23 Slowdoo

 

New York Times

 

Just beyond the reach of New York City’s frenetic, round-the-clock subway, people in a slice of western Queens wait — and wait — to board one of the borough’s slowest buses.

Many of the 2.3 million New Yorkers who live and work in Queens aren’t served directly by the vast network of trains that keeps the nation’s biggest metropolis moving. The borough, the city’s second most populous, has less subway service relative to its size and population than the other four.

So hundreds of thousands of people here plan their lives around the only mass transit choice they have: the buses that lumber along traffic-choked streets.

One of those buses, the Q23, is among the slowest in the city. For the past four years, it has consistently traveled more slowly than the citywide average of about 8 miles per hour — about the speed some people can run — bogged down by an awkward path and riders who swarm two stops that connect to the subway.

It was slower than nearly all of the 76 other buses in Queens in April, and it ranked dead last in the borough in January, when it traveled at 6.5 miles per hour.

 

The Q23’s route curls around the Tudor-style houses and lush yards of Forest Hills, then cuts through the bustling heart of multicultural Corona before turning west toward the edge of Queens to head to its last stop, near La Guardia Airport.

“Each section has its own little demon,” John Breeden, who has driven city buses for 11 years and counts the Q23 among his routes, said as he sat behind the wheel on a spring afternoon. “You need patience.”

More New Yorkers ride buses in this borough than in any other. On a given weekday before the pandemic, 680,000 people took a bus in Queens, making up about 32 percent of the city’s overall weekday ridership of 2.2 million.

Many blue-collar workers rely on the Q23 to reach their jobs, and its frequent delays can derail their commutes and make them late to work. Some riders set out hours early to compensate. When buses are slow, people put off basic needs such as medical care, according to a May 2020 study published in the American Journal of Public Health. They spend longer in harsh weather, and their quality of life suffers because of lost time.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the city’s public buses, wants to speed them up in Queens, in part by getting rid of stops and adapting to modern traffic patterns, making routes straighter and more direct.

“Most of the subway system was built when Queens still had farmlands,” said Janno Lieber, the M.T.A.’s chairman and chief executive.

“Now we have to make the bus system do a lot of the work in Queens that the subway system does for so many other parts of the city that got more heavy rail, because of when they were developed,” he said.

The authority released a draft plan to redesign the borough’s bus network in March, and it is soliciting community input through June.

Critics of the plan say it would not solve problems like drivers who don’t follow the rules, dining sheds that make narrow streets even tighter, and construction jobs like the one that blocked Ms. Mora’s route.

“Realistically, there’s not much you can do,” Mr. Breeden said. “It’s very populated over there. And then you add in the churches, then you add in the deliveries, and the people’s entrepreneurship out there — it’s always going to be crowded.”