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Report: MTA behind on bus service

By Matthew Sweeney | msweeney@am-ny.com

5:32 PM EDT, July 8, 2008

NYC Transit has driven bus service downhill by not keeping pace with the growing ridership, the Straphangers Campaign said in a report released Tuesday.

"The history of transit in New York City is being behind the curve, going back to the opening of the subways in 1904," said Gene Russianoff, lead attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, which released the report.

In 1997, some 2 million people across the city rode buses every weekday. By 2007, about 2.45 million people took the bus. There were 22 percent more passengers, but there was only a 15 percent increase in service, the report says.

Transit has fallen farthest behind in Brooklyn, where there are 25 percent more people on the bus on a given weekday from a decade ago, but only 8 percent more service, according to the report.

The agency's response to growth seems inconsistent at times. The report shows that the Transit almost tripled service on the M60, which runs between the Upper West Side and LaGuardia Airport, but the 15,000 passengers who crowd onto that bus each weekday are nearly five times the amount in 1997.

Meanwhile the S60, a short, little-used route on Staten Island, has slightly fewer riders than it did a decade ago -- just a couple hundred each day -- but transit increased service by nearly two-thirds.

Transit responded to the report by arguing that in 1996 -- a year before it adopted free transfers from subways and buses -- the bus system had ample room to take on additional ridership. Agency officials argue that it has kept up with growth - most of which occurred before 2001, by increasing service 29 percent.

Transit, however, counts weekend and express bus service, which the Straphangers report does not.

"The fact of the matter is that the increase in bus ridership, most of which occurred by the end of 2001, was met with unprecedented increases in bus service," Transit said in a statement.

Russianoff replied, "Ask the riders who are they going to believe: the transit authority or their eyes?"