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MTA to Study Every Bus Route on Staten Island to Make Improvements

By Nicholas Rizzi | July 29, 2015 4:28pm
 The city will study every bus route on Staten Island to determine ways to make improvements to service.
The city will study every bus route on Staten Island to determine ways to make improvements to service.
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DNAinfo/Nicholas Rizzi

STATEN ISLAND — The MTA will study every bus route on Staten Island to find ways to make improvements to the 51 lines in the borough.

Borough President James Oddo, the MTA, Councilman Steven Matteo and the borough's bus union, ATU 726, announced the kick off of the "Staten Island Comprehensive Bus Study" on Tuesday to improve service and change routes.

“The commute for many Staten Islanders has gone from bad to torturous,” Oddo said in a statement. 

“We simply need to do better. The unfortunate reality is that to achieve an improved and more efficient commute, we need to do a genuine top to bottom assessment of how we are delivering bus service to Staten Islanders."

The study will look at changing travel trends, inefficiencies of current routes and emerging areas of the borough that will lead to an overhaul of obsolete routes and increase service based on the ridership of this year, Oddo said.

To get data for the study, MTA workers will talk to riders at bus stops and ride the routes with them. They'll also track MetroCard usage, GPS data, survey research and poll riders' satisfaction.

The first part of the study — research and analysis — has already started and in the fall the MTA will meet with community boards to discuss the bus lines. The MTA plans to release the study in the winter of 2016, Oddo said.

The study will have long- and short-term recommendations to improve service in the borough, and the MTA said changes that are easily implementable will be done before the study's completed.