The city's bus sytem is not working smoothly, and many Brooklyn bus lines have a long wait time, fail to arrive at scheduled stops on-time and tend to bunch up, according to a new report.
About 15% of buses in Brooklyn fail to maintain even spacing along their routes, creating unreliable service and wait times regularly in excess of 10 minutes for riders on lines where average wait times should be no more than five minutes, according to the report Life in the Slow Lane: A Report Card for NYC Buses from city Comptroller Brad Lander.
The analysis also found that express buses, used by many riders in the outer borough, have higher average speeds but a much lower on-time reliability rate than the system overall. Many express buses travel across bridges, highways, and tunnels, allowing them to reach speeds most local buses cannot. However, they fail to reach stops at their scheduled times compared to local or Select Bus Service buses. All of the ten bus lines with on-time performance rates below 50% are express buses, the report found.
“New York City is home to the largest bus network in all of North America, yet pedestrians can walk faster than some buses,” Lander said in a statement. “New Yorkers deserve a system that actually gets people where they need to go."
Brooklyn bus routes with an on-time performance rate, which reflects its ability to reach stops and pick up passengers on-schedule, that are below 50% include the BM1, BM2, BM3, BM4, BM5, B32 and B74.
Many lines in the borough also suffered from bunching, which occurs when two or more buses fail to follow their scheduled headways and end up spaced close together. These lines include B3, B12, B25, B38, B41, B46, B60 and B68.
Bus lines with the highest wait times in Kings County include the BM3, B7, B16, B67 and Bx26.
One bright spot is that buses that operate in Manhattan's congestion pricing zones improved their performance, the report said.
While solutions like dedicated busways, transit signal priority, and automated enforcement are effective tools to boost bus performance, they have not met their full potential in New York City, Lander said.
"Comptroller Lander's report shines a light on an issue all too familiar to New Yorkers: slow, unreliable bus service," Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso said. "Buses are essential for intraborough transit in Brooklyn and yet there has been no measurable improvement to service in decades."
Reynoso said the city should redesign the bus network to better connect riders to the subway; improve crosstown service between Bushwick, Bed-Stuy and Downtown Brooklyn; automate parking enforcement; and upgrading SBS to a fully traffic-separated Bus Rapid Transit network.
