into a thoroughfare for buses, the DOT installed four “bus bulbs”—sections of sidewalk extended into the parking lane of the street and designed to be docking platforms for buses—between Spring and Franklin Streets. The plan, Sanchez said, was to make Broadway a less attractive means of getting downtown for car and truck drivers, thus clearing the way for buses and reducing the overall number of vehicles on the street.

“We wanted to keep Broadway as free-flowing as possible,” Sanchez said. “There’s the saying that if you build the roadway, they will come? Well, we wanted to take the roadway so they wouldn’t come.”

According to a DOE study, Sanchez said, an MTA bus making regular stops from Houston Street to Fulton Street takes about 15 minutes, almost as fast as a car making the same trip.

Despite Sanchez’s presentation, CB1 Quality of Life committee members said the DOT’s plan had done little more than make a bad situation worse.

Albert Capsouto, the committee’s co-chairman, said if travel times had leveled off between buses and other vehicles, “it’s because the car times have increased so much.”

One of the biggest problems, committee members said, was the amount of time double-decker tour buses spend idling at the bulbs. Capsouto said some of the tour buses camp alongside the bulbs for up to 10 minutes, preventing MTA buses from accessing the bulbs and dropping off passengers, as well as snarling traffic behind them.

“This is a major problem for both the [MTA] buses and the other vehicles,” Capsouto said. “Not only did you defeat the purpose of the bulbs, you’re exasperating traffic everywhere else. ”

The study did not measure changes in car and truck traffic volume. It also did not compare current travel times down Broadway before and after the changes were made.

Sanchez said the DOT would try to work with tour bus operators to establish rules for loading and off-loading passengers.

Even if the DOT’s plan has been effective, and cars and trucks are opting for alternative southern routes into Lower Manhattan, committee members said the department was, in the end, just moving congestion from one avenue to another. But Sanchez said traffic on the interior Lower Manhattan avenues should subside once construction on Route 9A is complete in 2009.

“Hopefully, once that’s open, that will help relieve the traffic,” Sanchez said.

The Tribeca Trib · 401 Broadway, 5th Floor · New York, NY · 10013 · 212.219.9709

[Ninjahedge]

Those tour busses can be a real PITA.

I have seen so many of them just camped here or there waiting for people. The Tour tour busses (not the double decker sightseeing ones) are the worst, having to wait for everyone to get back from seeing where Seinfeld had lunch or where the Huxtables "lived".

[ZippyTheChimp]

Commuter buses


http://www.downtownexpress.com/inside_dt_logo.gif (http://www.downtownexpress.com/index.html)

April 17 - 23, 2009


City moves to park buses in Tribeca

The city’s plan to move 20 commuter buses from South St. to West St. in two weeks is drawing opposition in Tribeca.

The city Dept. of Transportation had to find a new place for the buses to park since work is starting on the East River Waterfront project (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=195931&postcount=111) along South St. between Maiden Ln. and Wall St. The buses will move to West St. between Harrison and Canal Sts., where they will be allowed from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. seven days a week.

Bruce Ehrmann, a member of Community Board 1’s Tribeca Committee, was angry the D.O.T. told the board about the bus move only when it was already a fait accompli and said the buses would wreak havoc in Tribeca.

“We’ve been waiting years and years and years for our segment of Hudson River Park to be completed,” Ehrmann said after the meeting Wednesday night. “Then, boom, this city in its wisdom wants to wall it off with buses…. It’s a crime.”

Ehrmann said the buses would block loading docks and fill the neighborhood with pollution. The Tribeca Committee unanimously passed a resolution opposing the bus move, he said.

The city picked this stretch of West St. because it has few ground-floor retail stores and because much of the area does not allow daytime parking, meaning the new bus parking spots will not disrupt existing parking spots.

During the week, New Jersey and Pennsylvania buses will use West St. for roughly five-hour layovers, while tour buses will use the spaces on the weekends for shorter stretches of time.

Although the buses will be allowed to park until 7 p.m., the new parking should not interfere with Holland Tunnel traffic because commuter buses usually leave to start picking up passengers before rush hour begins, a D.O.T. spokesperson said in an e-mail. D.O.T. will monitor the traffic and make changes as necessary.

The bus move was listed as temporary on the community board’s agenda, but the D.O.T. said in the e-mail that the buses would never be able to move back to South St. because of the configuration of the new East River esplanade. Transportation officials would not say how long they expected the buses to remain on West St.

— Julie Shapiro

Downtown Express is published by Community Media LLC.


and tour buses



Tour bus layovers clogging
West Side streets


http://www.chelseanow.com/cn_125/busstop.jpg
photo by Diane Vacca
Non-designated vehicles have been parking on streets
authorized for tour bus parking only, as shown
here on 44th St. between 10th and 11th Aves.


By Diane Vacca

Hundreds of charter and tour buses roll onto Manhattan’s streets every day. The drivers drop their passengers at theaters, restaurants, shopping centers and all the famed attractions, then search for a place to wait out the hours until the long haul home. Much more often than not, that search results in frustration and anger, pitting drivers and residents against each other.

Many streets between Eighth and 12th Aves. in Midtown were designated as tour and charter bus layover locations years ago, when many fewer people lived on the far West Side. But now residents of Hell’s Kitchen are infuriated by the buses that drive through the neighborhood, shaking the foundations of 19th-century tenements and emitting fumes that seep through ancient window sashes.

Drivers are not oblivious to these sentiments.

“I don’t know any drivers that want to park on residential streets. It’s a hassle,” said Ira Steinberg, who has been driving large charter buses for 30 years and is also co-president of Coach Tours. “People don’t like it. They don’t want the buses there, and we take up three to four parking places. We kill the parking for the residents, and they become very unhappy.”

But the buses have nowhere to go.

Until a few months ago, specific Manhattan streets provided 1,200 to 2,000 legal parking spaces for these buses, according to Mike Neustadt, co-president of Coach Tours along with Steinberg and a tour operator for over 40 years. The number of spaces “varies with the season, the mayor, construction, [and] usually more than half of them are taken up by vehicles other than the buses they are designated for,” he said, because police and other city employees have thousands of passes that enable them to park anywhere.

Ultimately, confusion reigns.

In November of 2007, the Department of Traffic posted on its Web site a list of Manhattan streets where buses may “layover” or wait with drivers on board for an unspecified time. Last February, however, Neustadt noticed that the page had been modified: Layover time at all locations had been limited to 15 minutes. He called the Department of Transportation for an explanation, but the agency referred him to NYC Transit, a division of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The MTA in turn told him that parking and bus stops are under the DOT’s jurisdiction. Neustadt said the United Motor Coach Association “is working very hard to get an answer from somebody. Are they saying they don’t want us to park at all?”

