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COURIER LIFE, JULY 3-9, 2020 17
Brooklyn bus
redesign on hold
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 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 “fouralarm
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.
A B46 bus. Photo by Ellie Esher
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
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 socalled
busway, a stretch
of street where throughtraffi
c is banned for most
of the day, like to the 14th
Street busway in Manhattan.
The bus redesigns
were championed by former
New York City Transit
President Andy Byford
under his Fast Forward
plan to modernize the
city’s ailing public transportation
and advocates
worried in the past that
the revamps could be
compromised without the
British transit guru at the
wheel.
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
— and will also be
halted for the time being.
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