B44 Is Least Reliable;
B63 Is Slowest in Borough
NEW YORK — The Straphangers Campaign and Transportation Alternatives Thursday gave out its “Pokey,” “Schleppie” and “Trekkie” Awards for poor and ultra-slow bus service in the city.
The Pokey award, for the slowest local bus route, was given to a Manhattan bus, the crosstown M42, which, as the name implies, runs on busy 42nd Street.
However, the Schleppie award, for the least reliable bus, went to the B44, a long route between Sheepshead Bay and Bridge Plaza in Williamsburg. It proceeds largely along Nostrand Avenue, stopping along the way at Brooklyn College and other well-known institutions. The B44 has the fifth-largest bus ridership in the city.
According to the Straphangers Campaign, more than one in five B44 buses, or 21.7 percent, arrived bunched together or came with big gaps in service during the first half of 2009.
The Trekkie Award for the bus with the longest travel time went to another non-Brooklyn route, the M4 between Penn Station and the Cloisters in upper Manhattan.
Getting back to the Pokey Award, however, the Straphangers Campaign and Transportation Alternatives gave out mini-Pokey Awards for the slowest service in each borough.
Brooklyn’s slowest bus route, according to the survey, was the B63 between Fort Hamilton and Cobble Hill, which only proceeded at 5.1 miles per hour.
The B63 is known to take at least an hour, and sometimes as much as an hour and a half. One particular bottleneck takes place on Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park, a busy commercial area with many trucks and double-parked cars. Observers have said that like the B44, the B63 also has a tendency to run in “bunches” — for example, three buses following each other within 10 minutes, followed by a 30-minute wait for the next one.
The MTA responded to the report by saying that while buses are “the most efficient vehicles on rubber tires as far as the numbers of people they carry, they are still forced to vie for the same street space as a single-occupant automobile.” The transit agency also praised the recent Select Bus Service (SBS) innovations, but so far, SBS has only been implemented on one line in the Bronx.
————————
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2009
All materials posted on BrooklynEagle.com are protected by United States copyright law.
Just a reminder, though -- It’s not considered polite to paste the entire story on your blog. Most blogs post a summary or the first paragraph,( 40 words) then post a link to the rest of the story. That helps increase click-throughs for everyone, and minimizes copyright issues. So please keep posting, but not the entire article. arturc at att.net