Bus Rapid Transit

Earlier this week DOT and the MTA showed plans for Bus Rapid Transit on the east side of Manhattan to the Seaport/Civic Center committee of Community Board 1. With implementation scheduled for next September, the question of how to allot space on First and Second Avenues is increasingly urgent. Robust bus improvements paired with protected space for biking on this corridor could become a model for sustainable street design in New York.

Mayor Bloomberg has already shown how much his administration can accomplish in just a few years. Since Janette Sadik-Khan's appointment to head the DOT in 2007, the city has striped hundreds of miles of bike lanes, reclaimed acres of street space for pedestrians and improved bus travel for tens of thousands of New Yorkers. "More of the same" is no longer a dirty phrase when it comes to local transportation policy. During the next four years, the mayor needs to accelerate this progress, and introduce a few key innovations to maximize the value New Yorkers get from their new streets.

Following Tuesday's citywide elections, Streetsblog asked leading advocates and experts to lay out their ideas for the next four years of New York City transportation policy. What should the Bloomberg administration try to accomplish? Kate Slevin, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and editor of its excellent blog, Mobilizing the Region, kicks things off with today's installment.

Advocates and volunteers working for protected bike paths on the East Side, flush from last month's highly encouraging Community Board 8 vote, delivered more than a thousand handwritten letters yesterday to City Hall, supporting protected bike lanes on First and Second Avenues. Keep an eye on this story. It's a big one.

Yesterday the Straphangers Campaign awarded Brooklyn's B44 the Schleppie Award in recognition of its status as the most unreliable bus route in the city. Over 20 percent of B44 buses, which run on the Nostrand Avenue corridor, arrive either bunched together or very far apart. About 42,000 people endure the route's maddening inconsistency every weekday.

With extremely low turnout expected for tomorrow's mayoral election, Bill Thompson and Mike Bloomberg canvassed the city over the weekend trying to drum up some enthusiasm for their candidacies. For Thompson, the itinerary included a stop in Bedford Stuyvesant this Saturday to protest plans for improving bus service along Nostrand Avenue.

"If I put train tracks down the street, you wouldn’t park your car on them. If I said this is a bus lane, somehow it becomes fair game. One person’s use of a road impacts upon another person’s use of the road. My point is, if we have to make a choice, make the choice for the bus, not for the car.”

“In London, you carry nearly twice as many people in the bus system as you do on the Underground.” In New York, the opposite is true. “We must close the gap and make more of the bus system.”

Following another revision to the Second Avenue Subway construction timetable, the first phase of the mega-project remains, as ever, about seven or eight years away from completion. Pete Donohue reports in the Daily News: