BY KEVIN DUGGAN
The Metropolitan Transportation
Authority will restart
its dormant borough bus
network redesigns this fall,
17 months after the pandemic
forced transit gurus to hit the
brakes on the program aimed
at speeding up commutes
and modernizing ancient bus
routes.
“The city needs a strong
transit system more than ever
to help lead our recovery from
the pandemic — we all know
that,” said acting MTA Chair
and CEO Janno Lieber at a
press conference in the Bronx
on Aug. 16. “The time has also
come to revive our boroughby
borough bus network redesign,
redoing all the routes to
line up with current ridership
patterns.”
The agency plans will
bring back its three remaining
network overhauls in the
Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn
later this year, which were all
at different stages of development
when the COVID-19
outbreak hit the city in early
2020.
The Bronx redesign is fi rst
in line and will be fully implemented
in June 2022, with
some changes to the old plan
published in the fall of 2019,
according to New York City
Transit interim president
Craig Cipriano.
“We have some refi nements
to that Bronx plan, so
we’re going to come back out
in the fall and share those refi
nements with the community,”
Cipriano told reporters.
Staten Island was the fi rst
— and so far only — borough
to complete its redesign in
2018. The Bronx had a fi nalized
plan prior to the pandemic,
while the Queens redesign
had a draft proposal,
and Brooklyn was at a more
preliminary stage with just
a report on that borough bus
network’s current conditions.
Some bus routes, such as
those in Brooklyn, are still
based on 1920s trolley networks
and have remained
largely the same since, despite
changing commuting
patterns over the past century.
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BRONX TIMES REPORTER,24 AUG. 20-26, 2021 BTR
The redesign projects were
championed by former NYCT
President and “train daddy”
Andy Byford under MTA’s
Fast Forward plan, but offi
cials paused projects last
year, because of the havoc
the pandemic wrought on
the transit system and due to
coronavirus meeting restrictions
limiting the ability to do
adequate in-person public outreach
for the scheme.
New York City’s buses are
the second-largest transit
system in America, outnumbered
only by the subways,
and ridership has returned to
around 60% of pre-pandemic
numbers, according to MTA’s
most recent counts.
But the people movers,
which tend to carry more lowincome
New Yorkers of color
than the subways, have ranked
among the slowest in the nation’s
large cities and recently
averaged at only 8.2 miles per
hour in June 2021, up slightly
from 7.9 miles per hour in June
MTA’s acting Chief Janno Lieber at a press conference in the Bronx on
Aug. 16, 2021, fl anked by NYCT Interim President Craig Cipriano, left, and
NYC DOT Commissioner Gutman. Photo Kevin Duggan
2019.
MTA and the city’s Department
of Transportation, which
is in charge of the roads, on
Monday announced a slew of
improvements for buses coming
down the pike in addition
to the redesigns.
The agencies will partner
to add 300 cameras on board
buses in 2022 to catch motorists
illegally hogging the redpainted
lanes, along with an expansion
of stationary cameras
that will cover 85% of all bus
lanes by the end of 2023.
DOT will also install 20
miles of new bus lanes including
up to fi ve new busway pilots
next year and give signal priority
to buses at 750 more intersections
on top of about 1,000
junctions that currently give
preference to public transit.
MTA plans to allow commuters
to board buses through
the back door as well as the
front by using the new OMNY
tap fare payment system starting
10 local routes as a pilot.
The agency plans to expand
all-door boarding to all buses
by the time MTA phases out
the MetroCard at the end of
2023.
This story appears courtesy
of our sister publication am-
NewYork.
MTA revives bus redesigns,
starting with the Bronx
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