Making matters even worse for the drivers, most of the Midtown layover signs have been replaced by “No Parking” or “No Standing” signage, Steinberg said. The signs that do remain, like the one on W. 29th St. in Chelsea, have no time limit.

“Right now, the drivers are screaming bloody murder,” he said, describing their complaints over having to park in the bus layover area, per the DOT Web site, and receiving parking tickets for doing so. If not, they simply ride around “endlessly blowing black smoke because the drivers pay for their tickets themselves”—to the tune of $122.

The DOT’s 15-minute limit on bus layovers effectively forces buses to drive in circles for hours, exacerbating traffic congestion and air pollution. Repeated calls to four DOT departments by Chelsea Now failed to find anyone who could explain the rationale behind the policy. DOT spokesperson Scott Gastel, explaining the discrepancy between the signage and the Web site, said that “time limits for layovers are reflected on the signage,” which contradicts the experience of the drivers. An official also said that where no time limit is given on a layover zone sign, parking is permitted all day. But this hasn’t been communicated to the police, who are handing out summonses.

The DOT does mention two off-street lots available to buses, both on 11th Ave., but neither one allows for many buses.

Tom Ferrugia of the Broadway League, an association of theater owners, has been working with bus companies, the city and the Port Authority to find more parking spaces by identifying lots that are underutilized. The League has a big stake in accommodating the large tour buses, which carry 40 to 55 passengers, many of whom spend several hundreds of dollars a day on meals, the theater and shopping.

“Bus drivers can have a lot of say about where the coach is going to go,” Ferrugia said. “If the bus drivers are balking about going to a specific location, [tour operators will] either jack the price up or they flat-out won’t go. So it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find drivers willing to go to New York because of the parking problem.”

A bus driver laying over on W. 29th St., an authorized location, declined to give his name but said he receives tickets all the time.

“Greyhound’s parking in the tour bus layover areas, and we can’t park anywhere in the city other than those designated areas,” the driver said. “I can’t understand why they are parking their buses out here on the street, taking spaces away from charters and tour buses.”

He explained drivers also need time to rest, and that he’s woken up with multiple tickets attached to his bus. “We want to abide by the law,” he added, “we want to do the right thing.”

Neustadt said he simply wants reasonable regulations that are strongly enforced.

“It is impossible to operate a tour bus in NYC and obey every regulation to the letter, because there is no place to park,” he said. “Driving around the block 20 times at 10 miles an hour isn’t illegal, it’s stupid.”

Neustadt also cited the city’s anti-idling law, which he explained allows buses to idle for up to three minutes in below-40-degree weather and not at all when it’s warmer.

“One minute in very cold weather and zero minutes even in warm weather is impossible,” he said. “The bus is designed so that it will not move until there is sufficient air pressure, and that takes more than zero minutes.”

Idling is another hot-button issue for neighborhood tenants. Dahlia Duperroir and Elaine Marlovitch, both longtime residents of Hell’s Kitchen, lamented the constant fumes on W. 52nd St., where there are two schools.

“They idle their engines at will,” Duperroir said. “Sometimes they’re going for an hour, two hours. Even when the gas was all the way up there, they were still idling their engines.”

A long-term solution to the problem is creating a facility for the drivers, Ferrugia said. In extreme weather, buses idle for hours to make use of their vehicles’ heating or air-conditioning systems.

“They’re basically compelled to break the law, because they’re not supposed to idle for more than three minutes,” he said. “They can’t freeze to death. They can’t use a bathroom because they can’t leave the bus unattended. That’s a huge problem.”

Duperroir and Marlovitch said they have seen drivers, particularly limousine chauffeurs, toss plastic bottles filled with urine out the windows of their vehicles.

“[One driver] actually had a bottle of urine, and he dumped it out onto the sidewalk, parked in front of where I live [on W. 54th St.],” Duperroir said. “I’ve seen it in the gutter, I’ve seen them cover themselves with newspaper.”

Lillian Martinez, a crossing guard at PS 111 on W. 53rd St., concurred.

“The [limousines] sit there, and I can call an officer, and he’ll come by and remove them, but they come right back,” she said. “Twenty, 30 minutes they’re sitting there, they’re urinating in bottles while the children are in the yard, they have no respect.”

Neustadt and Steinberg denied that charter bus drivers would resort to such an act, because luxury buses all have bathrooms on board, unlike most commuter buses.

“There needs to be an infrastructure organized to welcome them,” said Christine Berthet, co-chairperson of Community Board 4’s Transportation and Planning Committee, which has been petitioning the city for a long time to build a parking garage for tour buses. “I can’t blame those guys with nowhere to go for five, six, seven hours. It’s not good for anybody. It needs to be dealt with… We want to attract all these tourists, but we don’t know how to set it up.”

Jean-Daniel Noland, a resident of Hell’s Kitchen and chairperson of Community Board 4, agrees.

“The city is to blame for this, because they have not found a solution for all these buses,” he said. “Certainly the buses are great. They bring in tourists, and that’s money for the city. … But the city really provides inadequate parking for them.”

Many drivers now decide to leave the city when they have a layover of several hours.

“It’s far easier and in the long run less expensive, despite the tolls and mileage, than staying in the city,” Steinberg said. There are places in New Jersey where drivers can legally and safely park and shut down their vehicles. They don’t have to “worry about some traffic cop that’s going to sneak up behind them and give them a $100 or $200 parking ticket,” he added.

Several charter bus garages have been proposed—two in Lower Manhattan and two on 10th Ave.—but “no tour bus garages are under construction,” Gastel said. “There would not be any constructed until at least 2012. As for specifics about capacity, no garage has been designed yet.”

Steinberg suggested several sites that could help alleviate the parking shortage. Ten years ago, 600 to 800 buses parked on Hudson River piers. One of the cruise ship terminals can hold 60 to 70 buses when no ships are in port, he said, and the bus companies would be willing to pay a reasonable fee to park there.

New Jersey Transit also has lots for its buses on the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel that are largely unused during the day, he said. The bridge over the railyards on 11th Ave. used to be available for tour bus parking before it was assigned to the Javits Center for loading and unloading trucks. Steinberg said that on the many days each month when the site isn’t needed by Javits, buses could park there again.

The West Side Highway from 42nd to 57th streets, he added, has about 20 bus pull-offs— spaces that hold three to four buses each. But they are currently designated for MTA buses or marked with “No Parking” or “No Standing” signage.

“Every other big city that we go to on the East Coast has a place to park buses,” Steinberg continued, noting that some charge a fee and some don’t. “In Atlantic City, they built a big place for buses to park, and there’s a lounge with a million recliners and a lot of snoring drivers.”


