Thursday, January 16, 2020

MTA holds first Queens bus route redesign proposal hearing in a basement and commuters are pissed



PIX 11 News

 Changing bus routes is a guaranteed way to draw a crowd in the city.
MTA New York City Transit is in the process of a complete redesign of all the routes in the city.

The proposal for Queens was released two weeks ago. Elected officials and riders calledfor a meeting with transit officials to discuss the plan.

Additional sessions will be held over the. next month. Comments can be made on line.

Read about the Queens proposals here .

The entire plan for all five boroughs can be found here

Looks like commuter rage resonated with Byford and his entourage. Those links are now 404's.

31 comments:

Anonymous said...

Its kind of interesting, i dont take the bus but seems like they are trying to make the routes straighter and bypass jamaica and flushing if possible.

Anonymous said...

The URLs are just wrong, but the pages are still there:

https://new.mta.info/system_modernization/bus_network

https://new.mta.info/queensbusredesign

Anonymous said...

The new plan is a nightmare for workers, and the elderly. Why rename all the routes, too confusing, especially since they removed the schedules at the stops.

Anonymous said...

The links still work, PIX just linked to the site wrong. Check the URL.

Anonymous said...

It looks like the MTA has 404 error for the links you have included, they have changed and deleted the info.

Anonymous said...

Not much commuter rage here. I'm the second one to comment. Where's the rage?

Anonymous said...

Hats off for Byford having the guts to show up in person and not hide behind underlings.

It even made the Wall St Journal!

https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2020/01/15/queens-mta-bus-route-redesign/

https://www.amny.com/transit/nothing-is-set-in-stone-mta-exec-tries-calming-queens-nerves-at-bus-route-design-workshop/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/queens-lawmakers-complain-about-proposed-bus-route-changes-11579043813

Something went REALLY wrong with the Queens plan. The other ones weren't as crazy.
I'm betting they used only Streets and Avenues
and ignored the importance of Boulevards.

Anonymous said...

The 76 is being redirected to downtown Flushing, which is crazy.

That is one route, like the 44 which is best left alone.

Make the 76 an SBS and the stops fifteen blocks apart.

Anonymous said...

I disagree with the statement "bus ridership is down". If that's the case why are the buses so packed you can't get a seat? Is this like the NYPD Compstats where they only count murders and rapes as crimes and leave out every other crime?

Theorem Ox said...

The proposal really screws over much of Western Queens.

(1) The MTA was never particularly good with routing buses in general and it clearly shows here.

The general philosophy appears to be packing everybody onto the increasingly unreliable subway, which can barely handle the current ridership ON A GOOD DAY. I don't see how it'll get any better when bus lines are truncated, taking out surface options to avoid the subway.

Bus routes running through Sunnyside and Woodside are circuitous. It's as if the planners completely ignored their own memo about route lengths and turns slowing buses down. Doesn't help that that the routing seems to be oblivious to the origin-destinations for the vast majority of the passengers currently riding on the existing routes.

Parts of Middle Village and Maspeth are looking at losing service outright with no nearby alternatives.

(2) If the new routing doesn't get you, then the proposed service frequency will.

Particularly outside of rush hour, it seems like the MTA sees fit to cut service to 30 minutes or more to areas that currently gets scheduled service of 10-20 minutes.

And that leads to fewer alternative routes during the timeframe when the MTA routinely disrupts subway service AND longer waits (on top of higher likelihood of missing connections) for those who MIGHT be okay with the idea of having to make more transfers to get to their final destination.

To me, it's clear that the proposal IS a systemic service cut masquerading as an improvement.

Anonymous said...

It is a systemic service cut. Asshole wants everybody biking. So no cars, no buses, no trains (good luck on weekends) - bike everybody! These people are mentally disturbed. Now asshole wants his wife as Brooklyn borough president. You can't make this shit up I swear.

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-chirlane-mccray-bill-de-blasio-20200117-skq6cfxsgjfipgm4v63qa4fnka-story.html

georgetheatheist said...

Can you take a bicycle onto a bus?

Anonymous said...

I thought we threw the Limeys out over 200 years ago. Don't believe him, he's full of crap and just wants to kick Americans off to the side in their own country.

Res Ipsa said...

Last commenter nailed it: To me, it's clear that the proposal IS a systemic service cut masquerading as an improvement.

Every bus and train should be MAX 10 minute wait, especially for a place that wants people to give up their cars. Anything more than that is ridiculous, especially when you have scheduled service (like LIRR) that is expensive and chronically late.

Anonymous said...

Where is the rage? I ask my neighbors “ Do you they are remove the Q 18 and Q67 from riding and stopping on 65 place? They are like No, WTF? Oh it will never happen? I tell them don’t be too sure. It will happen and you all have to walk 6+ or more to 69 Street to catch the bus that normally stopped right on the corner. The rage and anger will come after its too late just like when they eliminated some stops here.

JQ LLC said...

@Res

It's an austerity measure to reallocate funding to other transit. Say a ferry or maybe a trolley. Or maybe to recover funding spent on another service, like say a new tech fare pay system and advertising pushing it.

