Transportation
How Riders Won the Fight for Better Buses in New York City
The MTA’s ambitious bus overhaul plan has long-suffering transit advocates giddy. Now comes the hard part.
When the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) announced its “NYC Transit Bus Plan” in late April, transit advocates in New York expressed something that can seem rare in 2018: glee.
In recent years, the dilapidated state of Gotham’s subway has dominated headlines and local politics. But the plight of New York City’s buses has been a far quieter fight, even as statistics grew increasingly grim. New York City’s buses are now the slowest in America—in Manhattan, they seep through traffic at an average speed of 5.7 miles per hour. As advocates like to mention, there are routes where you can actually walk faster. Accordingly, the system hemorrhaged 14 percent of its annual ridership—a whopping 100 million—in the past decade.