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Is the MTA Correctly Performing its Bus Network Redesigns?


mta priority bus

(photo: Marc A. Hermann/MTA New York City Transit)


In the year since I wrote “Designing Bus Routes to Attract Passengers and Reverse Declining Ridership,” the MTA announced the results for the Staten Island Express Bus Redesign, completed a Bronx study, and began studies of the bus networks in Queens and Brooklyn.  

These studies make incorrect generalizations resulting in formulas attempting to correct problems. It is not true that simple direct bus routes always better serve the public; or that underperforming bus routes should readily be eliminated; or that exclusive bus lanes are needed on every wide street with bus operation.

Formulas lead to poor decisions resulting in unexpected consequences. Problems need to be studied and decisions to correct them made on a case-by-case basis. 

There is currently too much emphasis on: improving bus speeds, while ignoring passenger trip times; increasing frequency on heavy-demand routes at the expense of reducing network coverage; using articulated buses to reduce service; and expanding Select Bus Service (SBS) and exclusive bus lanes. 

Improving bus speeds and improving passenger trip times are different. The latter results from better reliability, more frequent service, reduced walking time, and the need for fewer connections, as well as from improving bus speeds. Fewer bus stops and more direct routes could improve bus speeds, but could also increase passenger trip time. Some underperforming routes might be necessary to provide adequate coverage in low density areas. Exclusive bus lanes may not be a cost-effective way to improve reliability.

Routes cannot always be simple and direct because of grid system irregularities; major destinations may not be accessible with a straight route without a long or inconvenient walk for many riders. The positives of an indirect route may outweigh the negatives.

Several years ago, the B36 route was made more direct by no longer stopping in front of the Sheepshead Bay Station. My experience showed minimal change in bus travel time, while that station has the sixth highest bus/subway transfers in Brooklyn. The savings from straightening the route added two additional minutes of walking for those making bus/subway transfers and significantly increased the chance of a missed connection, which could add 10 or even more minutes to passenger trip time.

About 40 years ago in Denver, simple and direct routes failed miserably. Riders complained of longer trips due to increased walking and switched to cars. Bus ridership plummeted; many old routes were restored. 

Bronx riders were asked to choose between frequency or coverage. This assumes the MTA cannot provide both, when both are crucial to a well-functioning system. It is like asking a prisoner who hasn't had anything to eat or drink for the past 24 hours if he wants food or water. A survey showed more passengers preferred frequency to coverage; routes that have fewer bus stops to ones with more bus stops; simpler and direct routes to indirect routes; and SBS or LTD service to local service. Those results are being cited so the MTA can claim the effort is customer-driven. Data should not be used to support predetermined conclusions. It is curious that no MTA recommendation was also made to permit riding three buses for one fare, which riders also suggested.

The MTA could do a far better job in advertising its bus design workshops and encouraging meaningful participation by those who do attend.

One goal of the Queens Bus Redesign is to eliminate bus routes that are redundant with or compete with the subway. Whenever there is a subway blockage, it can often take hours for replacement bus service that is usually inadequate for the demand. These redundant routes are necessary.

These studies emphasize SBS and articulated buses because they are perceived to be more efficient. Articulated buses are also more difficult to maneuver, have less traction during snow storms, and have higher labor costs. Though more efficient when ridership is heavy, they are less efficient when ridership is light, such as overnight.

According to the Bronx Bus Existing Conditions Report (p. 98) five routes are profitable, with the Bx12 SBS leading the pack. However, when considering the cost for fare enforcement and fare machine maintenance, all SBS routes are financial losers. After I explained why SBS is not a panacea, the MTA placed a moratorium on new routes for three years.

The MTA declares success by analyzing data and finding something positive to say, ignoring negatives. After one year, Staten Island express bus service is 1.3 mph faster, and the average dwell time is down 23 seconds. However, complaints about reduced service spans on some routes, adding precious time to many commutes, or that more passengers must now stand, are dismissed. Rather than first considering a lower off-peak fare to encourage ridership during those times, the MTA chose to eliminate trips.

