Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Elizabeth Adams, Getty
Zohran Mamdani got his rent freeze, and the grocery-store pilots are on the way. Now comes the third of the three campaign promises everyone remembers: Make the buses fast and free. It was always going to be the tough one. How does a mayor, who does not control the MTA and whose request would require Governor Kathy Hochul and Chairman Janno Lieber to cede $600 million-plus at the farebox every year, carry that one off? A lot is riding (in every sense of the word) on that pledge: Mamdani’s political credibility, yes, but also a billion riders’ sanity.
That’s because bus travel in New York can be a draining experience. The streets are jammed up, even with the improvements wrought by congestion pricing. The buses themselves are aging. A dedicated lane, where there is one, can be bollixed by a single parked car, requiring bus drivers to ease out into a traffic stream and then back, agonizingly. The headways and wait times can be infuriating, doubly so if there’s no bench at the bus stop, triply so if the countdown clock is broken, which it always seems to be. Just the other day, when it was 99 degrees out, a half-dozen people and I sat for the better part of 20 minutes in order to catch the crosstown bus across 42nd Street — only to see a packed bus zip past us without stopping. The groan-shout of sweaty irritation that rose from our bench was life-sucking, and also far too familiar.
I — an able-bodied person with a bottle of water in my tote — gave up on waiting and trudged across town. That would not have been an option for everyone. The bus network is the sole way of getting around for those who don’t have a lot of options: the disabled, the elderly, the too-broke-for-a-cab, the parent with a stroller (and a kid strapped in it) who is loath to lug it up and down the subway steps. And, as we see with the interminable delays dragging out the Second Avenue and 125th Street subway extensions, new subway lines take decades, not months. If we are to get better transit in this lifetime, it’s going to be through bus lanes that are built to act like subways: with dedicated lanes, a raised platform for entering and exiting, and quick boarding at all doors.
Hence the appointment of Elizabeth Adams. Two months ago, she was named to a new Mamdani post, senior adviser for fast and free buses, a.k.a. “the bus czar.” This morning, the administration released the city’s bus action plan, the first big hunk of the ambitious project of which she’s a significant architect. To mark the occasion, we met up on Flatbush Avenue to ride the northwest-bound B41, one of the routes slated for big upgrades.
In contrast to my dismal 42nd Street experience a few days ago, the bus arrives after just a couple of minutes and we board. There are even empty seats, and we get to talking. Adams is a New York City native, now living in central Brooklyn with her husband and toddler. She’s an animated and lively talker bursting with bus-related policy points, and she hews fairly close to them, most likely to avoid poking the bear of interagency conflict. (She has perhaps learned from her boss, who is astonishingly good at pivoting to the message of affordability whenever he’s baited by a reporter.) “Dignity and respect for riders” comes up in our conversation more than once.
She did not arrive in this field as a transit obsessive; she instead comes out of the progressive organizing movement, having worked on policy for Planned Parenthood, and then in the office of former city councilmember Stephen Levin. That was where, she said, “I started working on local constituent issues — and they were all transit issues. How do we improve the bike lane? How do we make the street work?” She ran for his seat after he was term-limited out in 2021, but came in a (decent) second in the primary behind Lincoln Restler. From there she became an executive at Transportation Alternatives, the pedestrian-and-transit activist group, and in April joined Mamdani’s City Hall.
She offers that her organizing background has turned out to be valuable when managing the herding-cats aspect of this project, helping to align the demands of the MTA and the the Department of Transportation and the governor’s office and various other stakeholders. When I asked her to recount her day-one meeting with the MTA, which surely was freighted with some Mamdani-versus-Lieber tension lingering from the mayoral campaign, she demurred, “Um, it’s been great!”
