{"id":227918,"date":"2025-09-15T05:10:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T05:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/227918\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T05:10:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T05:10:10","slug":"what-new-york-can-learn-from-european-buses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/227918\/","title":{"rendered":"What New York Can Learn from European Buses"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York City\u2019s buses are in crisis, and have been for a long time.\u00a0In the year 2000, MTA buses carried 699 million passengers per year<\/a>. Even as New York City has grown over the last quarter-century, gaining 470,000 new residents, bus ridership has dropped by 41 percent<\/a>, to 409 million. Fare evasion is rampant. Over one-third of passengers refuse to pay<\/a>, costing the MTA $568 million in 2024<\/a>. Nearly one-third of buses run late.<\/a> The MTA\u2019s buses are also slow, an issue showcased by Assembly Membrer Zohran Mamdani when he and others walked<\/a> across E. 34th St faster than the M34 bus by eight minutes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s time to reimagine the bus system, something that the MTA (to its credit) is acting on with its ongoing Bus Network Redesign<\/a>.\u00a0This network redesign doesn\u2019t go nearly far enough. Now, there\u2019s no silver bullet to fix the buses, but there are many improvements \u2014 common in Europe \u2014 that the city Department of Transportation is leaving on the table.<\/p>\n

New York can and should learn from its peers across the Atlantic.\u00a0What follows is a summary of three cheap, straightforward reforms that the MTA and the next mayor could do without breaking the bank: better bus lanes, fare collection reforms, and bus stop consolidation.<\/p>\n

More and better bus lanes<\/p>\n

Mayor Adams ran on a promise to be the \u201cBus Mayor<\/a>.\u201d (Notably, bus lane expansion is legally required by the Streets Plan of 2019<\/a>, which was passed during the de Blasio Administration.)\u00a0 But Adams broke his promise<\/a>, and bus lane construction has stagnated. In 2024, only 5.5 miles of new lanes were installed, according to Comptroller Brad Lander<\/a>.\u00a0 Making matters worse, most of New York\u2019s bus lanes are vulnerable to disruption. As a regular rider of the M15-SBS and B44-SBS, I can personally attest that the bus lanes are regularly blocked by double-parked vehicles, right-turning vehicles, and parallel parkers.<\/p>\n

New York doesn’t just need more bus lanes. It needs better bus lanes, ones that are less vulnerable to disruption.\u00a0In Paris, there is a great example to emulate in the Trans-Val-de-Marne<\/a> busway.\u00a0The Trans-Val-de-Marne runs on city streets, but avoids traffic delays, because the bus lanes are physically separated from other traffic by curbs and fences. These types of improvements would be ideal for New York\u2019s busiest lines, and such barriers are quick and cheap to build.<\/p>\n

Expand all-door boarding and proof of payment<\/p>\n

On the MTA\u2019s local routes, passengers can board only through the front door. Theoretically, this is to ensure that everyone pays the fare<\/a>.\u00a0 This policy has been an abject failure.\u00a0Fare evasion is still rampant, and New Yorkers don\u2019t get the speed benefits of all-door boarding. According to the National Association of City Transportation Officials, all-door boarding increases boarding speed by 38 percent<\/a>.\u00a0 The current situation is the worst of both worlds: high fare evasion rates and slow buses.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A better approach is to emulate Vienna, where bus drivers have no role in fare collection. Cash is not accepted onboard. Instead, Wiener Linien has a large team of roving fare inspectors<\/a> that issue summonses to fare evaders. The MTA already employs this toolkit on the Select Bus routes, and it would be straightforward to expand this practice to the entire bus system.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also proof that this practice can work on a large American transit system.\u00a0When the San Francisco MTA rolled out similar reforms on its buses over a decade ago, there was no change in fare evasion \u2014 but the changes allowed the buses to run significantly faster<\/a>.\u00a0The MTA already has installed back-door OMNY readers, which makes this an especially attractive and cheap fix.<\/p>\n

Remove duplicative stops<\/p>\n

One major reason why New York\u2019s buses run so slowly is that the buses stop too frequently.\u00a0International best practice is to have a local stop every 1,320 feet<\/a> or so, about four stops per mile. This stop spacing is standard in Vienna and Berlin, with stops slightly closer together in city centers. MTA buses stop every 805 feet, on average \u2014 that is, 6.5 stops per mile<\/a>.\u00a0 At a systemwide level, this is a recipe for large-scale delays, something that the MTA itself recognizes. But the MTA\u2019s attempts to eliminate duplicative stops as part of the borough network redesign don\u2019t go nearly far enough.<\/p>\n

The MTA\u2019s brand-new Queens bus network redesign<\/a> does eliminate some duplicative stops, but only one of the five busiest Queens local routes (the Q58) is streamlined enough to average a stop every quarter mile.\u00a0The others, the Q17, Q20, Q27, and Q45, still average five stops per mile \u2014 better than before, but still short of the mark.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the draft Brooklyn bus plan<\/a> has the same issues.\u00a0The routes which use the Fulton Street busway, the B25, B26, B38 and B52, continue to use short stop spacing, with 5-6 stops per mile even after stop consolidation.\u00a0The MTA\u2019s consolidation plans just aren\u2019t aggressive enough to bring New York\u2019s buses into line with international standards.<\/p>\n

What comes next<\/p>\n

All of these changes are relatively straightforward to implement \u2014 and more important, they\u2019re cheap. There\u2019s a saying in the German-speaking lands: when it comes to making transit run well, an agency should prioritize \u201corganization, before electronics, before concrete.\u201d That is, get the low-hanging fruit first by implementing low-cost bureaucratic fixes before buying whiz-bang technology or carrying out major construction.\u00a0A lot of transit fixes can be had cheaply and quickly \u2014 if the MTA is willing to learn from abroad.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Berman will talk about the past, present and what might have been of the subway system at Cordelia, 942 Bergen St., Brooklyn, on Sept. 17, 7 p.m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York City\u2019s buses are in crisis, and have been for a long time.\u00a0In the year 2000, MTA…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":227919,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-227918","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}