‘Miracle On 34th Street II’: Midtown Strip May Finally Get A Busway 17 Years After Bloomberg Plan

It’s the best sequel since “Godfather II.”

The Adams administration is devising ways to improve bus speeds on 34th Street in Midtown — but residents are demanding a full-fledged busway similar to the bus-only “transitway” that Mayor Mike Bloomberg first proposed 17 years ago.

“Riding the bus is a form of torture,” David Warren, a member of the Transportation Committee on Manhattan Community Board 4, told Department of Transportation officials at a recent session about upcoming changes on 34th Street.

Buses on 34th Street move as slow as 3 miles per hour on some sections, despite the fact that strip has bus lanes between First and 11th avenues. The MTA’s Select Bus Service treatment to the M34 didn’t do much for riders, either: The M34 goes just 5 miles per hour at peak hours on weekdays, an unacceptable state of affairs for 28,000 people who ride the route each day.

Crucially, the DOT won’t yet say what it plans to do. Agency presentations to Manhattan community boards 4 and 5 this month merely focused on the current conditions and offered a reminder of what’s in the agency’s celebrated toolkit, which includes the successful 14th Street busway.

“Right now we’re gathering feedback,” Rachel Eisenberg, a senior project manager at the DOT, told the CB4 Transportation Committee. “A busway is certainly something we’re looking at as an option because it’s had positive benefits on 14th Street.”

Community board members want what their friends on 14th Street have.

“It looks like on 14th Street you’re getting much higher bus speeds,” said CB5 Transportation and Environment Committee Member Zool Zulkowitz, leaving off the “hint, hint.”

Over at CB4, board members also asked for the 14th Street treatment, which sped buses by 24 percent.

“I really think 14th is a great model,” said CB4 Transportation Planning Committee member Charlie Todd. “Maybe people make that first right turn so we can still have local deliveries and access, but keeping everything out but buses is a good plan.”

DOT’s reconsideration of the sclerotic streetscape of Midtown is part of the city’s larger effort to take advantage of the space dividend afforded by congestion pricing. The Adams administration’s 2024 report, Connecting to the Core, that proposed bus, bike and pedestrianization projects for the congestion pricing era, including a possible busway on 34th Street.

But any busway plan is weighed down by history.

In 2008, Bloomberg’s DOT proposed banning cars from 34th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues so that buses would be the only vehicles that could travel from river to river. The city scrapped the plans after vocal opposition scared Bloomberg into backing down.

That historic failure means that DOT now has to move as slowly as its buses, with the agency now undertaking a painstaking planning process with more traffic studies.

“Because of the importance of 34th Street, we’re planning to do more traffic analysis than we normally would do and at a higher level that would allow us to look at diversions depending on what type of work we would do,” Philip Betheil, the deputy DOT director of bus priority, told CB 5.

In the years after the introduction of the 14th Street busway in 2019, the DOT under de Blasio created more bus-only corridors in four boroughs, though the Adams administration has only finished work on a Livingston Street busway in the three-plus years that Mayor Adams has run the city.

In addition to the DOT’s own experience expanding bus-only street projects, there’s also an organized pro-transit base that can come out to support projects that were once seen as too controversial to get finished. The DOT has told community boards along 34th Street that it will come back later this winter with a draft plan, follow a more refined plan in the spring. But neighborhood that’s already asked for one busway is probably ready to welcome an aggressive street treatment, advocates said.

“There’s been a busway in the plans or in the works for a very long time, and we almost had a busway,” said Riders Alliance Director of Policy and Communication Danny Pearlstein. “This is our moment to grab hold of it and make it happen. Given the history of this particular project and efforts in the past, I think DOT can cut to the chase with a robust solution as was proposed in Connecting to the Core.”