Chelsea Now is published by Community Media LLC.

[brianac]

May 12, 2009, 9:46 am

The Return of the Bus Bell Cord

By A. G. Sulzberger (http://wirednewyork.com/author/a-g-sulzberger/)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/05/07/nyregion/07bus1.480.jpgMichael Appleton for The New York Times
Miles, 4, who was on his way to school on the Upper West Side with his baby sitter, Gina Harrison, used the new pull cord on the M5 bus in Manhattan.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is phasing out the touch pad buttons and reintroducing the cords to public buses.

For most of the history of the public bus, all it took was a single, satisfying yank to bring the 16-ton machine to a halt.

In New York City, however, the plastic-coated wire called a “bell cord” that a rider used to signal a stop was phased out beginning in 1980, replaced with strips of wall-mounted yellow tape for passengers to press when ready to debark.

It got the job done — buses continued stopping upon request — and even if the modesty of the action left cause feeling a bit disconnected from effect, most New Yorkers had moved on by the time the next M15 rolled around.

The bell cord became another city relic — like Checker cabs and one-dollar hot dogs — remembered affectionately if not all that often.

What a surprise, then, when Areatha Walker climbed onto a bus recently to discover a yellow cord strung around the cabin, riders tugging at it as their stops neared. “It brought back old memories, it really did,” Ms. Walker, herself a bus driver of 11 years, said Tuesday during her lunch break. “When I was a kid they had those.”

Without fanfare, New York City Transit (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_city_transit/index.html) has installed the bell cord in all new buses, including 270 already in service in every borough, with an additional 580 hitting the streets over the next year. Eventually, the whole fleet will be outfitted with the cord, said Charles F. Seaton, an agency spokesman.

On an M5 cruising through Manhattan’s Upper West Side one morning last week, passengers reached up occasionally to signal their destinations — “Springy!” one declared after a pull, and “It’s like we’re going backward in time,” said another — a ritual guided as much by common sense as by muscle memory.

While they waited, umbrellas leaning against legs, iPod earbuds dangling, morning papers adorning laps, some reflected on the change, expressing a range of opinions generally set to the tune of indifference.

“I don’t really care,” said Gina Harrison, 44, a baby sitter. “As long as the bus stops when I want it to stop.”

That was not the case for her two squirming wards, Lola and Miles, 2 and 4. “They love it,” Ms. Harrison said. “Kids love to pull cords.”

For the adults, the two systems proved to be somewhat of a Rorschach test for existing biases. Some preferred the tape because it was easier to reach, while others endorsed the cord because it was easier to reach. The tape was accused of being buggy, the cords of being saggy. Each was thought to be irresistible to misuse by teenagers.

Janette Kemp, 53, a former New Yorker in town visiting family, said she was squarely in the tape camp.

“You just push down on it,” she explained. Then she gestured to the cord. “This you have to pull down on.”

“I guess you just get used to certain things,” she said.

The bell cord’s return, much like its disappearance, was essentially an asterisk to two generations of major bus upgrades.

First used on trolleys as far back as the late 19th century and incorporated by their gas powered competition from the start, the cord system was stripped from New York City buses in the 1980s when the city began switching to wheelchair-accessible buses. No one at the transit agency (http://www.mta.info/nyct/) knows why the buses were instead outfitted with the yellow press tape, said Mr. Seaton, but the last bus with a bell cord was taken out of service in 1992. (Other cities, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles among them, have loyally stood by the bell cord system.)

Some never grew accustomed to the shift. Steven Van Manen, a bus driver for 26 years, described continued confusion, particularly among older riders and foreign visitors, who still reach up to signal their stops.

“People still search for the cords,” he said while standing outside the Jackie Gleason Bus Depot in Sunset Park. “To this day, people will come up to me and say, ‘I can’t find the bell.’ ”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/05/07/nyregion/07bus2.480.jpgMichael Appleton for The New York Times
Riders use the new pull cord for requesting stops on the M5 bus in Manhattan.

Last year when the agency purchased a new line of hybrid Orion VII buses, a move aimed largely at saving fuel and reducing emissions, it decided to reintroduce the cord system because it was cheaper to install and repair, Mr. Seaton said. The bell cord system costs $293, compared with $1,056 for the touch tape system (a new bus costs just under $550,000). It will take about a decade to replace the entire fleet.

That will be a welcome moment for Stanley I. Fischler, a public transit historian who never liked the tape system, which he says lacks the quality of tactile accomplishment.

“When you pulled the cord, you had a general feel — the cord in your hand, you heard the buzzer — of contacting the driver,” Mr. Fischler said. “You feel like you were doing something.”

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/the-return-of-the-bus-bell-cord/

Copyright 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[brianac]

August 31, 2009, 1:01 pm

When Bus Drivers Stopped Giving Change

By A. G. Sulzberger (http://wirednewyork.com/author/a-g-sulzberger/)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/08/27/nyregion/fare1-480.jpgEdward Hausner/The New York Times
On Aug. 31, 1969, New York City buses began requiring exact change. A day earlier, passengers boarded a crosstown bus on 42nd Street, heading east toward the United Nations, as someone up front got change from the driver.

Before the MetroCard, before the old two-tone token, when fares were just 20 cents, New York City bus drivers did something that today seems almost remarkable.

They gave change.

For example, in case the self-explanatory nature of the concept has eroded with time, a person could hand a crisp dollar bill to a driver and the driver would return 80 cents in coins.

Until Aug. 31, 1969. (http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0714FB3A5910738DDDA80B94D0405B 898AF1D3) In a year of 40th anniversary celebrations — the moon landing (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/13/science/20090714-apollo11-interactive.html), Woodstock (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/as-woodstock-played-city-was-then-as-now-business-as-usual/), the premiere of “Sesame Street” — it could be easy to overlook the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s move to exact fares on city buses. (Thankfully, though, it is the time of year when editors seem unusually eager to note these anniversaries.)

At the time it was a big deal. City officials praised it for speeding up service and preventing robberies. One driver called it the “best thing” since air-conditioning on buses. And many riders griped about losing the last 5 cents on their quarters, sometimes seriously overreacting to that prospect.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/08/27/nyregion/fare-190.jpgEdward Hausner/The New York Times
A small notice above the driver’s seat reminded riders about the change to exact fare.

In 1969, the city bus system had about 4,000 buses taking about 1.5 million daily fares totaling about $300,000, according to reports at the time.