Probably a lot of money is going into worker salaries, insurance and pensions. Maybe that state medicaid budget that Cuomo fucked up.

But what do I know, I'm just some curmudgeon running 2 blogs.

#ImpunityCity

JQ LLC said...

Anon under Ox.

It's probably in these areas were Citibike is going to expand next. Before there wasn't a need to put in these towns because there were buses, even if they didn't run on time. Now with these austerity cuts planned you got an instant need. Tada!

Anonymous said...

JQ LLC said..."Maybe that state medicaid budget that Cuomo fucked up."
When Donald J Trump wanted to fix medicad the left nut job Federal Judges stopped him.
NYC and NYS will just bill the tax payers to pay for more benifits for non-citizens.


Potus 45 "In order to get a green card, an immigrant will have to prove to a consular officer that they will obtain health insurance within 30 days of their arrival in the US. If they can’t, they must demonstrate that they will be able to pay for their medical expenses."

Anonymous said...

This is social engineering just like forced busing. Te north end of the Q76 used to serve private homes in Whitestone, but it is replaced by two lines serving the projects in Clearview and Flushing instead. Liz Warren wants to eliminate private homes.

Anonymous said...

Yep, pretty soon New Yorker's will be forced to ride bicycles year round, just like China (50 years ago)!

Anonymous said...

Just who is this Jarrett Walker(jarrettwalker.com,humantransit.org) who redesigned the bus routes in so many cities?
https://news.google.com/search?q=jarrett%20walker

They did it all by hand, no math. And they did it with false assumptions as to who we are and how we live.
This is the book which describes their methods: http://www.trb.org/Main/Blurbs/179215.aspx

And lastly, it may have worked elsewhere, but get serious, this is Blah Blah land, run by BlahBlasio, world expert on stepping on his own member.

Anonymous said...

They should congestion price mass transit. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. EMployers would then allow for flex time or stagger their hours across different disciplines.

Anonymous said...

Back in the 1970s they did a study which said the ideal bus sizes in twelve passengers with flexible routes, a bus-taxi hybrid which readily exists in unregulated markets, around trains stations and airports. But politicans want bigger and bigeers buses, fancier projects, so they themselves can feel big.

Anonymous said...

The MTA should create a luxury class of high price bus service that stops at the front door of all the complaining, obese deplorables. If the fare was tripled, the MTA could afford all they want.

Anonymous said...

They want to replace hub and spoke with grid, and they assume folks prefer faster bus service with many transfers to slower, dependable long trips without interruptions. The idea is if a long route gets bogged down, the entire line suffers. Amtrak and the airlines are into the same ideas. These fads cycle every generation amongst those academics dealing with transportaion, because all the papers on the old method have been written so they gotta get published for tenur eby reviving the old ways. I once confronted an academic who said his program was the first on campus if he knew of a former professor, who had done the same thing. He said "Oh,yes, I was his student". So was I. So he stopped claiming he was the first. Same thing here. No reason we should be taken along on their rid eon the tenure roller coaster.

Anonymous said...

All of these models require that, at every iteration, you check for reality and feasibility (boundary and initial conditions; and constraints) or else they flail about unpredictably, producing spurious results along with the good ones. You can see this when you use google, some results are excellent, others totally suck. In the end, it depends on the one running the model to know what is going on. Models are great, they save a lot of work, provided you know what you are doing. Queens has the brightest students in the state, but these carpet baggers who came to work at the MTA treat us like idiots.

Anonymous said...

They want to put us all in kulaks like Electchester or Queensbridge so they can monitor our every thought and indoctrinate s

Anonymous said...

"Garbage in" is the list of major arteries from DOT, not MTA.
West Northern is "Primary", East Northern is "Secondary",
and Francis Lewis is nowhere to be found. p 9 (PDF 11),
Hence the Q76 gets chopped up and NEQ gets fwaqt

The following corridors, listed alphabetically, ranked highest in the NYCDOT evaluation process:• 108th Street• 168th Street• 21st Street• 69th Street• Archer Avenue• Broadway / Corona Avenue• Grand Avenue / Grand Street• Hillside Avenue• Jamaica Avenue East• Junction Boulevard / 94th Street• Kissena Boulevard• Main Street• Merrick Boulevard• Northern Boulevard West• Parsons Boulevard• Queens Boulevard• Roosevelt Avenue East• Roosevelt Avenue West• Sanford Avenue East• Sutphin Boulevard• Union Street

Anonymous said...

They say they want to replace hub and spoke with grid, but bringing the 76 to the downtown flushing subway is the reverse. The 12 and 13 and 16 and 15 do that.
Leave the 76 alone.

Anonymous said...

Use the online comment form. They DO read them!!!

Anonymous said...

>They should congestion price mass transit. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. EMployers would then allow for flex time or stagger their hours across different disciplines.

Why would employers do that when the extra costs will be borne by hapless employees?

>They want to put us all in kulaks like Electchester or Queensbridge

Are you really conflating Electchester with Queensbridge??