MHV9218

Damn, didn't see this one coming. This seems like it's only good news for New Flyer, which hasn't been too hot financially lately. The real money is going to go to whoever can figure out a serious electric bus line, especially with all the funds from the Infrastructure bill. I'd like to see Proterra succeed but they're a real mess on basic structural stuff right now, and New Flyer hasn't cracked it yet either.

29 minutes ago, IAlam said:

It seems like the MTA is now putting digital mirrors on buses. I found this video on TikTok 

Whenever I see these I think, one more thing to break. On the other hand, a huge chunk of accidents involving buses have to do with the massive mirrors, so reducing the collision rate however possible isn't a bad idea. Plus, on a car with electric mirrors, you could be sure the tech would break after 20-30 years, if not sooner. But bus lifespans are only 15-20 (and ideally, 12) years anyway.

9 hours ago, Cait Sith said:

The other problem with the busways are if they'll actually be enforced....Jamaica Avenue's busways are hardly enforced. Cabs and other vehicles go through it as if nothing changed. This has always been my primary problem with their implementation of the busways, and so far, 14th Street is the only one that is enforced seriously. Main Street is very hit or miss with enforcement. I doubt Fordham Road would get that treatment of serious enforcement.

What folks who are also for the idea don't see is that Fordham Road is literally a major artery on both the East and West ends of Fordham Road, as it leads directly to Pelham Parkway, the Major Deegan Expressway, the Bronx River Parkway and quite literally, Manhattan. Logistically, making Fordham Road from Arthur Avenue to Morris Avenue a busway would make very little sense for that reason alone, as there's no alternative to get to those two points of interest, and would actually make traffic conditions much worse elsewhere. That part of The Bronx has very few alternative routes to get to those areas. A busway won't stop people from driving in their cars, especially people who already dislike using public transportation as it is(and that's a lot of people).

If Fordham Road was wide enough, double bus lanes like on Madison Avenue would've been better than a full blown busway. The DOT always had a half-assed approach to the busway implementation(except for 14th Street, they actually mapped out alternate routes), for example, in preparation of the Jamaica Avenue Busway, they ADDED a traffic light on Sutphin Blvd at 91st Avenue. That made traffic exponentially worse on Sutphin. Every block between Jamaica Avenue and 95th Avenue has traffic lights now, and they aren't in sync.

The fact of the matter is, if the DOT, the MTA and the NYPD were actually serious about enforcing the existing bus lanes, we'd never be in this predicament to implement full blown busways to begin with. Other big cities have bus lanes that are seriously, legitimately enforced. The fact that New York City has bus lanes that are very rarely enforced systemwide(but will enforce SBS fares sparingly) is an overall disappointment. The bus lanes in New York City are literally a joke because of the lack of enforcement. And with the way DOT implements their plans, it's a lazy, half-assed approach that more often than not, does more harm than good.

After how disastrous the implementation of the Jamaica Avenue busways was, I have very little faith in the DOT and the city implementing busways with some sort of logical sense behind it.

They're half-assing everything these days. 14th Street is an effective bus lane but from a planning perspective it's a total waste of space that could easily have been a busway + bikeway + pedestrian plaza. Instead, it's just this ugly empty thoroughfare, with little enough traffic that everybody jaywalks mid-block, but enough traffic that it's not pleasant to walk on. Worse, the 12th and 13th St. bike lanes are unprotected and unenforced (the NYPD has completely claimed the buffer lanes between 5th and Broadway) so a lot of bikers still take 14th Street, meaning they just crammed a lane of traffic, took away hundreds of parking spots, and split up bikeway traffic for no good reason.

The funniest thing by far is what they did to West 3rd St., where they moved the parking lane into the middle of the street to narrow the traffic lane and add a bike lane, but because these morons only use paint on the street and not curb extensions, bollards, planters, or anything, they accidentally created a second parking lane where cars just park on the pedestrian plaza. And to add insult to injury, the only way to access that parking lane is to, you guessed it, drive a car through the bike lane. It's a level of incompetence that would get people fired in most places, but Ydanis is completely over his head and Mayor Essential Oils has no idea what he's doing. 

The only hope, I think, are these bus-mounted cameras really upping enforcement as you say. As far as I'm concerned, the 5th Avenue double-lane bus way is another complete waste because of lack of enforcement, and you can see the proof from the fact that ops use the car/traffic lanes to get through. Until they 1) actually enforce bus lanes, 2) protect bike lanes, and 3) use concrete for curb extensions rather than paint, they're just creating traffic jams and (in many cases) making streets even less safe than before.

2 hours ago, R32 3838 said:

The RTS were supposed to stay for an additional year or two, They wanted the 6300s-6600s out first due to their mdbf compared to the RTS and they just finished rehabbing a good chunk of the 1998-1999 RTS. Also The shutdown was also another reason hence why we got that large XD40 and LFS order in 2018.