The main reason for the fare change was to discourage robberies (http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50A16FB3A5910738DDDA80B94D0405B 898AF1D3). Bus robberies increased from 59 in 1966 to 97 in 1967 to 244 in 1968 and 356 through August of 1969 (bus drivers were known to have as much as $75 in fares on them at the end of shifts). The surge prompted New York to join a rapidly growing list of more than 30 cities that had switched to exact fare in the previous year, where their experience in bolting a heavy-duty, locked fare box to the bus floor had pretty much ended robbery attempts.

But transit officials cited other benefits: faster rides, less risk of fare money “disappearing” and fewer accidents caused by distracted drivers.

“This is the best thing that’s happened, other than the air-conditioned buses,” Mario Contaldi, a 52-year-old driver, told The Times (http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50617FF3B551B7B93C1A91782D85F4D 8685F9&scp=1&sq=mario contaldi&st=cse). “I’ll tell you, the attitude of the public is very good — exceptional.”

There were hiccups. Within hours of the change, Norman Simington, a bus driver from Queens, was held up at gunpoint by two men who had apparently not been following the transportation authority’s publicity campaign. After informing the two robbers that the fares were locked and inaccessible in the sealed coin box bolted to the bus floor, he gave them $6 of his own money.

Complaints (http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F7061FF63C5D1A7B93C1A81783D85F4D 8685F9) about the lack of change were far more common, not that transit officials were particularly sympathetic. “People must have 10 cents in exact change to use a public telephone,” a transit authority spokesman told the Times in the weeks leading up the change. “It’s no more unreasonable to expect them to have exact change when they get on the bus.”

Yet unreasonable was exactly what Arthur Burroughs, a 27-year-old Brooklyn resident, called the new policy shortly after it went into effect.

Boarding a bus, he demanded a nickel back for his quarter and then refused to get off the bus when the driver said he could no longer provide change. He was arrested on a “fare beat” charge.

His lawyer — Gloria Goldstein, who recently retired from the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court — said at the first court hearing that she doubted whether the change was “legal or constitutional.”

The case spent more than a decade in criminal and civil court. After her promotion to the bench, Ms. Goldstein passed the case to her son, Mark Goldstein, who was just out of law school. “It was a weird case,” he said recently.

The charges of trying to dodge the fare were ultimately dropped, he said.

Mr. Burroughs, who had been fired amid the publicity, filed a wrongful arrest suit, Mr. Goldstein said, and was awarded $75,000 in damages by a jury, but the appellate division overruled the judgment. His best guess was that the whole thing wrapped up in 1982.

Mr. Goldstein, now 51, still is surprised at all the attention the case garnered. “They made it sound like he was leading a fare revolution,” he said. “He wasn’t. He was just a guy who had a quarter and wanted change for a quarter.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/08/27/nyregion/fare2-480.jpgPatrick A. Burns/The New York Times
As the switch to exact change — intended to prevent robberies of drivers — took effect, a passenger counted out his coins while waiting for a bus.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/when-bus-drivers-stopped-giving-change/?scp=1&sq=No%20Change%20on%20the%20bus&st=cse

Copyright 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html) The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[ZippyTheChimp]

Welcome back, brianac.

[brianac]

Hi Zippy.

[Stroika]

Lanes for Buses Only, and New M.T.A. Chief Means It


By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/michael_m_grynbaum/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
Published: October 19, 2009

Jay H. Walder (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/jay_walder/index.html?inline=nyt-per), the new chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/metropolitan_transportation_authority/index.html?inline=nyt-org), was walking through his old neighborhood in Brooklyn on Monday when he ran into a former neighbor he had not seen in 15 years.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/nyregion/20mta.html?partner=rss&emc=rss#secondParagraph)http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/10/20/nyregion/20mta.inline.190.jpg (http://javascript%3Cb%3E%3C/b%3E:pop_me_up2%28%27http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/10/20/nyregion/20mta_CA0.inline.ready.html%27,%20%2720mta_CA0_inl ine_ready%27,%20%27width=720,height=600,scrollbars =yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes%27%29)

Jay H. Walder, the new chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, on the B41. He plans to add restricted bus lanes and to use enforcement to make drivers take them seriously.

Pleasantries were quickly followed by a plea: “Please do something about the B41!”

That would be the B41 bus, which Megan Ryan, 65, the former neighbor, and nearly 40,000 people along Flatbush Avenue ride each day.

“It’s very frustrating,” Ms. Ryan explained to the chairman. “A local comes, and you can’t get on it, because there’s too many people.” Sometimes, she said, she walks to a nearby avenue to try to catch the limited. “And of course, it will pass me when I’m walking by.”

Much of the focus on Mr. Walder’s arrival in New York has been on the subways, where Mr. Walder, a former London transit guru, wants to install contactless, no-swipe fare cards and arrival-time clocks.

But buses, which carry nearly 2.4 million New Yorkers a day on nearly 250 routes, have struggled to overcome constant congestion and slow speeds, with some moving only slightly faster than a typical pedestrian. Experiments with bus lanes and satellite tracking technology have yielded mixed results — leaving riders like Ms. Ryan, who commutes to her job as a nurse for developmentally disabled patients, with a lurching, crawling ride to work.
T
o Mr. Walder, that simply does not make sense.

“In London, you carry nearly twice as many people in the bus system as you do on the Underground,” he said on Monday as he rode a packed B41 local along Flatbush Avenue toward Downtown Brooklyn. In New York, the opposite is true. “We must close the gap and make more of the bus system,” he said.

Mr. Walder’s plans include an expansion of dedicated bus lanes with stricter enforcement, aided by cameras mounted on street poles and on the buses themselves that can snap photos of offending cars. He wants to introduce the contactless fare cards — which can be quickly waved over a sensor — to the subways and buses, reducing boarding times. And he wants GPS devices on buses so passengers can tell when a bus is coming, even if the familiar bulky shape is not visible on the horizon.

“What I’d like you to think about is a train system with rubber-tire vehicles,” Mr. Walder said, peering out at the passing street. A single red car was parked in the bus-only lane on Flatbush Avenue, forcing the bus to merge into an adjacent lane and bringing traffic to a standstill.

“We’re on a bus right now where every seat is full,” he said. “How many people are on this bus? Seventy-five? But we haven’t prioritized this bus any differently than a car which has one person in it.”

In London, Mr. Walder and his team found that drivers simply did not believe that bus-lane restrictions would be enforced. Stricter fines, widespread cameras and an advertising campaign helped open up the lanes, leading to a significant increase in ridership.

“If I put train tracks down the street, you wouldn’t park your car on them. If I said this is a bus lane, somehow it becomes fair game,” he said. “One person’s use of a road impacts upon another person’s use of the road. My point is, if we have to make a choice, make the choice for the bus, not for the car.”