A good plan requires minimal fine-tuning. The Staten Island Express bus redesign continues to undergo revisions for over one year with many passengers still dissatisfied. 

Clear criteria should be established to measure the effectiveness of a network redesign. To what extent: Has reliability improved? Have passenger trip times decreased? Has ridership increased?

Is the MTA’s real purpose to save operating costs? Bus routes with fewer bus stops and buses cost less to operate. Straight routes cost less than ones that divert to better serve major traffic-generators. Is a minor bus speed improvement with no regard to passenger trip time the best use of funds?  

The Fall 2019 schedule revisions saved $7 million. Reducing service was chosen over reallocating it. Service cuts were recently announced for the B38 and severe cuts to the B46 Utica Avenue route, while instituting articulated service. Articulated buses originally were purchased to reduce crowding, not to enable service reductions. 

B46 paid ridership declined since the introduction of SBS three years ago. How much was due to increased fare evasion? No SBS progress report was ever issued, though they were with all other SBS routes after the first or, for the B44, second year.

In 1975, B46 service during rush hours was cut in half although the buses were already severely overcrowded. The result was private for-hire cars started picking up passengers, followed by “gypsy cabs” that morphed into dollar vans following future cuts. The MTA is now repeating its past mistake; at the same time, it is spending $5 million to study a new Utica Avenue subway line it will never build. 

Fare evasion on buses has reportedly been high and on the rise, with the MTA just starting to really address it. Is cutting service wise when patronage may not have really declined? And is cutting service the way to win back riders who may have abandoned bus?

These bus redesign are also myopic in their approach, focusing only on paid customers, and ignoring latent demand. Simplistic solutions have resulted in today’s transit and traffic problems. 

In April, the city proposed spending $280 million to add 30 miles per year of exclusive bus lanes that will increase average bus speeds by only 1-2 mph! That plan has since been expanded to 150 miles of exclusive bus lanes over three years at a cost of $1.7 billion, which will also pay for many miles of new bike lanes and other streetscape changes. City Council Speaker Corey Johnson’s Let’s Go Transit plan (p. 9) proposes each redesigned bus route feature an exclusive bus lane. That is expensive and unnecessary when bus service is infrequent, risking avoidable increased traffic congestion. 

My Brooklyn Bus Network Redesign improves accessibility and reliability. Increased operating costs would be offset by increased revenue. My 1972 master’s thesis correctly predicted the addition of free transfers would greatly increase bus ridership. It rose to its highest level since World War II after they were instituted. Better routes and reliability would have the same effect. 

Passenger trip time must not be ignored. Criteria for evaluating bus network redesigns must be established; minor improvements do not indicate success. A broader approach that considers latent demand, a time-based fare, and express bus fare discounts is also needed. 

Congestion pricing monies should offset operating cost increases needed for service improvements, rather than used solely for capital improvements such as unnecessary bus lanes to improve average bus speeds by 1-2 mph. A state law requiring vehicles to give the right of way to buses pulling out of bus stops would speed buses more than SBS.

A bus network redesign should seek to improve travel accessibility between neighborhoods with strategic investments, not to lower gross operating costs.

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Allan Rosen is former Director of Bus Planning, MTA NYC Transit. On Twitter @BrooklynBus.

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Surveillance and the City: Sex, Lies, and Wiretaps


police comm grad

(photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


How many of us would think being jailed is a form of help? Not many, I’m guessing. But that’s the twisted rationale faced by countless New York sex workers, forced to endure the constant threat of imprisonment by people who claim it’s “for their own good.”

At a time when the American political establishment is witnessing a nonpartisan revolt against the waste and destruction of mass incarceration, one area of the carceral state is potentially headed in the wrong direction: the war on sex work. Not only is this puritanical crusade endangering sex workers’ lives, but it created yet another justification for the over-policing of communities of color. Even worse, it’s facilitating some of the worst abuses of the Trump Administration’s attack on undocumented communities. And let’s not forget that it’s the latest rationale for expanding the surveillance state.

