NEW YORK — You’d be better off in a bumper car.
The Straphangers Campaign handed out its 11th annual Pokey Awards Monday, naming and shaming the slowest city buses. The "winners," the M66 and M42, both crawl at an average of 3.9 miles per hour at noon on a weekday, according to the organization.
By comparison, a bumper car can travel 4.3 miles per hour, according to www.zz-modern.com, meaning you might be better off trying to purchase one from Rye Playland than coughing up the $2.25 to get across town.
“The M66 and M42 are falling behind their peers because they're children of neglect,” said Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, in a release. “It's high time the city and state invested in making every bus the high achievers New Yorkers deserve.”
The Bx19, which travels between the Botanical Garden in the Bronx and Harlem, clocked in at 4.9 miles per hour, and the B35 bus from Sunset Park to Brownsville averaged 5.6 miles per hour, making them the slowest buses in their respective boroughs.
The seventh-annual Schleppie award for the city’s least reliable bus was given to the M4. Nearly 30 percent of M4s arrived with large gaps between them or bunched together, according to the Straphangers Campaign.
The S78, which travels between St. George Ferry and Bricktown Mall, was Staten Island’s worst Schleppie at 25.8 percent unreliability, meaning it turns up late, with large gaps, or bunched together more than one quarter of the time.
Last year's winner, or slowest bus, was the M50, according to the Pokey Awards, and the M101, 102 and 103 were the city's least reliable in 2011.
