BrooklynBus

Especially when people asked for it at the workshops but were ignored. Guess a hundred would have had to have asked for for them to have made the change in 2013.

I agree with you that it would make no sense for all B49 buses to bypass Sheepshead Bay station for the reasons you mentioned, but since when would that or event the MTA from defying logic? They believe in lowest common denominator solutions like a bus stop every quarter or half mile regardless of specific situation or straightening a route not considering why it turns in the first place. I don't see how the large crowds boarding at Avenue Z affects the low usage śouts of that point. If you are saying there would not be sufficient capacity for existing B44 users north of Avenue X because of additional riders on the bus, that would have to be part of the analysis to make sure enough buses are scheduled when needed. If extra buses for example would be needed south of Church or Flatbush Avenues are needed for example for certain trips, those should be added. Adding buses from WBP would be wasteful. As far as the buses provided by the college, they only account for 20 percent of B1 risers between the subway and the college. The college only runs then because of the unreliability of MTA service. I don't think they should provide more buses but I also do not believe the MTA should bear the financial cost of providing school service. The city should reimburse the MTA for all service on the school open schedule.

I don't think many KCC students gave unlimiteds unless they take classes five days a week. There are surges between 12 and 1 and at 3 PM. At those times a hundred or more students can appear in only three minutes. At about 2:30 PM there are 12 buses sent to the school not in service and they sit there for about 30 minutes until classes are dismissed. They are there for the high school students as well. Why they have to sit there for half an hour I do not understand. Even in August there are six buses waiting, but they don't get filled up. Seems artics could be borrowed from Flatbush and used on the B1 unless the unions won't allow that.

Yes they used them as shuttles to Sheepshead Bay and carried about 12 passengers each. Was a waste of resources.

He didn't even mention the B44 extension. And no one other than you mentioned artics for the B49. Plus you didn't answer his question.

There is also crowding on the B49. I don't know why they don't use artics on the B1 shuttle to Brighton Station. That would help. They just need to announce that the bus will only stop at the station and hold the bus until it fills up. Right now the dispatching is horrible. They fill up the 4th Avenue buses and then the shuttles leave half empty. They need to fill up the shuttles first. The B49 shuttles are always empty.

I don't see why it would have any affect on B1 passengers.

I wouldn't be surprised if the go back to the Pre-1978 B49 bus routing claiming few use Sheepshead Bay Station and people can walk the four blocks to the subway because it's within guidelines or else take the B1. They will use some irrelevant statistic like one percent of the routes daily passengers are going to the Sheepshead Bay Station rather than the percentage of bus passengers that get off or on at the station. Of course this will result in lower ridership and more service cuts. That's what we have to look forward to with this redesign. And you know they won't do anything to replace NY Avenue service.

First of all, I don't see your analogy the the M15 SBS. The M15 now has some competition from the SAS. There is no new competition for the B44 SBS. In fact, it acts as competition for the B49 north of Foster taking away passengers from that route if someone wants the B49 and a B44 SBS comes first, they will take it if I travel also takes them to their destination. So that could explain some of the B49 ridership loss and inflates the B44 ridership numbers. Even with those inflated numbers, fewer people are now riding the B44 SBS/local than rode the B44 Limited /local. As for why it is a failure, we have to look at the promises made. The MTA contended that it previously took an hour and 15 minutes to travel between WBP and Knapp Street and after SBS, passengers would save 15 minutes and the trip will be able to be made in one hour which what they are still claiming it takes. In fact no one even travels between WBP to Knapp Street to save those 15 minutes. The average time saved is about four minutes for an average 2.7 mile trip. The few riders who travel in excess of five miles will save 15 minutes. Many save no time at all, merely trading a few minutes extra walking for a few minutes saved on the bus. Some even have longer trips with SBS. So it really takes closer to two hours although bus lanes and fare pre-payment were added. Machines are frequently broken and it takes a long time to fix them in some cases, people are unfairly ticketed, fare evasion is probably up. SBS costs more to operate ( about $2 or $3 million more a year than the previous service and carries fewer passengers. Initial costs for the B44 were in the neighborhood of $20 million although different sources provide different numbers. Not to mention those in cars who have longer trips because of the bus lanes. There is no way you can consider the B44 SBS a success bless you only consider the few who save considerable time and ignore everything else I stated. That's not the way it used to be in the 1980s when I was there. The running time on each section of route (usually about eight sections for a long route) varied according to time of day to reflect traffic conditions.For example, from point A to B: overnight: 6minutes; 7 to 9 AM: 10 minutes; 9 to 2: 8 minutes; 2 to 5; 9 minutes; 5-7PM 11minutes; 7 to 10 PM: 8 min, etc.

So schedules mean nothing to the MTA or to bus riders and it routinely takes twice as long as a schedule says for a trip to be made. That was not the way things were years ago. You both now have confirmed what I have been saying since 2010. That the B44 SBS would be and is a total failure. I have been rallying for the commuters. That doesn't mean I have forgotten about the importance of considering costs and other MTA considerations. Otherwise I would be proposing nothing but service increases. Service also needs to be cut where warranted. That doesn't mean I share the MTA's unwritten philosophy of running the least possible amount of service that is politically feasible. 1 hour 15 minutes each way? That was supposedly before SBS. The MTA Claimed that SBS knocked off 15 minutes from each trip so that passengers saved 15 minutes even if no one rode from end to end. I didn't really believe that schedules were mostly met but am flabbergasted to learn it ROUTINELY takes 2 hours to make a one hour trip, not if there is an unforcasted event like a street closure due to a fire. The MTA needs to publicly admit they don't give a damn about realistic schedules and that's why buses are totally unreliable. They also need to show in their Performance Dashboard that only half the scheduled trips are actually made. And they also need to admit that SBS hasn't made a positive difference. I've stated that KCC students would primarily benefit from the extension. But so would B49 passengers because buses would be less crowded and therefore travel faster.

Now you have said it all. The speed limit is 25 mph, but drivers are instructed to never drive more than 20 mph and to forget about the schedule. So now we know why buses are never on time and always late. That means that when the MTA claims a certain number of trips are made each day, that is never true. So no MTA statistics can be believed. And their new performance dashboard means nothing. Thanks.

I figured they were going in the northbound direction which makes it irrelevant to this discussion. I stated that no more than six passengers are ever aboard the B44 express and local south of Avenue X in either direction even during rush hours except perhaps when shifts are changing at the nursing homes. And telling me 20 people are getting on at Avenue X to go north does not refute that. I am fully aware how people lie with statistics and use them unfairly to prove certain points. I am just as upset about that as you are but I can assure you I am not one of those people. More service is definitely needed to Manhattan Beach some of the time. (There are also times when the service is excessive such as at school dismissal time during the summer, but that is another issue.) You have never stood at the terminal in MB and watched the students board the buses. A hundred students can appeAr within a matter of 30 seconds. Between 12 and 1, I counted 1500 students waiting to board buses and that is the off-peak. At 3 PM, you would need three or four people counting to get an accurate count. So don't tell me there is no demand. As for the part about an extension destroying the rest of the route, if I believed that was the case, I certainly would not have proposed it. I care about the entire route not just the southern end. Your argument about me wanting to help my community while destroying another one reminds me of an argument I nice had with someone who lived in Crown Heights. He claimed that I was proposing to reduce service in Crown Heights because I was angry why my car was stolen there and I wanted to get back at that community for that reason. That would have been absolutely ridiculous. Mr. Byford's answer was nothing but an excuse for not taking action now. There is no reason why it would have to wait for a study of the entire route system when it was proposed two years ago. If I were first proposing it now, then his answer might have made sense.

So what if commuters do not care how drivers get paid. Commuters also don't care if they are the only ones on the bus as long as one is there when they want it. It doesn't only matter what commuters want. It also matters what the MTA wants and needs and they certainly do care about driver pay. That's why I mentioned it. I am looking at the extension vs the positives and negatives of doing it which is exactly how it should be looked at. As far as buses running the full route, it has been my philosophy for about 40 years which I must have stated somewhere at least once that we need more longer routes to minimize transfers and fewer buses traveling the entire lengths of a bus route during times of heavy demand and heavy traffic. The base headway of any route should be no greater than 20 minutes except during late night hours. (This 30 minute thing is ridiculous.) service should be supplemented as needed. So with the B44 I would have no bus going from end to end more frequently than every 20 minutes. Additional buses could start at Flushing or Avenue U. I would have liked to propose that all SBS go to the College when in session and locals go to Knapp. But with the current fare structure, the few SBS passengers that board south of Avenue X would have to pay an extra fare. To avoid that, I proposed that half the buses go to the college. Some or all of them could start from Flushing with more WBP buses turning at Avenue U so that there is at least ten minute headways to WBP.

Hold on one minute. You are saying that it usually takes 2 hours and ten minutes to get from WBP to KCC with traffic and that is the usual case? So why does the schedule say the trip takes one hour or less? Schedules supposed to reflect reality most of the time and if that is not how the MTA does its schedules anymore, we have a much bigger problem than deciding if five minutes should be added to the route or not.

