Streetsblog New York City

Bus bulbs will improve bus service and the pedestrian experience along Nostrand Avenue as part of the new SBS service. Image: NYC DOT/MTA.

With Select Bus Service speeding trips and boosting ridership on Fordham Road and First and Second Avenue, the next route slated for an upgrade is Brooklyn’s Nostrand Avenue. The B44 bus runs over nine miles from the Williamsburg Bridge to Sheepshead Bay. It attracts 41,000 riders a day, making it the seventh busiest route in the city, despite running at an average speed or seven or eight miles per hour and having the least reliable service in the borough. Last night, the Department of Transportation and MTA held an open house to present an updated design for the corridor [PDF], one of the final revisions before construction begins next year.

Nostrand Avenue SBS will, as in the Bronx and Manhattan, create dedicated bus lanes enforced by automated cameras and use high-capacity buses and off-board fare payment. With fewer stops, the bus will also spend more time in motion and less time starting and stopping.

The Nostrand project will add another new feature: bus bulbs. By extending the sidewalk out to the street, bus bulbs mean that drivers don’t have to pull to the curb and back into the lane, resulting in a smoother and speedier ride. A raised curb means more level boarding onto the bus, advantageous for the elderly and the mobility-impaired. The extra space also means that the bus stop won’t crowd the sidewalk.

DOT and the MTA made a few revisions to the plan under the new design. A station was added at Avenue D/Newkirk Avenue in response to community requests. Bus lanes were removed on Bedford Avenue between Fulton and DeKalb — the agencies said bus speeds were already high there but the bus lane would have interfered with the bike lane — but lanes were added to a congested section of Nostrand between Farragut Road and Avenue I.

In order to preserve the same number of motor vehicle lanes during rush hour, where a bus lane is being installed DOT proposes turning the left parking lane into a through lane during the morning and evening peaks. This shouldn’t have too much of an impact on local merchants. At Nostrand and Empire Boulevard, only 14 percent of shoppers had driven to the area (and not all had parked on Nostrand). Further south, at Glenwood Road, only 13 percent of shoppers had arrived in a car.

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With results like these, it’s hard to understand why the city isn’t rushing to complete the redesign of First and Second Avenue all the way up to 125th Street. According to DOT’s presentation to its community advisory council Wednesday night, both the bus improvements, which go the length of the corridor, and the protected bike lanes, which run from Houston to 34th, are improving safety and mobility for all New Yorkers. Here are the highlights:

• The new Select Bus Service is 15 percent faster than the old limited was. It goes 11 percent faster while moving, thanks to dedicated lanes enforced with cameras, and spends 36 percent less time at stops thanks to off-board fare payment.
• Those faster speeds mean that 4,000 more people ride the M15 every day, from a previous base of a bit more than 50,000 daily riders. That increase is even more impressive in the context of the overall decline in Manhattan bus ridership by 5 percent over the same period.
• Where the bike lane and pedestrian refuge islands were installed, the street is much safer. Injuries declined by 8.3 percent compared to an average of the three previous years.
• Riders are flocking to the new protected lanes. On First Avenue, there were more riders counted in December, January, and February with the lanes than in June without them. From June 2010 to April 2011, the count rose by 153 percent. On Second, where the base of riders was higher to start, the number of cyclists rose by 55 percent from June to April.
• All of this came without imposing a cost on motorists. Based on taxi data, traffic appears to actually be moving faster on Second Avenue than before the redesign, and at about the same speed on First. Traffic volumes, too, are basically the same: a little higher in some locations, a little lower elsewhere.

M15 riders can expect an even easier ride moving forward. Bus bulbs will be installed over the next two years eliminating the need for bus drivers to pull over to pick up passengers, and starting this fall, transit signal priority will give buses a few extra seconds of green below Houston.

