Select Bus Service Coming To 21 More Routes, City Says

NEW YORK CITY — Half a million more bus riders across the five boroughs will get access to New York City's Select Bus Service over the next decade, officials announced Friday. The city plans to expand the faster bus service to 21 more routes over the next 10 years, nearly tripling the number of straphangers it serves, Mayor Bill de Blasio's office said.

The expansion will benefit Queens the most, bringing the borough eight additional Select Bus Service routes. The plan adds six routes in the Bronx, five in Brooklyn and one each in Manhattan and Staten Island, with two to three routes to launch each year.

Select Bus Service, or SBS, routes have dedicated bus lanes and traffic signals that let buses get through intersections more easily, improving travel times by about 30 percent, the city says. About 309,000 people ride Select Bus Service routes each day, representing about 12 percent of the MTA's daily bus ridership, according to a report released Friday by the city Department of Transportation.

“Bus riders deserve faster, more reliable service — and the growing number of riders on SBS buses has found that they are getting to work on-time, and getting home to family faster,” de Blasio said in a statement Friday.

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The city also plans to evaluate ways to make normal bus service faster along a dozen other routes, possibly adding dedicated lanes or changing the spacing of stops. Transit advocates say these projects are at least as important as expanding Select Bus Service.

Transportation officials will start discussing such ideas over the next year and implement them by 2019, the DOT report says. Such projects are already underway in Midtown Manhattan, Fort Greene, Brooklyn and Flushing, Queens, the city said.

Select Bus Service started in 2008 as a joint effort between the city and the MTA, which runs and maintains city buses. The city is responsible for all other elements of the system, such as painting the bus lanes and installing special fare-payment machines on sidewalks. Riders can get on SBS buses at any door, which speeds up boarding.

The number of SBS routes has increased to 14 from six since 2014, when the city started dedicating $9.4 million annually to the program's expansion. De Blasio on Friday touted it as a key part of Vision Zero, his initiative to reduce pedestrian deaths at the hands of vehicles. SBS expansion is also a component of his plan to combat climate change.

The MTA has pledged to spend $1.5 billion on new buses compatible with city traffic signals that are part of the SBS system, agency spokesman John J. McCarthy said. The city still has work to do to assuage traffic congestion, "the most vexing problem our buses face," McCarthy said in a statement.

City bus ridership has declined in each of the past four years, according to MTA data. Public transit advocates stressed the importance of fixes to normal bus routes, along which buses have an average speed of just 7.4 MPH, according to the DOT.

"We should work to make buses modern, convenient and attractive to riders, so people who have given up on buses will come back," John Raskin, the executive director of the advocacy group Riders Alliance, said in a city news release.

Ben Kabak, an advocate who writes the popular transportation blog Second Avenue Sagas, said de Blasio's expansion of "easy bus improvements" will move far too slowly.

"In my opinion, this could be done in 10 months if we had the right leadership. 10 years is laughable," Kabak tweeted from his blog's account.

(Lead image: A Select Bus Service bus is pictured along the Q44 route in Queens. Photo from nyc.gov)