Here are the points I was trying to make. Drivers get paid by the amount of time spent on the road, not by the length of a route. So when making a route extension, the amount of time added is more important than the distance added. In the case of my proposed extension, although a mile is being added to the route, it would only take about another five minutes since usually there are no traffic problems most of the day and no stops are proposed for that distance. (It might take seven or eight minutes for a a few hours a day, but you should reflect that in the running times.) You have to weigh that against the benefits which I already outlined, saving thousands of riders 15 minutes. According to your logic, no long routes should ever be made longer. But where is it written that every bus SBS (or local) must operate the entire route length? Years ago, there were many more short turns to reflect ridership demand, but they were eliminated just to save money and resulted in increased unreliability. Since virtually no one rides from Williamsburg to Sheepshead Bay, adding short turns so that most trips occur where the riders are lessens the probability of exceedingly light usage at a routes extremity.

You know I was against taking the stop away from Sheepshead Bay Road and moving it to under the trestle. We both fought against that so I am unsure what your point is. I also don't know what slippery slope you are referring to that took 20 years to recover. Or that the stop was moved to Sheepshead Bay six months later. I attended al those meetings and the MTA promised it would stop under the station. Buses stopped on Avenue Z for only three days. When I reminded them of their promise to stop by the station, it was changed in three days. As for Deutsch, while I had good things to say about him regarding Avenue R, he was of no help in this case and did nothing to get the stop back to Sheepshead Bay Road. I don't know how you can make a statement that no one in the community wants my proposed change when hardly anyone even knows about it. I don't see how stating a fact that virtually every bus south of Avenue X has no more than six riders is lying with statistics. Did you say you see 20 people boarding B44s on Avenue X going south? I don't believe you specified the direction those 20 people were traveling. I believe everyone is giving Byford a chance and was also doing that until he told me it would take five years to study my proposal, including two that have already passed, and at the same time claims to be able to study 300 routes in three years. And yes he is fighting an entrenched bureaucracy.

I was trying to be polite by saying "I am sorry". But you accuse me of "feigning ignorance." What you are saying makes no sense at all if you are saying adding runtime and mileage is "directly proportional" to runtime. How can something be proportional to itself? If anyone understands what he is trying to say, please chime in.

I didn't say anything to the contrary. Of course the union has a say.

Although the pre-1978 B1 ran every ten minutes during the summer, I doubt it that the buses never bunched and two didn't come every 20 minutes some of the time. There are many reasons why buses cannot keep to a schedule and although traffic is an important factor, too often it is a scapegoat so as not to address the issue of traffic enforcement and scheduling tactics that can minimize bunching and late buses. One is to allow ample layover time to allow buses to recover from traffic delays and delays caused by wheelchairs. I do not believe any extra time is allowed in the schedule for wheelchairs. With RTS buses, one single wheelchair can delay a bus between five and ten minutes for entry and exit. With ten minute headways, that's automatic bunching without even considering traffic. And once bunching starts, it often exacerbates and spreads. If there is not enough layover time buses will leave the terminal already bunched or a minute apart. That means without any intervention they will remain bunched throughout the day. Not scheduling enough buses in the first place causes overcrowding at bus stops and also increases unreliability. So there is a lot more to bus delays than just traffic and double parking. You need more delivery zones which DOT has been trying to do, but the commercial establishments are against it because they do not want reduced metered parking. They are also trying to create additional traffic lanes in the parking lanes during rush hours but the stores don't want that either. They would rather have the double parking that delays buses. The solution is to tailor the parking bans to only when needed. Instead of 7 to 10 and 4 to 7, perhaps only an hour or 90 minute ban is necessary. Explain why the B1/B64 terminate swap reduced reliability on the B1. How would extending the B44 to KCC, extend the problems of the B1 and B49 to the B44? Many of the B1 problems are caused by the two els and are irrelevant to the B44. The B49s problems are caused by double parking on Ocean Avenue and traffic congestion near Sheepshead Bay Station, also irrelevant to the B44. I fail to see how adding passengers to the route in the off-peak direction would create problems. That is something that us desirable. Regarding your statement: "the MTA cannot correctly predict the weather which will determine how many buses are needed beyond the regular schedule and, therein lies the problem as clear warm weather will have more riders and rainy weather will have empty buses." But that is exactly what used to happen back in the old days. First of all summer schedules were automatically boosted on Beach routes as you already pointed out using the B1 as an example. And volunteers who wanted overtime would agree to work extra runs on those routes when the weather called for sunny temperatures in the 90s. Now I doubt that happens anymore with the focus on reducing overtime. Still, beach service was horrible through the 1980s, because the MTA had absolutely no idea regarding the numbers of passengers using beach routes. I remember in the 1960s how B49 buses would often run non-stop from Church Avenue all the way to Emmons Avenue, stopping only when someone had to get off usually at a transfer point. Those waiting at stops such as Avenue K could wait over two hours for a bus to stop. That was something I tried very hard to correct during my brief time in Operations Planning. The solution is to schedule buses for a day with moderate bus usage, not for a rainy day. And to supplement buses on a day where high beach usage is projected. Luckily for the MTA, beach usage today is much lighter than it was 50 years ago, so not nearly as much service is needed. I am sorry but I do not understand what you are saying. Additional mileage and adding three minutes to the runtime are directly proportional to what? The runtime?