Buses have become cleaner, more efficient and graffiti-free since Mr. Walder moved to the Prospect Park area of Brooklyn in 1989 as a newlywed. But the congestion and lack of information for riders remains the same.
Waiting for the local just before 8 a.m., Mr. Walder assumed the perennial pose of the expectant bus rider: head cocked, eyes searching the busy street. Without any sort of GPS unit, the wait can seem like forever.

“Just not knowing when the bus is coming” can make riders much more anxious, Mr. Walder said.

Because of the way New York’s transit system is governed, carrying out some of these changes will require cooperation with City Hall, Albany, the Police Department, and even the courts — statewide legislation must be passed, for example, before the city can use cameras to enforce the bus-only lanes.

And Mr. Walder, who has been on the job for only two weeks, did not give many details about when his plans might take effect, or what could make these efforts more successful than those that fell short in the past. (Attempts to provide arrival times to bus riders have been tried as far back as 1996.)

But the chairman said “there is no separation on this issue” among the key entities, noting that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/michael_r_bloomberg/index.html?inline=nyt-per) has cited improved buses as a top priority. And he pointed to recent successes, like countdown clocks installed this summer along 34th Street and a pilot program on Fordham Road in the Bronx that has raised bus ridership there by 30 percent.

On Fordham Road, buses can send signals to traffic lights that delay red signals, allowing a straggling bus to make it through the intersection. But Mr. Walder said he would like to begin with better enforcement, noting that more complicated technologies can come after riders start to see a difference.

“This is what moves New York,” he said, as a packed B41 lurched by.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/nyregion/20mta.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

[Ninjahedge]

They have to be careful about the delayed red signal. SOmetimes when you mess up the timing, it messes up the flow all around, and can cause stagnation in some areas that will, in turn, effect bus travel.


The only other thing I am wondering is how people will be able to make turns when bus lanes take up the turning lane. You want to make a RHT on, is it 2nd avenue?, 3rd maybe?, there are areas where a double bus lane makes you wonder how you can make that turn. How long can you ride in the lane if you are making a turn and how can you prove hat you were making a turn in the first place if you get snapped/pulled over before you do so?


I would like enforcement of the bus lanes though. That combined with more enforcement of things liek parking meters and double parking should help. Keep people moving and the reverse of stagnation will also be true.

[Merry]

New Buses Bring Silence to the Streets

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

Any New Yorker who has ridden a city bus might be forgiven for believing a banshee is buried under the floorboards. Engines idle at an alarmingly high volume, and acceleration is often accompanied by a symphony of cracks and snaps, the squeals of aging machinery with little eagerness to perform its assigned task.

So the newest addition to New York City’s formidable bus fleet — an experimental turbine hybrid known as the DesignLine — is notable mainly for a feature it does not have: noise.

“Quiet as a tomb,” declared Doreen M. Frasca, an appointee to the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who has taken the bus several times in the last month.

When the DesignLine stops short, or takes off from a light, there is little more than a low groan. An onboard air-conditioner usually drowns out any sound from the engine.

The other day, one block north of Astor Place, James Sollecito sat down behind the wheel and gradually eased the bus onto Fourth Avenue for a 90-minute trip to Washington Heights. The engine hummed softly as its driver peered out from the extra-large Plexiglas windshield, a sheer single pane that resembled an astronaut’s visor writ large.

“I never drove anything that accelerates like this,” Mr. Sollecito, who has driven city buses for 15 years, said approvingly, as the bus glided along the street jerk-free.

Silence, that rare commodity on the city streets, is achieved by throwing out the most basic element of automobile design: internal combustion.

Instead of a noisy, piston-based engine, the DesignLine operates on a spinning turbine that recharges a lithium-ion battery, a green energy source more commonly found inside laptop computers. That means fewer moving parts, and fewer ways to create a racket.

Three of the buses are operating in Brooklyn and Manhattan, at a cost of $559,000 each. If the pilot is approved, 87 more will arrive by the end of next year, part of a $60 million contract with DesignLine, a New Zealand-based manufacturer.

The buses have 37 seats inside a brightly lit interior with glowing LED panels. The rear doors open after a slight nudge, and the batteries recharge every time the driver hits the brakes.

“It’s the most advanced vehicle we have,” said Charles Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit.

On the trip to Washington Heights, not every passenger had the same reaction. Valerie Murray, on her way home from Bellevue Hospital Center, boarded near Madison Square Park and made her way to the bus’s elevated rear seats. She quickly returned. “It’s too high,” Ms. Murray said, frowning at the seats, which are closer to the roof than in other city buses.

But is it smoother? “It might be if the road wasn’t this bumpy,” she said. “But it is bumpy, so it’s the same thing exactly.”

Maria Principe, an Upper East Sider, took a seat near the front after boarding just north of 42nd Street, where she had been shopping at Willner Chemists, an upscale pharmacy. “It feels like the air is cleaner, lighter,” she said, glancing around the bus and adjusting the fox-fur lining on her khaki coat. She squinted through her sunglasses. “It’s still noisy, but it’s nice that it’s bright.”

Other riders were immediately struck by the lack of racket. “There’s no hissing back there,” said Darryl Samuel, an employee at the Department of Education who lives on 142nd Street. “There’s usually a lot of engine noise.

It’s a lot quieter; it makes me think it’s electric.”

Malachai Williams, a second grader at Public School 171 in East Harlem, put it more bluntly. “This bus is awesome!” he said, plopping into a seat toward the back. “It smells like a bus that takes you to different countries and states.”

Malachai appeared to find the ride smoother, too; he was fast asleep within minutes.

Jay H. Walder, the new chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, helped run the transit system in London, where buses are taken twice as often as the subway. In New York, the reverse is true, but Mr. Walder has vowed to change that. He has plans for dedicated bus lanes, GPS tracking devices and fare cards that can be waved over a sensor, reducing boarding times.

The authority will buy nearly 2,500 new buses between 2010 and 2013, an investment of $1.96 billion. Nine of 10 buses will replace a vehicle older than 12 years. Officials also hope to expand a pilot program on Fordham Road in the Bronx, which lets riders buy their tickets ahead of time and see how many minutes until the next bus arrives. New York City Transit wants to bring that system to six locations, including First and Second Avenues in Manhattan.

While quieter and smoother buses may attract more passengers, some problems could remain out of the authority’s control. It took more than an hour for Carmen Johnson, in town from Georgia, to make her way up Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and across the island to 168th Street and Broadway, the route’s final stop.

“This bus is too long,” Ms. Johnson said as she disembarked. “That’s all I got to say.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/nyregion/07bus.html?_r=2

[ablarc]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MTA_New_York_City_Bus_DesignLine_EcoSaver_IV_ (2009).jpg

[ZippyTheChimp]

It's got a happy face.