I still blame Clayton Guse for that BS article about ENY running RTSes through poor neighborhoods. Meanwhile the M66/M72, probably the highest-income routes of anywhere in the city, had exclusively RTSes, while ENY had a mixed fleet. 

Also worth mentioning that Jamaica is a heavily school year-dependent depot, too. When school's out over the summer (nearly 3 month timeline), the depot has often put 15-20 buses into storage. Only running 9-10 months out of the year is a big difference compared to 24/7 service for a fleet.

7 hours ago, xD4nn said:

Adding on to this, it looks like Jamaica took off the stickers from 7550, 7551, and 7568 and put them on the 2015 XD40 loans.

The stickers don't come off and go back on. They're single-use adhesive, afterwards they fall off. But it's possible they removed them from some buses and put new stickers on others.

55 minutes ago, Kingsbridgeviewer382 said:

They received 9586-89 (And Orion 4692 from MHV) when they sent some XD’s to Jamaica.

I only saw up to 9588 noted on here, but checks out.

Think I saw 9589 on the M55 today. That would finish off the high number 958x buses on loan from MCH.

9 hours ago, SoSpectacular said:

Not happening until cash fares/Metrocards are fully phased out

Could be like 2025 the way we're going. They jumped the gun on that one, putting readers even on the OGs!

5 hours ago, RSMG106 said:

7596-7597, 7599, 7602, 7605, 7610, 7613: Michael J. Quill to Jamaica. 

9586-9588: Mother Clara Hale to Michael J. Quill (As Loans)

7259: Fresh Pond to Jamaica 

8168: Charleston to Casey Stengel

Is this temporary or is Quill going to give up all of the original XD40s to MV/JA?

7 hours ago, Cait Sith said:

I'm not convinced that it actually passed those 30-days, because it was still doing its testing interval after the test period.....and it was taken OOS yesterday because of propulsion problems.

Something is up.

Interesting. I noticed on Monday it wasn't running the same schedule (unless the road went to shit in the AM, but I don't think so, since there was a 46 running the exact same interval), so assumed it had cleared for a new pattern.

What is the new schedule for the R211 now that it cleared the 30-day test and runs a different service pattern?

If $2.75 constituted felony theft, laws would mean nothing.

On 3/27/2023 at 12:55 AM, UTC Bus Roster said:

I'm guessing that these moves won't take place until April 2 for the new pick. Am I correct?

This would be bizarre to have straight diesels and an otherwise new fleet type out of MTV instead of just sending additional LFSes over. Confused by this.

13 hours ago, Kingsbridgeviewer382 said:

That would be 7615-84, the batch that was sent to Brooklyn for the B46 and the B82 (The rest of the fleet before and afterwards have the dark blue as the base). It did take about a year or two after to give the Flatbush units the dark blue wrap, with Stengel's 6000s now in the proccess of getting the wraps on top. Also, the scheme has not stopped depots from using the SBS units on whatever routes they have so the argument of fleet flexibilty being stiffled doesn't have much legs here.

It does have legs lol – it confuses the hell out of customers when they run SBS buses on local routes. Doesn't mean they can't or don't do it, but it's not a good practice generally. It should be clear based on the initial deployment of SBS buses back in the day how strenuously dispatchers worked to avoid mixing the fleets. They've just had to throw in the towel lately.

1 minute ago, Lawrence St said:

Why is the new scheme even still being done, he’s no longer in office, go back to the cheap white and blue scheme.

I ask myself this all the time... I guess once the wheels get in motion, nobody wants to be responsible to change it. They're even doing Access-a-Rides in the scheme now, which looks completely ridiculous. 

37 minutes ago, Lawrence St said:

The SBS wraps need to be removed at this point, I can't tell how many buses I've seen with the SBS style wrap but the SBS lettering removed.

The wraps were a mistake from the start. No point reducing fleet flexibility just for some lousy branding, and the silliest of all might have been ordering the entire early batch of 75xx XD40s with SBS paint and then needing to wrap them right after. The wraps age badly, look bad, are generally just cheap. That's a problem with the Cuomo scheme overall too.

4 minutes ago, QM1to6Ave said:

What's the deal with destination signs, especially the front ones, that blink on and off constantly? And I mean totally turn off, then back on again, over and over, rather than just staying on. Is this a glitch or a setting? It's incredibly annoying, and I've seen it across different types/models of destination signs, including brand new ones on Prevosts

This has been an issue on the SBS buses for some years now. Once full cycle of readouts, black, then cycle again. I heard once it was an issue with B/Os putting the codes in via the farebox, but it seems like a more widespread programming problem. Makes you miss the flipdots.

19 hours ago, Calvin said:

3007 is still running. 3000 is probably out of service for a while either getting maintenance or waiting for further details to be retired or not. 

3000 was running two weeks ago, is that out now?