The bus we’ve boarded is No. 7705, in service since 2018. That means it is, under the new action plan, due for replacement pretty soon. Buses in our system are supposed to cycle out after 12 years at most, sooner if possible. “Part of the MTA’s commitment,” Adams said, “is they’re going to replace 40 percent of the fleet” — which, she added, “has been aging for far, far too long.” Old buses grow increasingly prone to breakdowns, she notes, “so 2,500 new buses will also particularly help with the time that is currently spent on maintenance. When they have to come out and be fixed, that messes up the route, messes up the schedule, impacts people’s rides.”
A first reading of the plan reveals a document of the achievable rather than the blue-sky. Its commitments range from the substantial, like a number of entirely revamped major streets, to modest and even comically micro improvements — seating added to 875 bus stops this year, and to all of them within a decade, and a goal to plant 30 (!) trees at bus stops before the end of 2026. The big news, though, is that about 50 of the heaviest-traffic, high-priority bus corridors will be redesigned, aiming to speed trips by 20 percent, which will shave off about six minutes per ride. (Sounds dinky, until you do it twice a day, five days a week: That’s an hour of your life you’ve just got back, not to mention less agita.) Five of those routes — four across Brooklyn and Queens, including Flatbush Avenue, plus Tremont Avenue in the Bronx — will become what are called rapid bus corridors, with dedicated lanes and those shelters you’ve perhaps seen here and there already, the long covered ones that stand on a pedestrian island rather than at streetside. (In fact, our conversation is briefly interrupted when the Department of Transportation starts jackhammering right in front of us to install a new bus shelter.) When it comes to the B41, I can see why a dedicated lane is a priority: Although we’re not crawling, it could certainly move faster.
We’ll be getting five rapid bus corridors, built to look a lot like this.
Photo: Office of the Mayor/MTA
A lot of barely visible changes will also ease the way for riders: better traffic-light timing to keep vehicles from bunching up, and firmer enforcement at hotspots where a high number of drivers block the lanes. Planning around actual behaviors, she said, is a significant part of her job. “If a New Yorker is jaywalking diagonally across the intersection,” she said to me, invoking our God-given right to cross wherever the hell we damn well please, “that means you should look at the intersection, right? And I think that we could do a lot better, with planning that is responsive to what New Yorkers’ needs are, and bringing that perspective into transit planning.”
The city and MTA have identified 50 routes that need particular attention.
Photo: Office of the Mayor/MTA
Certainly true, but there are inevitably going to be some points where the demands of one group sit in diametric opposition to another. One thing that is only glancingly mentioned in the action plan, but will have huge effects when finished, is a long-brewing MTA study begun in 2018 to evaluate every single bus route. That project is intended to bring order to a not very orderly system, a snarl of routes and stops that are often inefficiently close together, some of which are literally holdouts from the days of horse-drawn omnibuses. The Queens and Bronx analyses have been largely completed, and the latest draft plan for Brooklyn will be released this fall; an MTA official tells me that its recommendations will indeed be knitted into the build-out of all the revamped streets and rapid bus corridors. But people get very cranky when you take away their bus stop. Balancing what everyone knows will deliver the greater good with the demands of the squeaky wheels is the tricky part of politics in general and transit planning in particular. “For a long time you’ve had a small group of people” — referring (I think) to the crankiest of the cranks — “really try to dictate what’s happening in our streets and in our public transit system and slow things down,” Adams said. “And this is really saying, actually, let’s listen to the millions.”
Great as all this sounds, it of course fulfills only 50 percent of the promise. It makes the buses faster; it does not make them free. The Mamdani administration has done a little around the edges there, expanding access to the Fair Fares subsidy program in the budget that recently passed. But it’s a considerable distance from there to free, and the timing of that is still a little vaporous, at least in the public realm. “I am here to deliver fast and free buses, right?” Adams said, when I asked her about a timeline. “We’re already really starting to deliver on components of that with this plan, and we will have more working with partners in Albany.” I take this to mean, Just wait and see. And with that, the B41 pulls up at a curb and we disembark. The one-mile trip from Barclays Center to Borough Hall has taken just shy of 18 minutes. Google Maps puts it at a 21-minute walk.