[Merry]

Bus Lanes to Quicken Commute on East Side

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/06/07/nyregion/07buses01_span/y-buses-articleLarge.jpg
First Avenue in Manhattan, right, and an artist rendering of what it will look like after it is remodeled, along with Second Avenue.

Buses in New York are as slow as snails. It is as sure a thing as Yankees wearing pinstripes and congestion on the Cross Bronx Expressway.

But an ambitious $10 million project to bring European-style rapid-transit buses to First and Second Avenues — among the most highly used and heavily congested bus routes in the nation — is aiming to turn that truism on its head.

Starting in October, buses will be granted an exclusive lane to speed up travel on those avenues from Houston Street to 125th Street, a trip that can last an hour and a half — the length of an Amtrak ride from Pennsylvania Station to Philadelphia.

Tickets will be sold at sidewalk kiosks, allowing passengers to board without stopping to fumble for change or a MetroCard.

Riders will be on the honor system: passengers will not have to produce a ticket unless asked. (A $100 fine awaits the dishonest.) And the buses will be equipped with three doors for quicker boarding and exiting.

The plan, to be announced on Monday, represents the latest move by the Bloomberg administration to siphon away space from private automobiles in favor of other forms of transport. Once dominated by trucks, cars and taxicabs, First and Second Avenues will now gain cycling lanes and concrete pedestrian islands, as well as a bus route meant to function more like a subway.

The city’s Department of Transportation and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority hope that bus travel times will improve by about 20 percent.

That could benefit more than 50,000 riders on Manhattan’s transit-starved far East Side, still waiting for its subway line after 80 years.

“New Yorkers are tired of waiting years and decades for changes to make their streets work better,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner. “We want to give buses the red carpet.”

In fact, the new lanes will be painted a shade of terra-cotta brown. And they will not physically separate buses from other vehicles, unlike the bus lanes planned for the city’s overhaul of 34th Street.

Bus-only lanes have been tried in the city before, with mixed results: They often fall prey to double-parkers and other vehicular scofflaws.

This time, the city has promised stepped-up police enforcement and security cameras to spot lanes blocked by taxicabs, an offense that carries a $150 fine. Albany lawmakers would have to pass statewide legislation before the city could use the cameras to enforce those restrictions against private drivers.

A similar program along Fordham Road in the Bronx raised bus ridership there by 30 percent. Still, the buses will face some challenges. On about half of the route, the bus lane will run along the curb, and other vehicles will be allowed to use the lane for deliveries from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekdays. (Other portions will place a parking lane between the buses and the curb.)

Cars making right-hand turns can merge into the bus lane at intersections, and taxis will be permitted to pick up and drop off passengers. The dedicated lane on Second Avenue will cease between 70th and 100th Streets, stymied by construction of the Second Avenue subway.

And the buses will not be capable of extending green traffic lights, an advanced feature used by other cities to help lollygagging buses make it through intersections. Officials say they hope to introduce this technology later, but could not say when that would be.

Bicycle lanes will be added to a portion of the route. The lanes will be physically separated from cars by concrete pedestrian islands, similar to those on Ninth Avenue.

No separated bicycle lanes will be built above 34th Street, where traffic is heaviest, particularly near the Queensboro Bridge, a decision that may disappoint some cyclists.

Still, the new streetscape is “the prototypical 21st century avenue,” said Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group.
“For the first time, it recognizes that at least as many New Yorkers are walking and taking the bus and biking on the corridor” as driving, Mr. White said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/nyregion/07buses.html?adxnnl=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1275912003-yM/2qp87Hjb+LMi5op1MIg

[Ninjahedge]

I think the analogy would be better likening the bus route with the NJ Light Rail or another tram-like service (since many of the basics are identical, including the honor system!)

But w/o a hefty "do not drive in here or else" law, enforced fairly (or noone will be able to make a right turn!) you will still get trucks and taxis dominating those roads.

How many times have you seen an "only" lane filled with something other than the "only" it says it is for? ;)

[ZippyTheChimp]

^
Cameras would work. Put them in plain view with warning signs.

They work very well at traffic light controlled intersections.

[futurecity]

I don't understand...why would NY state be unwilling to help out by passing this law...why would someone in Albany be so stupid to block this? The people there seem to be a bunch of hicks out of touch with urban life.

Jeez, if your going to do it, DO it right please... and don't skimp on the green light technology.

[BBMW]

I wonder how they're going to do this on 2nd Ave in the middle of the subway construction (or are they just going to skip 96th to 63rd?)

[Merry]

Upstanding room only

New buses rely on honor system Thomas E. Gaston

By TOM NAMAKO

You won't need a ticket to ride!

Wide-eyed MTA officials are hoping that riders on a new East Side express bus line will buy tickets before they board -- even though nobody, except the occasional inspector, will be able to give them the boot for fare-beating.

Drivers will ask to see the tickets from riders on the new express M15 route -- who are being trusted to buy tickets before they board in order to speed up the process -- but will be powerless to enforce the fare.

Enforcement will be left up to a special MTA team, which has just 30 members.

The new route -- which in October will run on First and Second avenues from 125th Street to Houston Street -- is supposed to speed up trip lengths by ditching the time-consuming MetroCard dips.

Transit officials say the payment system has helped reduce fare-beating on the Fordham Road express line in The Bronx from 13 percent of riders per year -- when fares were paid on board -- to 10 percent.

Even Mayor Bloomberg is putting his trust in the riders.

"It's to some extent an honor system," Hizzoner said yesterday. "People pay. These are New Yorkers and, yes, there will always be a handful of people who cheat. There are a handful of people that cheat right now.

"Most people are honest, and the fact of the matter is, if you improve the service dramatically, you'll get a lot more people using it, and the revenues will go up even if a handful of people cheat," he added.

The MTA's uniformed ticket inspectors on the Fordham Road line have already doled out 7,312 summonses since August 2008 for fare beaters.

That's 3,419 summonses in the first 10 months, or about 342 per month, and 3,893 in the second 12-month period, or 324 per month, according to transit data.

From the first year after the service came into effect in June 2008, a million riders took the new express bus, generating $1.3 million in revenue, according to NYC Transit.

When someone is caught without a ticket on the new express buses, they are slapped with a $100 sum mons for the MTA's Transit Adjudication bureau court.

Deadbeats are asked to step off the bus so inspectors can write tickets.

Most people comply, but some get hostile, said José Estrada, the supervisor of special inspectors.

"People do become combative," he said. "If they refuse to get off the bus, we may even stop it and then call for the police."

Estrada's team, the Eagle Squad, has handcuffs and can subdue anyone who tries to physically assault an inspector. They can then hold them for the police.

