{"id":286507,"date":"2025-10-08T12:33:22","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T12:33:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/286507\/"},"modified":"2025-10-08T12:33:22","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T12:33:22","slug":"much-better-buses-are-within-reach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/286507\/","title":{"rendered":"Much better buses are within reach"},"content":{"rendered":"

New Yorkers pride ourselves on speed. Yet millions of bus riders waste time every day, because our leaders value our time less than the time of others. As a new Riders Alliance report<\/a> details, it\u2019s time for a change.\u00a0<\/p>\n

New York\u2019s buses are the slowest in the nation because of politics. Our leaders fail to prioritize bus riders, treating our commutes as negotiable. For health aides, teachers, restaurant workers, and caregivers, wasted minutes mean lost wages, missed appointments, and less time with family.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why making buses fast and free, as Zohran Mamdani has proposed, is a responsible policy. Eliminating fares would cost less than 1% of the city budget. Like making the Staten Island Ferry free and providing student OMNY cards, putting buses \u2014 and riders \u2014 first on city streets is about political will and mayoral prerogative.\u00a0<\/p>\n

By contrast, the so-called \u201cexperience\u201d candidate, disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, irresponsibly promised<\/a> to \u201cbuild a new subway system.\u201d It\u2019s an absurd notion that unfairly raises people\u2019s expectations of City Hall.<\/p>\n

New York\u2019s subway took decades to build and is run by the MTA, which the governor controls. When Cuomo was governor, train delays skyrocketed, costing New Yorkers $280 million<\/a> in annual lost time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cuomo promised a transportation plan during his primary campaign but never offered one. Instead, he stuck to exploiting people\u2019s fear of the subway and the \u201cchaos of e-bikes<\/a>.\u201d Mamdani won the subway rider primary<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Cuomo\u2019s bus record in Albany was poor. Focused on appearance<\/a>s, he ordered a blue and yellow bus fleet. Meanwhile, his MTA canceled the planned expansion of Select Bus Service<\/a> and slow walked<\/a> efforts to speed up Brooklyn\u2019s B82 route.<\/p>\n

Mamdani meanwhile led legislative efforts to improve bus and subway service emerging from the pandemic, piloting free bus service in each borough, improving ridership and safety<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Working together with Mamdani and his team, Riders Alliance members won more frequent subway service on 14 lines. What motivated him then, and now, is fairness for riders<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The stakes are high. Bad bus service demands serious attention. A 2024 survey<\/a> of 1,800 Flatbush Ave. bus riders by the Pratt Center and Riders Alliance found that 91% of bus riders have been negatively affected by delays.<\/p>\n

Of those surveyed, two out of three riders endured long waits for service in extreme weather. Half of riders paid for a car service or taxi because the bus didn\u2019t come in time. One in three riders was fired, reprimanded, or lost pay at work.<\/p>\n

The next mayor will have big opportunities to boost bus service. Stalled bus priority projects on Fordham Road and Tremont Ave. in the Bronx and on Manhattan\u2019s Fifth Ave. would speed up hundreds of thousands of commutes.<\/p>\n

Improvements on Fordham and Fifth are opposed by a small number of powerful figures. Hundreds of thousands of bus riders lose time every day because our needs have come last.<\/p>\n

But better buses are not just good policy, they\u2019re the law. The Streets Plan law mandates 30 miles of new bus lanes each year and requires a new Streets Plan at the end of next year, meant to guide improvements for the next half decade.<\/p>\n

The next Streets Plan should lay out a vision to bring true bus rapid transit to New York, with the potential to speed up some of the longest commutes in the nation from the northern Bronx to eastern Queens, southern Brooklyn and Staten Island.<\/p>\n

By combining protected, high capacity bus priority lanes with intersection priority and level boarding through every door, bus rapid transit can deliver major speed improvements, shaving 10 to 15 minutes off of many trips and save riders a lot of valuable time every day.<\/p>\n

Bus rapid transit is standard in Latin America and Asia. It\u2019s saving riders time in Cleveland and Indianapolis, Albany and Buffalo. Since nearly half of New Yorkers lack easy access to our subway, our buses are a lifeline. But they\u2019re failing.<\/p>\n

Bus riders are the backbone of New York\u2019s economy, riding from distant neighborhoods to deliver vital services in health care, education, hospitality and other essential sectors. It\u2019s about time that the city values the time of the people who make life here possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The June primary showed a critical mass of New Yorkers yearning for transformative change that puts working people first. With much better buses, that transformation in our politics can be matched on our streets in the most tangible way \u2014 with more time to live our lives.<\/p>\n

Plum is executive director of Riders Alliance<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New Yorkers pride ourselves on speed. Yet millions of bus riders waste time every day, because our leaders…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19435,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,1269,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-286507","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-opinion","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-united-states-of-america","18":"tag-unitedstates","19":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","20":"tag-us","21":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115338569488106947","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286507","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=286507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}