Brooklyn Boro

OPINION: Select Bus Service, a welcome addition to Brooklyn’s transit scene

January 24, 2017 By Raanan Geberer Special to Brooklyn Daily Eagle
A B44 Select bus is seen at Nostrand Avenue. Photo courtesy of NYC Department of Transportation
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If you look behind the recent hoopla over the opening of the Second Avenue Subway in Manhattan, you’ll find that the real story is the slow pace at which it was constructed and the high cost of construction. The first section, from 63rd to 96th Street, took 10 years to build, and serious planning has yet to begin on the second phase, from 96th to 125th streets.

Compare this to the four years in which the city’s original subway line, from City Hall to 145th Street, was completed and to the seven years it took to construct the A train from 207th to Chambers streets, both in the early 20th century. The only conclusion we can draw is that things are much more complicated today. While new subways should and probably will be built, the process can take years.

Thankfully, a new alternative has emerged in Brooklyn and elsewhere to make bus service faster in the absence of an aggressive new subway-building program. That alternative is bus rapid transit, which combines some of the features of mass transit with the flexibility of buses.

The MTA’s version of bus rapid transit is known as Select Bus Service (SBS). The city currently has 11 SBS routes. Two of them that are entirely in Brooklyn, and one additional route starts in Brooklyn and goes over the Verrazano Bridge to Staten Island. These routes serve such high-profile locations as Fort Hamilton, Sheepshead Bay, Kings Plaza, Brooklyn College, Kings County and SUNY Downstate hospitals and Williamsburg Bridge Plaza.

Passengers don’t swipe their MetroCard near the driver’s compartment — instead, they use their MetroCard to buy a paper ticket at a sidewalk machine, then hold on to it to show inspectors when they come through the buses. Thus, drivers don’t have to wait for passengers to swipe their MetroCards on board.

Passengers can now get on through the rear doors, which in “regular” buses are reserved for exiting. SBS vehicles use their own dedicated lanes — either the street’s outside lane or one separated from the curb by a parking lane — which are painted an orange-tan color. Finally, in some locations where the dedicated lanes are not the outside ones, “bus bulbs” at bus stops bring the curb right up to the bus.

The two all-Brooklyn routes are the B44, one of the longest routes in the borough, which runs between Sheepshead Bay and Williamsburg; and the B46, which traverses the same aforementioned Utica Avenue route that subway planners have dreamed of since time immemorial. As we’ve mentioned, the MTA also runs an SBS route between Bay Ridge-Fort Hamilton and Staten Island, the S79. Most of the MTA’s SBS lines were regular or limited-stop bus routes before the program began.

The B44 runs almost the entire north-south axis of the borough. It starts on Emmons Avenue, Sheepshead Bay’s main commercial street, which is known for its seafood restaurants. On its northward trek along Nostrand, Rogers and Bedford avenues, it stops at Brooklyn College, Kings County and SUNY Downstate hospitals, the Hasidic area of South Williamsburg and finally Williamsburg Bridge Plaza Bus Terminal. Southbound buses go from Lee directly onto Nostrand Avenue rather than using nearby Bedford and Rogers avenues.

The B46 begins at Kings Plaza, goes north on Utica Avenue for most of its route and finally turns onto Malcolm X Boulevard for the final leg of its journey, terminating at Broadway in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The S79 connects Bay Ridge and Fort Hamilton to Staten Island, terminating at the Staten Island Mall.

So far, SBS has met its expectations, says Kevin Ortiz, a spokesman for MTA New York City Transit. Overall, he said, “We’re seeing 20 percent faster bus service and 10 to 20 percent increases in ridership along our SBS routes.”

Using Brooklyn’s SBS B44 as an example, he points to a 31 percent travel-time improvement in the morning going north; a 20 percent travel-time improvement in the afternoon going north; a 19 percent improvement in the morning going south; and a 15 percent improvement in the afternoon going south.

Of course, as in any new development, there are criticisms of SBS. For example, Sheepshead Bites in May 2015 opined that having to pre-pay off site could mean that more people will miss the bus; that double-parkers often ignore the dedicated bus lanes on the Flatbush portion of the B44 and that longer buses (used on SBS routes) “will mean fewer of them and longer waits.”

I live near an SBS route (admittedly, not in Brooklyn), and I find a marked improvement in service. The bus proceeds at a faster rate down the street, and boarding time is reduced because passengers can get in at any one of the bus’s three doors rather than having to wait at the front door. True, one can lose time while getting a ticket at the bus stop ticket machine, but I don’t have any ready solution for that. Perhaps when the current MetroCard system is replaced by a faster chip card system, things will improve.

Many years ago I lived in Boston, and I saw how that city and neighboring Cambridge have a varied transit system, with streetcars, subways, buses and electric buses all working together. Hopefully, this type of system can also become a reality in New York, with SBS as a major component.

 

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