The buses on First and Second avenues will run in special, red lanes that are police-enforced. Construction will begin next week.

MTA chief Jay Walder said that the buses in Manhattan already run too slowly -- the M15 local averages 6 mph -- and that the new tactic could be used elsewhere in the city.

"We have some of the slowest bus speed in the country," Walder said. "That's a problem."

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/upstanding_room_only_njNhv6G4mNqfJdbpwwM9VL?CMP=OT C-rss&FEEDNAME=#ixzz0qLpivuCL

[Ninjahedge]

Enforcement will be left up to a special MTA team, which has just 30 members.

THAT could be a problem.


Also, the M15 isn't the slowest. Wasn't the crosstown at 32nd (or 42nd) something like 3.2mph? You could out-walk it if you wanted to?

[Merry]

New lanes set to roll for 1st, 2nd Aves. in fall

By Lilly O’Donnell

Congested traffic might just be a part of city life, something that New Yorkers will never escape. But the Department of Transportation is still fighting the good fight, attempting to make commutes faster and safer and cut emissions from vehicles. Two new projects for this year are the Select Bus Service and protected bike lanes along First and Second Aves. between Houston and 125th Sts.

The Select Buses differ from Express Buses in that they run along the same lines as regular buses, as an improvement rather than a supplement. Express Buses usually serve as faster ride between boroughs whereas Select Buses will replace regular buses along lines where heavy traffic has reduced their speed, at many times, to that of a snail’s pace. The S.B.S. is expected to be up and running in Manhattan by October, with construction, including resurfacing and painting of the streets, ongoing throughout the summer.

The new system will mean some drastic changes for Manhattan bus riders, including — as out of place as they might seem in New York City — tickets that rely on an honor system. Everything about the Select Buses is based on the need for speed, so rather than have riders take a few extra seconds of the buses’ time to pull out a MetroCard, they will be able to buy tickets (the same price as regular buses) at kiosks in bus shelters, which they will only have to present to drivers upon request, rather than while boarding.

The buses will also have their own dedicated lanes, freeing them from even the worst rush hour traffic. Other drivers will be ticketed if they use the lanes for anything other than right turns or quick drop-offs and pickups.

Merchants are often opposed to dedicated bike lanes, fearing they will interfere with truck deliveries and customer parking. But Monty Dean, a Department of Transportation spokesperson, told The Villager that the concerns of local businesses have been taken into account throughout the process of planning these developments.

“We have worked with local communities to see what their needs are,” Dean assured.

In fact, the bus lanes will not be in effect from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., according to a recent article in The New York Times. This will accommodate the busiest hours of truck deliveries, while also making sure that the buses are rolling rapidly during peak rush hours.

http://www.thevillager.com/villager_376/newlanes.html

[Merry]

Subway on the Street

The MTA has a simple, not very expensive ticket for improving how the city gets around: Revolutionize the bus. But can even the most sensible ideas get implemented these days?

By Robert Sullivan

You would never guess it from the dispiriting news coming out of the MTA, but if you want to see the future of New York, then head up to the Bronx and take a bus. This is not the future of New York in which everyone has a solar-powered jet pack that takes them high over the city’s organic farmyards. Nor is this the apocalyptic future in which the final few New Yorkers with health care live just beyond the moat that surrounds what was once called Yankee Stadium. This is the future as seen in a new bus line: the Bx12 Select Bus Service, or SBS, for short.

The future highlighted by the Bx12 SBS takes as a very depressing starting point the fact that the New York City subway system, once the envy of the world, is stalled. Not literally—as when we sat on dark, un-air-conditioned cars between stations on the way to Simon and Garfunkel reunion concerts—but still, our subways are strained under a ridership that has grown 60 percent since 1990 and a permanent budgetary crisis that has, over the past two years, only gotten worse. Last month, faced with an $800 million budget gap, the MTA canceled two subway lines and 37 bus lines and dramatically reduced late-night and weekend service. No one is expecting Albany’s fiscal situation to improve anytime soon.

If this were, say, Shanghai, one could imagine the federal government sweeping in and not just restoring transit funding but modernizing and expanding our underground tracks. Shanghai didn’t even have a subway system until 1995, and it is now in the midst of dramatically expanding it to 22 lines. But this is not Shanghai; this is New York, where the first subway line was built in 1904 and many lines still use the antiquated (and sometimes dangerous) signal system that was installed about 25 years after Edison patented his lightbulb. The New York subway system’s grandest plan at the moment involves completing one new line on Second Avenue. It was proposed in 1929. It is currently scheduled to open its first branch in 2016. It will stretch 33 blocks, or just under two miles.

So the future of movement in New York—how we get from home to work, how we navigate the city—is not going to be about subways. But what about the bus? True, buses are what most people think of when they think of not getting anywhere: senior citizens waiting in lines, guys counting out change, double-parked cars. They are less sexy than subways and tend to be ignored until the MTA announces another round of service cuts. The last time buses were new was in the forties, when they were installed around the city as a cheaper, more flexible alternative to streetcars.

To a large extent, flexibility remains the bus’s chief advantage—unrailed, they can go wherever we want them to go—and they’re a relative bargain. But over the last decade, in a few transit-enlightened cities around the world, the bus has received a dramatic makeover. It has been reengineered to load passengers more quickly. It has become much more energy-efficient. And, most important, the bus system—the network of bus lines and its relationship to the city street—has been rethought. Buses that used to share the street with cars and trucks are now driving in lanes reserved exclusively for buses and are speeding through cities like trains in the street. They are becoming more like subways.

One city that has transformed its bus system is London, which in 2001 hired a New Yorker named Jay Walder to help overhaul its transit system. At the time, Londontown was gridlocked. Walder looked at the Tube, then carrying about 3 million daily passengers, and then looked at the bus system, which was carrying almost 6 million. “The recognition was that it was virtually impossible to get anything done on the rail system quickly,” Walder recalls. “So we set out to work on the buses. And what you found was that buses were already the backbone, and you had the opportunity in a relatively short time to make them a lot better.”

