Red tape slows bus green tech
Roadblock to stoplight ‘priority’
City officials are sitting on a relatively old form of technology that could speed up bus service across the five boroughs — but stodgy bureaucracy and recent budget cuts have stymied its rollout.
The technology, called “transit signal priority,” or TSP, makes stoplights turn green when a bus approaches, giving dozens of straphangers a leg up over private car owners.
Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials said the tech is up and running at roughly 1,000 intersections along 21 of the city’s busiest bus routes, nearly double the 500 intersections and 12 routes where buses were given priority at stoplights this time last year. It’s proven to reduce travel times for bus riders by as much as 19%.
Through Mayor de Blasio’s “Better Bus Initiative” announced last year, the city Department of Transportation was to add TSP to at least another 300 intersections per year, along with a suite of bus lanes, to speed up service. But that plan has been put on ice thanks in part to a city budget passed last week that cut $5.7 million from the program due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Ben Fried, a spokesman for the think tank TransitCenter, said it’s on the DOT, which runs city streets, not the MTA, to push the technology ahead.
“We know that the DOT had some breakthroughs in 2019 and got more signal priority in that year than any previous year,” said Fried. “The mayor should be building on that progress, especially with the outsized role that buses will play in any recovery in NYC, but his budget does the opposite and makes it harder to scale up [the] TSP program.”
Still, DOT sources and transit experts agreed that the city could quickly implement the tech — even with the budget cuts.
Nearly all of the city’s stoplights are equipped with TSP technology because they run on a centralized wireless internet network. And 4,000 of the MTA’s 5,700 buses are modern enough to handle the software that enables the tech — but transit officials must first wait for the DOT to tell them which routes are ready to go.
The main holdup, it turns out, is that the DOT conducts traffic management studies at each intersection where TSP is being considered to weed out unforeseen issues. Those studies can drag on for months or years, sources said.
Alon Levy, a fellow at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management, met with DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg in 2018 to discuss ideas for speeding up bus service. He said the meeting made clear that the process to add TSP to intersections was unnecessarily mired in politics.
“This is not a new technology, which is to say it’s been around since the 2000s and was picked up by New York in the following decade,” said Levy. “The main issue is actually wrestling control of streets from cars, that a car might have to wait longer at a red light.”
Levy said De Blasio and other city officials may be fearful that car owners may cause a stink over the idea of spending a few more minutes in traffic, and that the lengthy studies are used as air cover for rolling out TSP at an intersection — or even as a way to stop the technology from being implemented altogether.
“In some cases they either don’t want to implement it, or they want to have a study that exists in case a ‘Karen’ wants to speak to the DOT manager,” said Levy. “She might stop screaming if she sees a dense engineering study.”
Without a more aggressive rollout of TSP and more bus lanes, transit advocates fear that bus service could drastically slow down as more traffic returns to the city. That could be painful for straphangers given that bus ridership has outpaced subway ridership over the last two months as hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers returned to mass transit.
Even bus initiatives that still have dedicated funding are seeing holdups.
De Blasio last month announced the city would install five new “busways” this summer like the one added on Manhattan’s 14th St. last year, with the first one slated to be rolled out along Main St. in Flushing, Queens, by the end of June.
A week into July, the Main St. busway is still nowhere to be found.
“We expect implementation this summer,” said DOT spokesman Scott Gastel.