Slow much for Blaz

Bus speeds even lower than when he took office in ’14

Buses move slower than when Mayor de Blasio first took office in 2014, a sorry statistic that highlights his administration’s failure to rein in the city’s notoriously congested streets during eight years in office.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority data released this week show the agency’s buses across the five boroughs averaged a speed of 8 mph last month, down from 8.2 mph in January 2015, the first month the MTA began publishing citywide bus speeds.

“The buses have gotten slower,” said Mario Rodriguez, 61, a museum security guard, as he waited for the M101 bus on Amsterdam Ave. in Harlem on Tuesday. “I ride them four times a day so I’ve seen them slow down over time. It takes an hour to get from my home uptown to Midtown.”

While the MTA is responsible for operating transit buses and depots, it’s up to city agencies to ensure they have a clear path to travel.

The city Department of Transportation under de Blasio has installed 67.8 miles of the city’s 141.7 miles of active bus lanes, DOT officials said. The DOT has also installed six new “busways” — or streets where most passenger car travel is banned during certain times of the day.

MTA data show those efforts worked. A busway installed on Main St. in Flushing, Queens earlier this year correlated with bus speed increases of up to 51% during peak periods.

But the mayor’s efforts to ensure lanes aren’t blocked have been limited to a select few major thoroughfares, while most buses that carry some 1 million New Yorkers a day still crawl along their routes, said Ben Fried, a spokesman for TransitCenter, an analysis and advocacy group.

“The decline of bus speeds on the network as a whole is swamping the gains from the busways,” said Fried. “We have a few islands of good bus priority in an ocean of increasing traffic and parking violations.”

That sentiment was shared by Stacy Britton, 56 a health educator who travels all five boroughs for work.

“The bus lanes actually make things slower,” Britton said as she waited for the crosstown Bx19 bus on W. 145th St. “They are always blocked by people.”

Fried criticized de Blasio for keeping bus service on the backburner during his first five years as mayor. That changed in 2019 when he announced his “Better Bus Action Plan,” which aimed to give buses priority along 24 city streets and set the goal of improving average bus speeds by 25% — or to 10 mph — by the end of 2020.

That goal was not met. Bus speeds did shoot up over 9 mph in April and May of 2020, MTA data show — but that spike was attributed to empty streets during the first wave of the pandemic. Speeds soon plummeted as drivers returned. Port Authority and MTA data show that traffic has returned to pre-pandemic levels, resulting in more gridlock.

Staffing issues at the MTA sparked by the pandemic have also caused problems for riders. A shortage of bus drivers has kept the agency from running all of its scheduled buses each day, which sometimes leads to more packed buses that make more stops.

“It’s pretty slow, the public transportation,” said Jose Vasquez, 37, as he waited for the Q47 bus in Middle Village, Queens. “It doesn’t go on schedule.”

MTA officials have over the last eight years pushed to speed things up, including redesigning the bus routes in Staten Island and planning another redesign in the Bronx.

Automated cameras installed on MTA buses that ticket drivers who stop in bus lanes have also yielded more than 108,000 violations since the fall of 2019, said

MTA spokesman Eugene Resnick.

The DOT and MTA have also worked to install technology called transit signal priority at 2,200 intersections — or about a third of those used by transit buses — that prompts lights to turn green quicker when a bus approaches.

“This administration has given buses more street space than any in the city’s history,” said de Blasio spokesman Mitch Schwartz. “From record bus lane installations, to a growing and nationally recognized busway model, to partnering with the MTA on redesigning the entire network, we’ve left the bus system vastly better than we’ve found it.”

Bruce Schaller, a transportation consultant who studies street congestion, said Mayor-elect Eric Adams doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel to speed up bus service when he takes office.

“There’s a toolbox for these things, like setting aside space for buses and timing signals,” Schaller said.