Last summer, Walder was tapped by Governor Paterson to become head of the MTA. This is not a good time to be in charge of a sprawling bureaucracy dependent on Albany money, and it’s a strange time to be doing so as an optimist. But Walder is a hopeful bureaucrat, and he believes that if there’s any way to grow New York transit, it’s through buses. The MTA and the city’s Department of Transportation recently unveiled plans to install dedicated bus lanes on First and Second Avenues this fall and on 34th Street in 2012. These, along with the Bx12 line in the Bronx, are being promoted as trial programs for what Walder hopes will be, by the end of his tenure, a reconfiguration of the city’s streets. “When the city adopts a world-class ‘Bus Rapid Transit’ system, people are going to have a tough time, efficiency-wise, telling a bus apart from a subway—it’s going to be like a subway with a view,” predicts Kyle Wiswall, general counsel for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

2 (http://nymag.com/news/features/67027/index1.html) 3 (http://nymag.com/news/features/67027/index2.html) 4 (http://nymag.com/news/features/67027/index3.html) 5 (http://nymag.com/news/features/67027/index4.html) 6 (http://nymag.com/news/features/67027/index5.html)

http://nymag.com/news/features/67027/

[Ninjahedge]

The New York subway system’s grandest plan at the moment involves completing one new line on Second Avenue. It was proposed in 1929.

Classic.

The one thing to remember, however, is that teh better system you have early on, the more expensive it is to change it later.

Shanghai may be expanding like crazy, but they do not have as many different design standards to deal with. they could have made the station and platform sizes standard, the tracks and rails able to handle certain loads and speeds, and integrate the signal system to be more than just lights and switches.

The only disadvantage to new systems is man power hours. Constructing things nowadays costs much more and the workers, in general, really do not give as much of a crap as they used to.

This may also be an advantage to Shanghai... I hear labor is a bit cheaper there.......

[Merry]

Rolling Out Speedier Bus System, to Glitches and Grumbles

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

It has been hailed as the next generation of New York City public transport: a European-style rapid-transit bus system that operates in exclusive traffic lanes and requires passengers to buy tickets from sidewalk kiosks so trips will not be delayed by a single rider struggling for exact change.

But progress, particularly in the transportation realm, can have its fits and starts. When the system made its Manhattan debut on Sunday along First and Second Avenues, one of the city’s most congested corridors, riders up and down the route displayed the telltale frowns of New Yorkers convinced that their government had wronged them yet again.

When Shaunté Miller arrived at her bus stop at 125th Street and Second Avenue, a city worker told her that the only way she could take her usual ride on the M15 limited would be to pay for her ticket at a machine on the sidewalk. Even swiping a MetroCard onboard was no longer allowed.

Unfortunately for Ms. Miller, the machine in question had run out of paper: the kiosk happily deducted the $2.25 fare but spat out no receipt. The worker said not to worry, but Ms. Miller worried. “They’re not going to believe us,” she said, fretting about the enforcement agents authorized to deliver a $100 fine. When Hannah Huber tried to board at 100th Street, the driver refused her proffered MetroCard and told her to go back and get a receipt from the sidewalk machine. “I felt guilty,” she said later. “It ended up holding up the bus. I’d rather swipe my card than do all that. I think it’s asking for more problems.”

And when Laurie Barnett tried to board with a group on the Upper East Side, the workers “took 10 minutes to explain to everyone what they were doing,” she said.

“It’s going to wreak havoc now with people not knowing,” Ms. Barnett said. “This is definitely slowing things down.”

The sidewalk transactions, in fact, are intended to speed things up. The program, known as select bus service, has been described by city transportation leaders as a creative approach to converting the city’s antiquated bus network, currently one of the slowest in the nation, into a brisk above-ground system that could rival the subway in speed and popularity.

The system’s first go-round, on Fordham Road in the Bronx, sped up buses there by 20 percent, according to the city Department of Transportation, and officials said the new features could chop about 15 minutes off the 90-minute trip from 125th Street to South Ferry on the East Side of Manhattan.

“We’re really rolling out the red carpet for bus riders,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said, referring to the terra cotta-hued bus-only lanes installed for the system, before he embarked on a test run on First Avenue on Sunday morning.

Passengers do not have to show a ticket unless asked, but officials plan a stepped-up enforcement effort this week. Transit police officers boarded the buses at random stops on Sunday, asking to see receipts, but anyone without proof of payment was handed an informational pamphlet instead of the promised $100 fine.

Although confusion reigned among many riders, much of it seemed to stem from a wariness of the unknown. “Once people understand it,” the system will work, said Stan Pearlman, a Tudor City resident who has used the M15 for nearly a decade. He said he enjoyed a similar ticketing system in Vienna, where he said the buses run beautifully.

Yohannes Haile, from his perch in the back row of the M15, was so impressed that he said he would consider the bus his first option for a quick trip downtown.

“Subway during rush hour? God help us all,” Mr. Haile said. “You’re pretty much in somebody’s armpit.” A cab, he said, was no use in traffic: “Even if I want to spend a bunch of money, I can’t get up or down Manhattan quickly.”

If the new M15 worked as officials promised, Mr. Haile said, “it could be a game-changer.”

The bus lanes will be in effect during morning and afternoon rush hours on weekdays. The city will begin using camera enforcement next month to issue violations to drivers who block the lanes, and next year officials hope to equip buses with signal systems that can extend green traffic lights so that the buses do not get caught at intersections.

Traffic was predictably light on Sunday, and most passengers, asked if the bus was traveling faster than usual, said they could not make a meaningful comparison. The true test will probably come on Tuesday, the first full-fledged workday after the Columbus Day holiday, when the rush-hour crowds descend.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/nyregion/11bus.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

[Ninjahedge]

The slowdown because of the confusion of introducing a new system is not a valid reason not to switch to something less congesting.

OTOH, they should not have removed MetroCard payment at the front of the bus. There is only limited delay with that when cards do not work or there is no money left on them.

The only thing that should have been removed is cash-pay.


However, if these machines were actually hooked up to a network that would tally the riders waiting (including possible handicapped) it might speed things up by predicting rider load. I do not know how they would be able to do much (get people off the handicapped bench?), but it might help with flow management if you know you had a full bus and a lot of people waiting at a stop (dispatch another bus to relieve the queue?)

[BBMW]

If you don't have a ticket, but do have an unlimited Metrocard, do you get fined? I think it would be easier to give the transit cops portable metrocard swipers, and not have people with unlimiteds bother with the kiosks. I also bet they can get the info on the last swipe off the metrocard, so even the riders who use cash value metrocards could be okay without the receipt.

[stache]

I like the idea of readers, but only for people without receipts.

[BBMW]

True. I just think it's stupid to force people with unlimiteds to deal with the kiosks. They're only spot checking anyway.

[stache]

If you're waiting for the bus anyway, why not get the receipt?

[Ninjahedge]

Why not make it cheaper to get from the kiosk.

Charge an extra buck for the "personal service".

Also, have a flashing light on the Kiosk indicating that it is out of paper/OOS so that the bus driver knows he will be getting a bunch of people w/o receipts (and have to charge regular fare).

[stache]

What happens when the light burns out? - *From your apprentice antagonist* ;)

[Ninjahedge]

That's what the alarm bell is for silly!