Transportation

New York City Rolls Out Its Best Bus Corridor Design Yet

It's not quite BRT, but the Woodhaven Select Bus Service plan is clear progress.
NYC DOT

New York City may never get true world-class bus-rapid transit—major transformations to a street network that mature are just so expensive—but its own modified version, Select Bus Service, is proving a worthy alternative. Along the city's seven existing SBS corridors, travel speeds are up as much as 23 percent, ridership is up another 10 percent, and crashes are down 20 percent, according to the NYC DOT. And the next one to come should be even better.

The city has announced its preferred design for the Woodhaven SBS corridor in Queens, a $200 million project the city reportedly hopes to start building by 2017. The design would take a street that looks like this: