67thAve

4 hours ago, N6 Limited said:

Kinda sorta, the free transfer is now available for another route.

 

The Q5 gets turnover all along Merrick, they’d lose money and probably would have to increase service. 

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The Q4 is proposed to be limited on Merrick Blvd, what if its a ploy to speed up bus service,  remove stops and decrease Q84 service?

Does anyone think this will affect (mainly increase) ridership at St. Albans LIRR ?

 

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...

20 minutes ago, Mtatransit said:

Wow, the only connection between Southern and Northern Westchester will be the 14 (and it will skip Verpanck/Montrose and end at Westchester CC area). Everything else will get eliminated. Granted the last time I was on the 15, it didn't really pick up any passengers until Yorktown Heights anyways, but still that whole section of Westchester county will lose service

Seems like they expected people in that area to essentially take Metro North

 

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.

On 6/12/2022 at 5:55 PM, Calvin said:

Paper maps in brochure style can be seen on Bronx buses 

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.

6 hours ago, jaf0519 said:

Wow, all of these service increases, plus the effective reinstating of the N36 with Nice Mini service in June is really surprising. 

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.

45 minutes ago, 553 Bridgeton said:

The 552 sees most of ridership between cape may court house and wildwood-rio grande. During the summer now is a different story, it’s really heavy out of Atlantic City with tourist. Transit is ok with taking a loss in the winter-spring months(Oct-may). 

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.

11 hours ago, User said:

If there is a budget gap, what do you think the first routes to be cut will be?

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.

13 hours ago, Cait Sith said:

If he's gonna be anything like Mangano, NICE will be in trouble.

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.

1 hour ago, Lawrence St said:

Thanks, but I was asking 67thAve, not you.

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.

On 9/23/2021 at 9:45 AM, FLX9304 said:

You know how NICE is: no money for extra service except for maybe the 6 or the 70s from eastern LI to Hempstead where they can get the LIRR. 

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.

1 hour ago, trainfan22 said:

WTF! I've been looking into a bus to take to Philly from NYC and thought Flixbus was an low budget, Chinatown bus type service. I didn't know they had $$$ like that to acquire Greyhound.

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

On 9/4/2021 at 6:14 AM, BM5 via Woodhaven said:

https://transportation.westchestergov.com/images/stories/Schedules/fall21seasonalposter.pdf

The largest changes are on the 5 and 6 buses on Sundays, as they will now operate every 40 minutes combined (every 80 minutes individually) instead of every hour combined. The span on the 6 is more frequent.

Also notable is the BxM4C midday service (or what was left of it) being eliminated. The route will now be a rush-hour only service in the peak direction, with some early evening service. Although it may also be a matter of time before the evening service also gets eliminated. 

 

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...

15 hours ago, MHV9218 said:

Sorry, but that's a bad solution to a misdiagnosed problem. The MTA's shoddy planning with bus routes is frustrating, but amount to losses in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars at worst. No transit system, even running an unthinkable surplus, could ever have dealt with the 90% loss of farebox revenue the pandemic induced. You're comparing apples and oranges. 

Privatization has a dreadful track record. Locally, consider what happened then Veolia took over LI Bus/NICE. Safety levels plummeted, accidents skyrocketed, breakdowns went through the roof, and service is still dreadful. NICE actually had to lower the threshold for what's considered an accident in order to make their system look safe. It's a mess. Then, look around the world. The British privatization model has been a failure that has taken decades to undo, and TfL is actually an example of essentially un-privatizing after the mess of the Thatcher years. There are extremely few examples of successful privatization, and when there are, it's in name-only (a government-subsidized operation run by a private contractor). 

 

You have no idea what you are talking about. You claimed that NYC 'couldn't manage its finance' despite developing the largest pocket of saved money in decades thanks to a surplus. You ignored Trump's unbelievable recklessness with the deficit. You ignored his $5.5 trillion tax cut, the likes of which Obama (the 'someone else') would never have even dreamed of passing. You continue the conflate specific crisis of the pandemic (a multi-billion deficit) with the operating expenses of the MTA in past years. Please. You are embarrassing yourself. Read up on some, truly any of these issues and spare us these remarks.

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.

18 minutes ago, JAzumah said:

Privatization will happen, but it will be a result of the MTA pulling back. They will play nice with the new private operators. I do not see them outsourcing anything. I see them assisting private operators on road and rail in order to spread out their overhead. Their overhead is HEAVY. Think about how much they are saving with cutting their service output almost in half.

They are not planning to implement cuts until May 2021. That is too late. They need to come out with the cuts right now. Let's see what they are and have a robust dialogue about whether redrawing the system could help mitigate the impact in certain areas. In addition, they should NOT be cutting bus wi-fi  and BusTime. Those systems will make the network more usable because you can have a real-time snapshot of what is happening with the buses.

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.

18 minutes ago, Lawrence St said:

Yup, NICE will get 60 Gillig buses to replace their fleet of Orions. This will be the first operator near NYC to operate Gillig buses.

Source?