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Could a new mayor fix New York City's terrible bus service?

By

Stephen Nessen

Published Dec 6, 2024

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A bus in Manhattan.

 

Gary Hershorn/Getty Images

By

Stephen Nessen

Published Dec 6, 2024

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This column originally appeared in On The Way, a weekly newsletter covering everything you need to know about NYC-area transportation.

Sign up to get the full version, which includes answers to reader questions, trivia, service changes and more, in your inbox every Thursday.

New York City’s mayor doesn’t have much power over the state-run MTA. But the office does control the city’s streets — which gives the top dog in City Hall the ability to improve the agency’s sluggish bus service.

That power wasn’t lost on six mayoral candidates who attended a forum hosted by the advocacy group Riders Alliance this week. In a city with some of the worst bus service in the country — many routes run at just 5 mph — speeding things up is likely to appeal to the more than 1 million New Yorkers who ride the bus daily.

All but one of the attendees (trial attorney Jim Walden) said they’d taken a bus during the previous month. And several candidates lavished praise on Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogota, Colombia whose push to build a rapid bus network has become an international model.

All six candidates insisted they would be a mayor in the mold of Peñalosa, not Mayor Eric Adams, whose first term is marked by delayed or canceled bus lane projects.

State Sen. Zellnor Myrie called for a dedicated “busway” along Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue similar to the one in place on 14th Street. City Comptroller Brad Lander said one should be installed in Manhattan on 34th Street.

State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani declared he wouldn’t allow local opposition to kill bus projects.

"If the Botanical Garden calls me to cancel the busway, I'm not going to be picking up that phone call,” Mamdani said, taking a jab at Adams for his move to cancel a bus lane on Fordham Road in the Bronx after local business owners and officials at the New York Botanical Garden complained.

Mamdani also wants even more sweeping reforms to the MTA’s buses, including making them free to ride.

“It's frankly a shame because this city should be the model for the entire country,” Mamdani said. “The MTA is 40% of public transit [riders] in this country. So why don't we actually lead?”

MTA officials have long opposed the idea of removing fares from buses — noting they need the money to run service. After Mamdani spearheaded legislation that waived fares on five bus routes for a year, MTA leaders said the initiative hurt their ability to combat fare evasion. And if he were to make the buses free, Mamdani would need to find hundreds of millions in new subsidies to pay for the service.

Other candidates used the forum to push transit proposals that a New York City mayor would also have little control over.

State Sen. Jessica Ramos said she wants the MTA to extend its proposed Interborough Express light rail line into the Bronx. And former City Comptroller Scott Stringer said he’d push for the MTA to run more frequent trains and buses.

“When I'm mayor, we're going to reorganize the DOT and actually put them to work,” Stringer said. “We're going to realize my plan of making sure that buses and trains run six minutes apart.

All of the candidates agreed that increasing the enrollment threshold for Fair Fares, which offers low-income New Yorkers half-priced fares, would be the city’s best tool for combating the MTA’s $700 million fare evasion problem. Riders Alliance has called for extending the discount to anyone who makes up to 200% of the federal poverty level.

There were mixed opinions on the best way to deal with fare evasion, but Walden said the MTA should improve its service before calling on the city’s police department to crack down on fare beaters.

“I also don't believe that the juice is worth the squeeze,” he said. “If we go after all of those people, how much money are we spending on enforcement that we could have for other programs?”

Transit advocates have learned recently that talk is cheap from mayoral candidates. Adams vowed to create a “state of the art” bus network when he took office. The Riders Alliance gave him an honorary jacket in 2022 adorned with the words “bus mayor.” A year later, they asked for Adams to return the jacket due to the lack of progress on new bus projects.

“Of course, riders should always go to the polls with eyes wide open, knowing we'll need to organize and hold our leaders accountable no matter who's in City Hall,” said Riders Alliance spokesperson Danny Pearlstein.

Have a question about subway cars (or literally anything else NYC-transit related)? Use this form to submit yours and we may answer it in a future newsletter!

But note that Curious Commuter questions are exclusive for On The Way newsletter subscribers. Sign up for free here.

Question from Grace in Manhattan

I commute to work to the 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue stop. The MTA has multiple agents every day during rush hour telling people to move down the platform. What's the story behind that, and are there any other stations with that policy?

Answer

Those MTA workers are called platform controllers, and they’re deployed to manage crowds at some of the city’s busiest subway stations. Riders piling up in one part of the platform can slow people cycling on and off a sardine-packed train, costing the crews precious seconds. It’s an even more intense job on Tokyo’s subway, where transit employees sometimes need to physically push riders into a packed train in order for its doors to close.

The latest NYC area transit headlines

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On The Way

Stephen Nessen

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Stephen Nessen covers transportation. Since 2008 he has reported on everything from Occupy Wall Street, the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, Hurricane Sandy, to Trump’s campaign for president. His transportation reporting has taken him everywhere from the MTA’s secret Rail Control Center to the gleaming subways of Seoul. Got a tip? Email [email protected].

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