The point isn't the meandering or the extra distance. It's how much extra time it would add to the route and I do not believe it would be more than three or four minutes which is not that significant. And I certainly do change my opinion when presented with convincing arguments. I met with the MTA at least a half dozen times on thus very issue during the past ten years. I write to them whenever I see a problem. Whenever I think they got it under control, a few months later I see it again.

I agree with your assessment of the B36. But I don't see why even with the current Street arrangement. They couldn't operate a needed B36 shuttle service if they rerouted eastbound service back to Sheepshead Bay Road and used the closed portion of the fork at East 17 Street for buses only. Traffic on Avenue Z is bad but not impossible. Yes more enforcement would help. I do not see why or agree why my proposal would hurt the existing B44. I do not know if you ever use the B49 during midday between say Avenue J and Avenue Z. I used to use it frequently and now only occasionally. It is as slow as molasses even without businesses because of the double parking on every single block. Buses are constantly delayed by always having to switch lanes and waiting for passing cars to let them switch between lanes. I don't see how you can say it serves the college just fine.

But why would someone at Utica Avenue and Eastern Parkway need to transfer to the proposed B50? The B17 connection could be made at Empire and Utica. So the only really new connection would be between the B14 and the B50. I wonder if that cone toon alone merits an extension to Eastern Parkway but you would have it go further yet to Ralph Avenue, I guess to make a connection with an extended B65. The B22 would work if the new shoulders on the Belt Parkway were converted to a bus only lane. When the Mill Basin Bridge reconstruction is complete and Bus the Flatbush Avenue Overpass is high enough for buses, the route would not need to divert off the Parkway at Knapp Street. Moving the B44 SBS to Rogers would have been the correct decision if the MTA had made other changes to replace service on New York Avenue. But they are not capable of thinking if the system by studying more than one or two routes a total a time like I did in 1975 when I looked at the linkages between six routes. They never could have figured out how to have the B36 go along Avenue Z only because moving it from Neptune could not have been done if they only looked two routes. Thats why I don't expect much from the redesign because they still will look at the system one or two routes at a time. I don't see how you consider my proposal a meandering of the B44 route. It takes the shortest and straightest distance to the college short of building a bridge over Sheepshead Bay which will never happen. A route cannot be expected to be packed to the gills at both ends in mist cases, but when you have an opportunity to greatly increase ridership where service bus underutilized at no extra cost, you should take advantage of that. I find your arguments unconvincing why a partial rerouting to KCC is a bad idea.

I realize they are similar to my proposals. I am confused however what you are proposing for the B12 via Empire. Exactly what is the routing you propose. And I am still not convinced the extension up Utica and East to Ralph is cost efficient. What increased connectivity do you see that would make it worthwhile?

I never said my B44 proposal would fix the B36 overcrowding. (Also see my response to Interested Rider where I clarified my proposal.) Ther are several reasons why the B44 needs to run to KCC which I fully explained in the proposal I sent to the MTA. (It was about three pages long.) Many B49 passengers to KCC come from transferring routes. The only reason they do not use the Brighton Line instead is to save a fare. Since many have classes only three days a week, an unlimited pass does not make sense for them. If the fare structure is changed to allow three vehicles for a single fare, I agree the B44 SBS to KCC would not be necessary. Since there is no reason to assume the fare structure will change any time soon, as the fare continues to increase, the incentive to avoid a double fare also will increase. If those transferring riders used the B44 SBS instead of the B49 or B49 Limited which only operates during the AM, they would save at least 15 minutes with travel times comparable to if they used the Brighton Subway. Also, few realize that in addition to between 8 and 10 AM, and 3 to 5, college traffic is very heavy between 12 and 2 also. I counted 1500 students boarding at the college for the B1 and B49 between those tines in addition to seated leads arriving at the college. Buses are also crowded at every class change. That does not even consider that about 20 percent of the potential B1 KCC passengers are using the yellow school buses and enrollment at the college increases every semester. And as I previously stated the B44 excess capacity would be utilized. So there are many reasons why this proposal is a good idea.

Your proposal is a little difficult for me to follow. How would my proposed B50 get to the B45 terminal? Via Utica Avenue I presume? Sounds like a costly extension over existing routes. I doubt the MTA would go for it.