MTA To Use Cameras To Ticket Bus Lane-Blocking Drivers

NEW YORK — Some New York City buses will soon fight back when cars get in their way. The MTA plans to outfit more than 100 buses with cameras that will be used to ticket drivers who block bus lanes.

A $6.2 million contract for the camera system, which will be rolled out on Select Bus Service routes starting this year, is going before the MTA Board on Wednesday. The pilot program will help speed up the city's notoriously slow buses as they navigate congested streets, officials say.

"Together with our City partners, we are prioritizing public transit on city streets so that our buses and our customers spend less time sitting in traffic," Darryl Irick, New York City Transit's senior vice president of buses, said in a statement Tuesday.

The effort will complement the stationary cameras the city Department of Transportation already uses to ticket bus lane-blocking drivers on 13 routes. State law allows them on as many as 16 routes, but legislators and advocates want that program to expand.

The onboard camera system, known as automated bus lane enforcement, can capture photos and videos of vehicles that block bus lanes, along with license plate information and the time and location of the violation, the MTA says.

That information is then sent to the Department of Transportation for processing and review, the MTA said, noting that several pieces of evidence are collected to avoid ticketing drivers for making allowable turns from bus lanes.

The cameras will be installed on 123 new buses running on the M15 and B44 Select Bus Service routes in Manhattan and Brooklyn, along with the anticipated M14 SBS line, the MTA says. Installation will happen soon after the delivery of each bus starting this year and finishing in early 2020, MTA documents show.

The pilot program will evaluate the camera system's effectiveness and its impacts on bus speeds and travel times, the MTA says. The transit agency says it will administer the program with the DOT and the city's Department of Finance.

The MTA's contract with Siemens will cover the system setup and installation, software maintenance and processing of as many as 120,000 notices of liability, records show.

The effort comes amid Mayor Bill de Blasio's campaign to improve bus speeds by ramping up the installation of new bus lanes and using the NYPD to tow cars that block them, among other tactics. The bus cameras are another piece of the effort, Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg said.

"Earlier this year, Mayor de Blasio announced a plan to speed buses by 25 percent over the next two years, and automated enforcement — where we hope to see every bus on every route equipped — will be one more step to reach that ambitious goal," Trottenberg, who is also an MTA Board member, said in a statement.