67thAve

Probably not, but ridership at St. Albans is definitely higher now than it was pre-Atlantic Ticket. People are clearly willing to pay a bit more (if they can afford it) for a faster and more comfortable commute.

I'm glad to hear that it's opening, but definitely quite disappointed that it's happening while I'm away in London for three months! Hopefully the LIRR concourse doesn't turn into a homeless colony by April. I guess my surprise run-in with a certain famous London transport personality earlier this month was my consolation prize after all...

That's always been the intent. if you look at the fine print on a couple of the proposed changes, you'll notice mentions of fare reciprocity. One of the goals of the redesign was to give Bee-Line passengers access to Metro-North services in Westchester for $2.75, hence a lot of the trimmings up north. The 77 will be kept if the MTA refuses such an agreement.

Where would they have these maps available besides on the buses? Apparently 3 Stone Street is only open by appointment these days, so that's out of the question, and I don't think that the Transit Museum annex in Grand Central stocks MTA maps anymore. Big changes like these should obviously have the MTA going all-out on making these available to riders, even in the digital age.

I'm currently listening to the scanner and it seems that they've triangulated the suspect to a homeless shelter on 49th Street between 2nd and 3rd. If this does turn out to be a case of a homeless individual conducting a violent attack, the narrative about subway safety is going to get even more intense. Update: The scanner seems to have gone quiet about that. False lead, perhaps...? Update 2: Scanner is now saying that man who fit the description ran into the Carroll Street on the . Goes to show how fluid the situation is.

Hopefully all of the injured recover and the perp is brought to justice.

A lot of these service increases just bring service levels (mostly) back to where they were pre-pandemic. For instance, the n32 always operated every 30 minutes on Sunday until 2020, and Saturday service on the n31/n32 was traditionally every 20 minutes combined.

I'm not surprised by that - Wildwood seems to be relatively poor and dense, all of the county offices are in Cape May Court House, and Rio Grande is home to a large concentration of big box stores.

Last week (12/29), I used the free round-trip ticket from New York to Cape May which I received as part of their holiday promotion on MyTix. Overall, the buses were clean and on-time (the Atlantic City bus station is definitely not though - someone tried to sell me meth there during my short layover on the return trip). The 319 was busier than I expected and the quality of service is that of a standard intercity coach, with bathroom facilities and luggage storage underneath the vehicle. The 552 (Atlantic City to Cape May) bus was significantly more interesting than the 319, not just in terms of scenery, but also because it felt like three separate routes which have little to no relationship. The northern half of the route, which is an express service from Atlantic City to Cape May Court House with one intermediate stop at a park-and-ride only accessible via car, carried air on both of my trips - there were only one or two other passengers on board on this leg (excluding myself) in either direction. The middle leg between Cape May Court House and Wildwood was the most intensely used in both directions, and was actually pretty full going northbound. Ridership between Wildwood and Cape May was roughly what I expected for a semi-rural route.

Easily the n57 and the Port Washington Shuttle. As far as I'm concerned, the former has a completely different ridership base than the rest of the network and is not a "socially necessary" service, and therefore should be the first service eliminated in a time of crisis. I can also see the n26 getting cut if the Queens bus redesign does end up with an MTA route serving North Shore Hospital, which would essentially kill its primary reason to exist.

I think NICE will be fine. I don't think that Blakeman, much like the majority of Nassau residents, really thinks much about NICE at all, and therefore won't go out of his way to slice it into tiny pieces.

I chose not to respond because it wouldn't properly answer your question.

On Wednesday, I had the benefit of listening to Westchester's transportation planning director discuss Bee-Line and the ongoing bus redesign in a graduate school guest lecture. There are some really, really cool things that Bee-Line is looking at, but I'm not going to specify, since the information is not supposed to be public... yet. I can however tell that weekend ridership on Bee-Line is nearly back to normal and that overall ridership is roughly three-fourths of what it was pre-pandemic.

I don't think people going to Islanders games will ever decide to take a bus. This works well for NICE, because transporting middle-class sports fans to games isn't exactly their target demographic and they'd rather provide service where it is needed most.

It's not that Flixbus has a lot of money - it's that First was really desperate to offload Greyhound from its portfolio.

I'll eat my hat if the route survives Westchester's bus network redesign in the near future. That's how confident I am regarding it going the way of the dodo.

Honestly, a nice (no pun intended) series of service changes from NICE. I wouldn't have expected this a few years back, so it goes to show you that they've clearly begun to find their niche. However, I am surprised that they didn't eliminate the n15 routing via County Seat entirely. From my experience, that leg tends to more or less carry air.

I wonder if this is connected, but Suffolk County is now apparently redesigning its transit network, with a new bus system to be launched by the end of the year. https://www.connectli.org/ReimagineTransit.html Sounds like a bit of a rushed job to me.

If the LIRR does not begin to reinstate services cut when the city begins to rebound, they should expect to lose a lot of riders that would otherwise resume using the railroad once many jobs shift back to non-remote. Similarly, with the level of evening service reduction and the eroding perception of safety at Penn Station, capturing riders heading to and from cultural events in the city might become nigh-impossible. I know it's an unpopular opinion on this board, but the MTA (and the city as a whole) needs to crack down on the homeless in a manner that will make Giuliani and Bloomberg look like weaklings if they want to get LIRR riders back.

About time, though I did hear word of this a few months prior. I understand network redesigns are now the "hip" thing to do, but Newark's network really is antiquated, and therefore really does need a refresh. Some places do redesigns pretty often, but New Jersey is not one of them (for instance, French urban networks tend to get redesigned relatively frequently, with the timing typically coinciding with a change in the operating contract). I did see something that this is simply the first stage of a future statewide bus network redesign, which will be interesting to see.

Anyone else notice that printed LIRR timetables have been "temporarily" eliminated, most likely as a stealth budget cut? Yet before the pandemic, the MTA somehow had the money to churn out the production of thousands of temporary timetables which were valid for one or two weekends only...

Considering that Transdev had to work with some really threadbare budgets during their tenure at NICE, I'd say that they did a decent job considering the circumstances... certainly better than the MTA would have done in the same situation. As for TfL, bus operations in Greater London were never deregulated. Neither were those in Northern Ireland (but there's a different reason for that). Outside of London, there have been many private operation success stories, such as Stagecoach East Scotland's express network and TrentBarton.

Watch as the MTA cuts the remaining printed schedules available for commuter trains and buses as well to save money. The only way to figure out how long you'll be waiting for a bus will likely be third-party apps. Maybe the MTA should only sell GTFS data for a fee to third parties as a revenue stream (assuming this is not the case already)?

This is unsurprising and expected. It's been obvious for years that bus operations are the black sheep of the MTA and are treated as somewhat disposable. But I also don't feel sorry for the MTA. They've been fiscally irresponsible for years on end, and have proved that they cannot competently manage the operation of routes, especially those which really should be successful (such as the B41). I think the path forward for MTA bus operations should be either TfL-style tendering of bus depots to private operators (albeit with integrated fares), or complete privatization, Buenos Aires-style.

Source?