Palin: "Absurd" Not To Consider 2012 Run
Wall Street Throwing More Money at Republicans
Paterson Bombshell Rumor Watch: Resignation Imminent?
More Bald Eagles Spotted In Harlem!
Paterson "Bombshell" Just PG-13?
Courtesy Transportation Alternatives
This morning the NYC Straphangers Campaign and Transportation Alternatives held their big awards show for the worst exemplars of poor bus service. The "top" prize is called the Pokey award; it's a golden snail on a pedestal, and it went to the poor sad crosstown M42, which had the slowest bus speed at 3.7 miles per hour, as clocked at 12 noon on a weekday. According to the award presenters, the M42 would lose a race with a five-year-old riding a motorized tricycle with a speed of 5 mph (as advertised by X-Treme Scooters). But the M42 wasn't the only bus to crawl away with a prize!
The fourth-annual “Schleppie” was awarded for the city’s least reliable bus, and was selected based on official transit statistics. (The Pokey, on the other hand, was awarded based on actual rides taken by volunteers on 23 slow bus routes.) This year the Schleppie went to the B44, which runs on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn. During the first half of 2009, more than one in five B44s — 21.7% — arrived bunched together or came with big gaps in service. (Last year’s “winner,” was the M101/2/3, which runs between Upper and Lower Manhattan.)
Finally, the third award was the first-ever Trekkie, for the city bus route with the longest scheduled running time. The Trekkie (a golden camel on a pedestal) went to the M4, which runs between Penn Station and Fort Tryon Park. A trip from Penn Station in Manhattan to Fort Tryon in Upper Manhattan on the M4 is scheduled to take 1 hour and 50 minutes, according to MTA New York City Transit’s schedules. "What a trek!" said Gene Russianoff, staff attorney for the NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign. "Long haul riders on the M4 should be sure to bring along travel Monopoly and a pillow."
No representatives from the MTA or NYC Transit were on hand to accept the awards, but they did issue this statement: "Buses were introduced to New York City more than 100 years ago and despite being, by far, 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. However, with recent innovations such as Select Bus Service (SBS) and signal light prioritization, as well as plans to further improve service recently outlined by MTA Chairman Jay Walder, it is important for the city’s 2.3 million bus customers to know that we are working to achieve improvements in bus speeds and reliability."
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
word.
I'd love to see prepaid bus tickets that you stamp when you get on the bus. So people could use both sets of doors. Also it would be great to build concrete bus stop platforms so the buses don't need steps, don't need wheelchair lifts and don't have to kneel.
They may not be able to fix the traffic the buses have to contend with (thanks partially to the inability to levy a congestion tax) but at least they could speed up boarding and deboarding.
Have you seen this somewhere before? I'm just curious, like how would people get up on these platforms? As it would have to be pretty fail proof, because we all know how speedy the MTA is with repairs.
San Francisco has similar elevated platforms on some trolley routes.
Good idea about the stamps from Eric Roberts. And the MTA is right about a key problem being buses competing for space with cars. More dedicated bus lanes would speed things up, and if (and this is a big if) more people took buses maybe there would be fewer cars, so the remaining cars could go faster.
I can hardly believe that the M101 has lost its schleppie status. In my opinion, it remains the least reliable, most frustrating line with the nastiest drivers. On 72nd street each morning, they all come at once and the last in the group inevitably slams the door in the face of a prospective rider, pulls up about 8 feet and then sits at a red light while the abandoned rider looks up Lexington Ave. to a 15 minute wait.
Wouldn't it be great if the MTA were capable of hiring someone to do PR who had enough of a sense of humor to play along with this sort of thing and accept the award, rather than make whiny and defensive statements after the fact. There's no reason not to be friendly and cooperative with groups like TA and Straphangers, rather than reflexively defending turf and closing ranks.