Guised in the language of combatting forced “sex trafficking,” new measures have given law enforcement agencies sweeping powers to take down websites used by consenting, adult sex workers. Federal measures like SESTA-FOSTA, have driven many sex workers offline and into dangerous conditions. Sex workers have faced an increase in violent attacks, and some have even died, because of the laws that were purportedly passed to “protect” them. The impact has been so disastrous that lawmakers are now pushing a bill to study just how much damage their own law did.

The federal government hasn’t been alone in using the rhetoric of “sex trafficking” to target consensual sex workers. In New York, anti-sex work policing has birthed an array of surveillance tools, using everything from wiretaps to A.I. driven chat bots to try to identify sex workers and their customers. At the same time, the NYPD rapidly expanded its policing of sex work in immigrant communities, before pledging to sacale back, followed by a deadly raid in Flushing, Queens.

The NYPD’s campaign against sex work hasn’t gone unanswered. This year, the fight to decriminalize sex work accelerated in Albany, as lawmakers and sex work activists pushed to end the outdated, discriminatory, and paternalistic statutes that jail sex workers. Even as Governor Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio, and much of the political establishment came out against reform, advocates still gained momentum. In the end, the measure didn’t pass last term, but it gained more support than prior attempts at decriminalization, laying the foundation for enactment next year.

But not if the anti-sex worker lobby has its way. Rather than listening to the sex workers who speak out against continued criminalization, the anti-sex worker movement has tried to co-opt the progress with a watered-down bill. They call it the “equality model.” Sex workers call it an invitation to deportation.

But let’s not get distracted by the branding. Before “equality,” they labeled it as “Nordic,” in honor of the small selection of Nordic countries that prosecute sex work consumers, but not sex workers. But when you look at the details of how these laws work overseas, it’s clear that the facts fall short of the hype.

Sex workers in Norway and Sweden still operate without the protection of the law. Many face threats of retaliation when they report robberies and rape. When Ireland adopted this approach, violent crimes against sex workers increased nearly 50%. Every country that has tried to enact watered-down decriminalization has seen an increase in violence targeting the sex workers that the bills supposedly help. And the same thing will happen here in New York if lawmakers allow the decriminalization momentum to be hijacked.

As with SESTA-FOSTA, many of the sex workers these laws are supposed to help will end up in the crosshairs of the law. Watered-down decriminalization is designed to not just punish the New Yorkers who purchase sex work services, but the business owners who rent space, help with marketing, or give any other assistance.

But many sex workers wear more than one hat. Someone who might be “protected” by watered-down “decrim” for the sexual services they provide directly would be in the NYPD’s sights for sharing a hotel room or apartment with a friend who does the same. Even retweeting a friend’s advertisement might get you a knock at the door from police.

And this doesn’t begin to address the myriad of other ways that sex workers face collateral consequences from law enforcement, child services, and even ICE. Watered-down reforms won’t restore parental rights to the sex workers who are loving parents. And in the era of the Trump Administration assault on undocumented immigrants, half-hearted reforms will do nothing to help the countless New York sex workers put at risk of deportation because New York’s anti-sex work laws.

Rather than falling into the predictable trap of half measures and compromise bills, it’s time for New York to take a bold step and enact evidence-based reforms that are driven by impacted communities. Anything else would simply reenact the mistakes of the past.

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Albert Fox Cahn is the founder and executive director of The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), a New York-based civil rights and privacy group and a fellow at the Engelberg Center for Innovation Law & Policy at N.Y.U. School of Law. He writes the monthly "Surveillance and the City" column for Gotham Gazette. On Twitter @FoxCahn & @STOPspyingNY.

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Financing the Restoration and Repair of NYCHA Property


nycha superstorm aftermath

(photo: NYCHA)


In his recent column, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Billions in Potential Revenue for NYCHA” (Dec. 2), one of the nation’s leading housing experts, Nicholas Dagen Bloom, writes in support of a study by the Regional Plan Association proposing to finance the repair and rehabilitation of NYCHA public housing properties by selling unbuilt-upon open space in those properties. Those air rights would be sold to real estate developers who would erect apartment buildings in surrounding neighborhoods.

This is bad for NYCHA residents, bad for the surrounding neighborhoods, and bad for the city as a whole. Moreover, there is a better, more effective source for the roughly $32 billion that NYCHA needs to restore its property to livable standards.

