A ride on the MTA bus system can feel like one of Dante's nine circles of hell: you wait 30 minutes at your stop, then two buses arrive at the same time; once on board, you inch along to your destination in bottleneck traffic, pulling over every three blocks to pick up and drop off more passengers.
Exasperated bus riders can now see just how terrible their local bus route is compared with the 306 others in the city using an interactive website launched Thursday.
A bus route's online "Report Card" — the work of Bus Turnaround, a coalition of transit activists calling for a comprehensive overhaul of New York's bus system — shows you its average speed, daily ridership and "bunching," or the percentage of buses that arrive at less than 25 percent of the intervals scheduled between them.
The site is intended to validate riders' complaints with quantitative analysis that can be leveraged in the fight to reform one of the slowest bus systems in the country, according to Gothamist.
MTA Bus Time and ridership data analyzed by Bus Turnaround shows that the M66 bus — which won the NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign and Transportation Alternatives' 2015 "pokey award" — crawls along at an average speed of 4.1 m.p.h. The coalition's report card for the M1, winner of the "schleppie award," indicates 18.8 percent of its buses were bunched. The former saw a 15.3 percent decrease in ridership since 2010, the latter a 26.9 percent drop, as more New Yorkers turn to private transport services like dollar vans and ride hailing apps.
New Yorkers still take 2.5 million rides on city buses on an average weekday, per a Bus Turnaround report out in July.
The group is urging the MTA and the Department of Transportation to adopt such recommendations as redesigning inefficient bus routes, implementing all-door boarding. At a New York City Council hearing Thursday, MTA representatives said the agency would continue its current efforts to improve city bus service, such as its Select Bus Service program, which has sped up transit along 11 long bus corridors.
Find those measures unsatisfactory?
You can sign an online petition asking MTA Chairman Tom Prendergast and Department of Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg "to radically re-envision buses and revolutionize an important mode of transit for millions of New Yorkers" here.
