
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
They’re pulling the brakes!
The Metropolitan Transportation
Authority’s Brooklyn
Bus Network Redesign is
on hold due to COVID-19-related
constraints, according
to an agency letter to local
elected offi cials and stakeholders
obtained by Brooklyn
Paper.
The project managers behind
the overhaul of the borough’s
bus system will not release
their draft plan of the
revamp by June 30 as originally
scheduled due to the
pandemic’s impact on staff
and because of social distancing
challenges for holding
community meetings, according
to the June 25 notice.
“Due to the ongoing
COVID-19 pandemic’s impact
on staff resources and the challenges
to safely conduct public
14 COURIER LIFE, JULY 3-9, 2020
outreach with community
stakeholders under prevailing
social distancing guidelines,
the project is on hold,” the
Thursday 25 letter reads.
MTA reps will talk to politicians
and other stakeholders
to fi gure out what’s next
and publish a revised timeline
for the scheme in “the next
few months,” according to the
agency.
Transit gurus were supposed
to unveil their draft plan
for the borough-wide redesign
by the end of the second quarter
of the year, with a fi nal
plan scheduled for some time
in the fi nal quarter, according
to an agency timeline.
But the coronavirus pandemic
has wreaked havoc
on the agency’s budget, with
MTA leaders projecting more
than $10 billion in losses during
the next two years and its
chairman Pat Foye calling the
situation a “four-alarm fi re.”
Offi cials launched the project
in October to redesign the
borough’s 63 local and nine express
bus lines over the coming
year and gathered input
from Kings County straphangers
for months.
In February MTA released
a report about the existing
conditions in Kings County’s
bus system, where many of
the lines remain largely unchanged
since they replaced
old trolley lines in the 1920s.
The February report questioned
the need for so many of
buses from different lines running
through the congested
streets of Downtown Brooklyn.
The report also identifi ed
50 corridors in the borough
that could benefi t from bus priority
lanes, which are implemented
A B46 bus along Utica Avenue. File photo by Elissa Esher
by the city’s Department
of Transportation to help
buses move faster in dedicated
red-painted lanes on congested
streets.
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced
on June 8 that a
roughly half-mile stretch of
Jay Street downtown would
become a so-called busway,
a stretch of street where
through-traffi c is banned for
most of the day, like to the 14th
Street busway in Manhattan.
The agency has only completed
and implemented one
out of the four bus redesigns
in the city on Staten Island in
2018, and Brooklyn, Queens,
and the Bronx are at different
stages of the process.
The other borough bus network
redesigns will also be on
hold for the same reasons as in
Brooklyn, according to MTA
spokesman Andrei Berman.
BUS STOPPED
MTA pumps the brakes on Brooklyn
bus redesign amid COVID constraints