15 minutes ago, Lawrence St said:

Why is SIR the biggest waste of money?

Transit systems are usually measured by their farebox operating ratio, i.e. the amount that fares offset operating expenses. Almost everything in the MTA runs at a loss (Metro-North covers 60% of costs, NYCT covers 55%), but that's what taxes and state funding are for. NYCT express buses cover 34% of expenses, but the SIR has the single lowest ratio in the entire MTA network at 12% of expenses. 

7 minutes ago, checkmatechamp13 said:

It's not just wealthy people taking these routes. You have college kids and people who work at retail jobs in Manhattan who also take the express bus from Staten Island. Having lived out on Staten Island for 18 years, the ferry sucks...it's slow and infrequent and on top of that you usually have to transfer on both ends of the trip. (And the NYC ferry isn't much better...it's faster but it's even less frequent than the main ferry and doesn't accept free transfers)

It's true, but I just mentioned that as an example of some of the people receiving the subsidies. The fact is that express bus riders are, by and large, better-off than local bus riders. The average income of local bus riders is $28k a year, which is far below even the average subway rider income. In a zero-sum game like the distribution of meager of transit funds, it's never been a good investment to spend so much money on express bus subsidies. Not to mention that the SIR is actually the single biggest waste of money, by the numbers, in the entire MTA system. 

4 hours ago, Via Garibaldi 8 said:

And so are the railroads - they are also heavily subsidized.  Any commuter service is going to be heavily subsidized because the turnover is lower.  

And so is the ferry service.  I know it pains you to provide anything for outer-borough residents (your disdain over the years couldn't be clearer from the comments you have made with anything related to benefitting outer-borough residents), but the majority of New Yorkers live in the outer boroughs and we pay taxes just like you do.  I could think of a number of things that benefit Manhattanites that other New Yorkers subsidize.  

The ferry service is a total waste of money that should have been canceled yesterday. But the ferry service is actually even less subsidized than express buses. As usual, spare me the histrionics about outer borough prejudice. The very best thing we could do for outer borough residents is invest in local bus and subway service (both should be more frequent, and free buses are worth considering), which would be more possible if we weren't subsidizing express bus riders to the tune of $11.79 a ride. The railroads aren't even a relevant comparison; Metro-North subsidies are $5.62 per rider. Again, no emotion here, just the facts. Invest in local buses and subways, ideally even new transit construction, make life better for people in transit deserts, don't waste money on cheap fares for Tottenville bankers taking the express bus to the city. 

4 hours ago, Lawrence St said:

The ones that duplicate the subway or railroad, yes.

They lose money on the entire express bus network by a dramatic amount – again, the number is $11.79 per rider. The ones that don't duplicate the subway are the only reason it isn't a total blowout. 

19 hours ago, GreatOne2k said:

Every bus EXCEPT express buses would be free (Local, Limited, Select). Express Buses seem to be left out of everything (discounts, frequency increases), even commuter rail is cheaper with CityTicket.

Express buses are subsidized to all hell already. The MTA loses a ton of money on nearly every express bus they run but they do it as a service to the public. No need to make them free. 

Let's take a pause here. DOT changing the speed limit from 30mph to 25mph (have you ever seen Midtown traffic moving at 30mph, or an NYC bus even hit 30mph in Manhattan?) and adding bus lanes and bike lanes is not what slowed down our streets.

What slowed down our streets is the massive, unchecked, and unprecedented explosion of for-hire vehicles (Uber, Lyft) that have been allowed to completely throttle all major thoroughfares with no serious curtailment in years. In 2011, there were 40,000 licensed FHVs. By 2018, there were 103,000. It's only gone up. Most estimates have roughly 1/3 of all Manhattan traffic as FHVs. This has been a complete failure of city and state government who rolled over completely when Uber came to town and we've all been paying the price since.

The slowdown is a result of the additional cars and congestion, not the programs to improve turning visibility, separate bus and bike lanes, etc. If anything, traffic signal priority and other DOT initiatives have helped buses, not hurt them. But these are small battles won in a losing war. Nothing will change until the FHVs are limited, and unfortunately, people have gotten used to the (incredibly irresponsible environmentally) idea of simply Ubering everywhere.

Also, one point that people never note is that Ubers and Lyfts show up outside a building and double park for however long it takes for a passenger to arrive. This is miles worse than what taxis would do, which was pull over usually near a street corner or break in parked cars, and quickly unload for 5-10 seconds. Now it's normal for an Uber to sit for 1-3 minutes blocking a full lane of traffic. Leaving aside the sheer quantity of cars, meaningful regulation of Ubers and Lyfts would start with that practice.

1 hour ago, FLX9304 said:

The reason they don’t send their LFS HEVs because the other depots have them already. Why send a same design bus to a different depot for trippers or loans when one depot has a different model to send? That’s been a practice that’s been happening since the late 1970s 

Huh?