Between Ninth Avenue and Third Avenue, the proposal for 34th Street calls for a curbside bus lane on one side of the street, and an off-set bus lane with expanded pedestrian space and loading zones on the other side of the street. Image: NYC DOT

“Consensus” and “process” were the buzzwords last night when NYC DOT presented its new concept for improving transit on 34th Street [PDF]. Gone was the plan for New York’s first physically separated busway — scuttled by local property owners and residents seeking drive-up curbside access. In its place was a package very similar to Select Bus Service on the East Side of Manhattan: bus lanes offset from the curb, off-board fare collection, camera enforcement, and bus bulbs to speed boarding and relieve sidewalk crowding.

The average bus speed on 34th Street is 4.5 mph, and DOT’s preliminary estimates suggest these improvements could improve speeds 15 to 25 percent.

City Council Member Dan Garodnick supplied one of the evening’s most apt remarks, calling the plan “a lot more modest than some earlier ideas, and I believe it is extremely promising.” (His East Side colleague on the Council, Rosie Mendez, also seemed to capture the spirit of the moment when she handed the mic back to transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and quipped, “There are some potholes that we need to cover up. I hit them on the way here.”)

The new plan, which DOT expects to hone and present in more detail this fall, may not be the groundbreaking project originally envisioned, but it still has a lot going for it. In addition to improving bus speeds, the project would add 18,000 square feet of pedestrian space to some of the most crowded sidewalks in the city. It also drastically increases the number of legal mid-day loading spaces along the corridor, from 55 to 355.

The details are still getting hashed out, but the general concept for 34th Street now looks like this:

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A Soho shopper takes a break on a new bench between the sidewalk and the bus bulb. Construction's still underway on this block. Photo: Paco Abraham

A couple weeks ago, we showed how the bus bulbs on Lower Broadway were being integrated with the sidewalk next to them. For drainage reasons, a small gap and a large fence had separated the two pedestrian spaces, but DOT capped the gap with a small grate and replaced the fence with benches. That work's now largely complete and Streetsblog reader Dave "Paco" Abraham sent along these pics of Soho pedestrians taking advantage of their new public space. There's a lot more breathing room on a stretch of sidewalk that's often packed and it looks like people appreciate it. 

At this time of day, bench users didn't seem to be waiting for the bus. Photo: Paco Abraham.

This'll be our last post for the day, so see you on Tuesday and have a great Fourth of July.

With drainage grates being installed, Broadway's bus bulbs can lose their fences. All images: Clarence Eckerson.

But the bus bulbs along Lower Broadway haven't been living up to their full potential. In order to allow water to flow normally into drains, DOT had to leave a gap between the old sidewalk and the new bus bulb. Then they had to put up a fence along the sidewalk side of the bus bulb, presumably so no one would fall into the gap. What that left you with was an island of cement cut off from the busy sidewalks of SoHo, a waste of pedestrian space. 

It looks like that's a thing of the past, however. By installing a grate over the gutter, rain can fall where it needs to and pedestrians can safely cross between sidewalk and sidewalk extension. That means the fences are coming down and benches are going up.

Benches ready to be installed on wider Broadway sidewalks.

Moving uptown, we've written about the disappointing plans for the Second Avenue, which will switch from a protected lane to a curbside lane between 14th and 23rd Streets. But that doesn't make it any less exciting to see the protected portion get striped. Here's your newest protected lane: 

A story about the new bus bulbs on Lower Broadway in the New York Times highlights the role that enforcement will have to play if DOT's plan to make the boulevard more bus-friendly is to work. (Bus Rapid Transit, of course, will face similar issues when it rolls out later this year.) The story points out that Broadway's current bus lane -- bus bulbs or no -- is often blocked by double-parked delivery and placarded vehicles.

Note that at least one of the bus drivers quoted seems to see the virtues of eliminating cars entirely from this heavily trafficked area: 

David Woloch, a deputy transportation commissioner for the city, said that by early July the city will mark the lane that runs beside the bus bulbs as a bus-only lane, from Houston Street to Ann and Vesey Streets. And, he said, the Police Department will enforce the bus-only restriction by ticketing cars that encroach on the lane.

Bus drivers were skeptical.

"I think it's a waste," the driver of the M1 bus that was blocked by the cab and the double-parked truck said of the bus bulbs. He would not give his name because he said he did not want to draw the attention of his superiors at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. "It's not going to do anything. Get rid of the cars and that'll do something."

On another day this week, a driver on another M1 bus was also skeptical. He said that the police do not do enough to enforce bus lanes elsewhere in the city. "That's never worked," said the driver, who also asked that his name not be used. "It doesn't work on Madison. It doesn't work on Fifth Avenue because people park in the lane. Or cabs drop off in the lane."

Paul J. Browne, a deputy police commissioner, said 1,862 tickets were issued last year to drivers for using a bus lane. In addition, 4,205 tickets were issued for parking in a bus lane and 2,669 tickets were issued for parking at a bus stop.

That works out to just under 24 tickets a day in the three categories of tickets combined. He said the tickets were primarily issued in Manhattan.

So far this year, he said, 3,537 tickets have been issued for bus lane or bus stop violations.

"It may be a perception among some drivers, but in fact there is enforcement," Mr. Browne said of the bus drivers' complaints. "It may not be at the level they want or in an ideal world the level we want, but the fact remains we do enforce it every day."

Photo: Cary Conover for the New York Times

According to a more-than-a-little-snarky post on Curbed, the first of Lower Broadway's hotly anticipated bus bulbs has been constructed on Broadway south of Spring Street.

As Streetsblog wrote when the DOT announced the plan to construct the bulbs back in March, this is a noteworthy development for several reasons:

The benefits of bus bulbs include preventing buses from being delayed, reducing sidewalk congestion, providing space for bus shelters and other amenities, and reducing pedestrian crossing times.

In a small but very tangible way, bus bulbs may single-handedly change the pecking order on Lower Broadway by forcing other vehicles to wait behind or detour around loading and unloading buses rather than the buses having to defer to them.

Most promising, DOT appears to be taking a far more experimental approach in this particular project. Rather than allowing itself to become bogged down in complicated, expensive street engineering, it sounds like the agency will be creating the bus bulbs by putting down temporary curbs, filling them in with concrete, and just gerrymandering the drainage. The results might not look particularly pretty but advocates have, for years, been calling on DOT to show more willingness to conduct quick-and-dirty street design experiments.

And now that it's done, this one doesn't look half bad after all.

Photo via Curbed

Nope, that's not Lower Manhattan. It's an example of a "bus bulb" in Edgewater, Chicago, a neighborhood known for its thoughtful planning and pedestrian-friendly streets.

Tomorrow, the Department of Transportation will make the first public announcement of its Lower Manhattan Transit Priority Plan. We don't have all of the details but the redesign plan for Broadway south of Houston Street sounds like it is oriented around making bus service faster and more effective, providing more sidewalk space to pedestrians and bus patrons and, perhaps most significant, making the changes happen much faster, cheaper and with far less bureaucracy than usual.

Sources say the plan calls for the creation of "bus bulbs," a design in which the sidewalk is extended into the street at bus stops. Bus bulbs allow a bus to stay in its lane to pick up and discharge passengers instead of having to pull over to the curb. The benefits of bus bulbs include preventing buses from being delayed, reducing sidewalk congestion, providing space for bus shelters and other amenities, and reducing pedestrian crossing times.

In a small but very tangible way, bus bulbs may single-handedly change the pecking order on Lower Broadway by forcing other vehicles to wait behind or detour around loading and unloading buses rather than the buses having to defer to them.

Most promising, DOT appears to be taking a far more experimental approach in this particular project. Rather than allowing itself to become bogged down in complicated, expensive street engineering, it sounds like the agency will be creating the bus bulbs by putting down temporary curbs, filling them in with concrete, and just gerrymandering the drainage. The results might not look particularly pretty but advocates have, for years, been calling on DOT to show more willingness to conduct quick-and-dirty street design experiments.

The Daily News and New York Sun will have the details tomorrow morning.

And here is more information about bus bulbs than you could ever want: The Federal Transit Administration's Evaluation of Bus Bulbs (PDF).

Photo: Aaron Naparstek, July 2006