One significant cost of congestion in New York City is crawling bus service. Last week, the Straphangers Campaign and Transportation Alternatives announced a new round of "Pokey Awards," identifying the slowest bus routes in New York City. The seven slowest overall and 17 of the 20 slowest routes are in Manhattan.

Transit advocates have pushed NYC to adopt elements of "bus rapid transit" strategies that are rapidly proliferating around the world. In March, 2002, city transportation commissioner Iris Weinshall convened a meeting of advocates, experts and officials to work on the subject. The city implemented a busway on Church Street in lower Manhattan and new bus lanes on Fordham Road in the Bronx, but has not followed up with improvements to the many other bus lanes around town.

NYC DOT in fact put out a press release as the "Pokey Awards" were being announced to defend its record on bus improvements. Mayor Bloomberg campaigned on a platform that included a "subway on the surface" on Manhattan’s east side, but no work on that is in evidence several years into his term. Corridors such as 1st-2nd Avenues that are removed from good rail service are strong candidates for bus rapid transit improvements. Major crosstown corridors without subway service such as 23rd and 34th Streets would also be good sites (the Straphangers/T.A. study found that 23rd St. had the city’s pokiest buses), as would east-west routes in the Bronx and many routes in Southeastern Queens, southern Brooklyn and Staten Island, where subways are not an option for many or all trips.

NYC Transit officials told reporters that bus rapid transit features were in the city’s future, but could not say when. A big difficulty is that rapid bus service will require the collaboration of city officials who manage the streets and transit managers who operate the buses. These groups serve different political masters and have their own sets of bureaucratic imperatives that make a seemingly straightforward task very hard to even get started on.

In London, where an aggressive congestion pricing system was implemented earlier this year, bus riders are among of the chief beneficiaries. Revenue from driving fees has been used to expand the bus fleet, and the lower levels of traffic have dramatically improved bus speeds and reliability. 

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