Bloom, with whom I usually agree, begins with the observation that NYCHA projects are dominated by unbuilt open space. It may be “unbuilt,” but it is open space used for playgrounds, athletics, benches, promenades, parking, and other facilities used by both NYCHA tenants and residents and workers of the surrounding neighborhood.

NYCHA’s 316 developments were not built to warehouse persons of low income. They provide an attractive living environment that met the standards of the period in which they were built and went through public approval processes like all government-sponsored redevelopment projects. In many cases the projects involved rezoning and provided public facilities for the entire neighborhood, not just NYCHA residents. The public facilities are provided by city agencies (schools, settlement houses, fire and police stations, libraries, medical services, playing fields, etc.) not just on NYCHA property, but also on contiguous city-owned sites, across the street, and further away.

It is true that many NYCHA properties are the product of long-discredited, mid-twentieth century notions of design and development. Surely, we can find ways to knit NYCHA property together with the surrounding communities without transferring bulk to nearby properties that would be built at heights and densities that exceed what current zoning would permit in the neighborhood. Moreover, that would be vigorously opposed by NYCHA’s neighbors and very likely fail to be approved.

In fact, in many cases such proposals would be illegal. In 1973, the Supreme Court of New York County, in the case of Fred F. French Investing Co. v. City of New York, ruled that New York City could not rezone Tudor City so the unbuilt open space of its private parks could be transferred to receiving sites that would suffer from added noise, traffic, density, and other problems while being too far away to benefit from the light, air, and recreational opportunities of the now permanent parks space.

Zoning is a planning technique for maintaining a balance between the occupants of an area (people, businesses, and institutions) and the infrastructure (water supply sewers, transportation, etc.) and community facilities (schools, parks, medical services, libraries, etc.) needed to support them, without burdening the area with too much noise, traffic, and pollution. It should not be misused by becoming a device to monetize the value of “unbuilt” open space to pay for housing repair.

When homeowners need to make repairs, they do it the old-fashioned way: they borrow the money, often with a second mortgage. There is no debt on NYCHA properties. There are two obstacles that are preventing NYCHA from borrowing the money. First, neither the tenants nor NYCHA have money to pay additional debt service. Second, the federal government does not permit Housing Authority property to be mortgaged. But, there is a solution to both problems.

The City of New York could issue tax-exempt bonds, whose revenue could cover the repair of every NYCHA property. Today the low cost of public borrowing means that annual debt service would be $1-2 billion annually. Surely that amount could be paid from the city’s growing annual budget ($94 billion for 2020).

The federal government has a program that would allow NYCHA to transfer its property to a public-private partnership that would be responsible for development and management, while retaining low-income residents who would be transferred to a long-term Section 8 contract, so they would not have to pay additional rent. It is called the Rental Assistance Demonstration project (RAD).

That is exactly what NYCHA has done in Far Rockaway, Queens, where it has rehabilitated Ocean Bay Apartments, a 24-building public housing project with 1,396 apartments. It is a joint effort of New York State Homes and Community Renewal (HCR), U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and RDC Development (a joint venture between MDG Design + Construction and Wavecrest Management).

NYCHA, working with other city and state agencies, should begin immediately to transfer all its properties to RAD and the City Council should agree to cover through the city budget the needed annual debt service. Surely, the decent thing to do is to spend 1 percent of the city’s budget on repairs that would provide NYCHA residents with decent, safe, and sanitary housing within a suitable living environment – something that was promised in 1934 by Mayor La Guardia when NYCHA was established, three years before the Housing Act of 1937 began providing subsidies for public housing.

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Alexander Garvin has worked in urban planning, government, and real estate for five decades. He is currently President and CEO of AGA Public Realm Strategists, Inc., a planning and design firm in New York City, and previously was managing director for planning at NYC2012, the committee established to bring the Summer Olympics to New York in 2012. In 2002-2003, he was responsible for planning the rebuilding of the World Trade Center for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Garvin is the author of several books including The American City: What Works and What Doesn’t.

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