Queens Bus Redesign

Overview

At the Effective Transit Alliance, we have eagerly been watching MTA New York City Transit’s ongoing, borough-by-borough bus redesign project. These redesigns are an important opportunity to improve service for New York riders, as they have potential to make bus service faster, more frequent, and easier to understand. Now that New York City Transit has released the latest draft of the Queens bus redesign, we offer our analysis of the product.

Overall, the latest proposal would be a big step in the right direction. Although more could be done to straighten, consolidate, and simplify bus routings, the redesign focuses on a vital goal: speeding up bus service by both increasing the average distance between bus stops and giving buses dedicated lanes on major travel corridors. If anything, the redesign understates the benefits of the speed increases it would enable.

Unfortunately, the redesign has a serious shortcoming: service frequency. Simply put, the plan would not deliver enough frequency during off-peak hours. Out of 86 total routes, only five are planned to come every 8 minutes or better. In part, this is because the redesign splits the buses on many key corridors into slow “local” routes and fast “rush” or Select Bus Service routes, which is against the best practice of running a single service to give riders a regular, frequent flow of buses.

Make no mistake: as it stands the proposed Queens bus network would improve conditions markedly. However, with some key changes, the speed increases the plan proposes can enable even more frequent service for the same overall cost. Ultimately, we urge New York City Transit to redouble its efforts to provide the frequency of bus service that Queens residents—and all New Yorkers—need and deserve.

Frequency

By far, the biggest shortcoming of the Queens bus redesign is the small number of high-frequency routes. The borough’s population density warrants far higher frequency than the 10-15-minute frequency that other bus redesigns around the United States have aimed for. To effectively serve connecting passengers, the best practice along busy lines is for buses to arrive once every 8 minutes or less wherever practicable. In the previous draft redesign, a full 16 lines met this standard. 

Bus passengers in dense cities rely on high-frequency service. Increasing how often buses come not only shortens wait times, but makes transferring between bus routes easier and more predictable. Consider the example of the Nova Xarxa ("New Network") bus redesign in Barcelona. There, a network of radial lines was replaced by a grid of frequent buses which come every 3-8 minutes. The median time between buses decreased from 12.5 minutes to 6.3 minutes As a result, the proportion of trips that included a transfer to another bus skyrocketed from 11% to 44%, and overall ridership increased by one-fifth.

Closer to home, consider the Canadian cities of Toronto and Vancouver, both of which have long centered their transit networks on grids of high-frequency lines. In these systems, the workhorse buses of the grid come at least once every 8 minutes in the off-peak, with busier lines coming as often as every 3-5 minutes. This has resulted in successful transit systems with high ridership.

Queens needs bus lines with similarly high frequencies. With a population density of 22,000 people per square mile, Queens is the fourth densest county in the United States, behind only Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Recent bus network redesigns in less dense US cities have generally settled on a frequency of every 15 minutes as good service, and every 10 minutes or less as show-up-and-go-service. Meanwhile, both Toronto and Vancouver provide 8-minute service, even though both are less dense than Queens. While a bus every 15 minutes may suffice for many American cities, even 10-minute frequency falls short of what Queens needs. 

In the original Queens bus redesign proposal from 2019, 16 routes would have come every 8 minutes or less in the off-peak hours. In the current plan, however, only the Q1, Q10, Q26, Q27, and Q58 would come every 8 minutes or less all day. Another 31 are proposed to run every 9-12 minutes, and can be made more frequent as we detail below.

In addition to providing fewer options for riders, low frequencies make transfers prohibitively long. For instance, the Q1, which runs on Hillside Avenue and Sutphin Boulevard, would end at the JFK Cargo Area. To reach either the airport terminals or the AirTrain, passengers would have to transfer to the Q3 bus. The Q3, however, is slated to run only once every 20 minutes, a frequency that is too low to be a reliable option for either airline passengers or airport workers.

Speed and service

Three major improvements are planned to soon speed up Queens bus service. These faster speeds will not only benefit riders, but can and should be utilized to run more service at the same cost. First, the OMNY fare card system will allow all bus riders to board from any door, as Select Bus Service riders already do, reducing boarding and alighting times. Second, the redesign proposes a network of dedicated bus lanes, allowing buses full of passengers to avoid road traffic. Finally, the redesign proposes to remove around one-third of Queens’ current bus stops. While this may slightly increase walking times to stops, it will more than make up for it by speeding service.

Put together, these three improvements will have a large impact. As the researchers Eric Goldwyn and Alon Levy estimated in a recent NYU Marron Institute report proposing a similar bus redesign for Brooklyn, all-door boarding, bus lanes, and stop consolidation would raise the average speed of buses by a full 37%. And although that plan included a more extensive program of stop consolidation than the current MTA proposal, the current plan should still enable a speed increase of 20-30%.

Faster buses do not only benefit the riders on that particular trip. Since buses complete their routes faster, more overall trips can be undertaken utilizing the same equipment and the same number of bus operators. On a route that comes every 10 minutes, a uniform service increase of 25% can transform it into one that comes every 8, greatly improving the reliability of transfers and enabling shorter trips. 

If anything, there are some signs that the redesign may not take advantage of this free increase of service. New York City Transit planners say that the MTA plans buses based on a service-miles budget, rather than a service-hours budget. The dominant cost of bus service, however, is the driver’s wage, which is paid per hour, not per mile. Moreover, bus lanes and turns reduce the amount of acceleration and braking cycles that buses endure per day, which translates to reduced maintenance and fuel costs, which are the second highest cost of bus operation.

These savings mean many of the routes could be made even more frequent and thus more useful and convenient for riders. New York City Transit should capitalize on faster speeds to provide substantially higher service levels.

Dedicated bus lanes

Perhaps the most exciting part of the Queens bus redesign proposal is the plan to install dedicated bus lanes along Queens’ main surface arteries. Dedicated bus lanes make buses faster, improve trip times, and improve reliability no matter the amount of traffic on the road. If anything, the plan’s proposed bus lane rollout is not aggressive enough to give bus riders the priority that they need and deserve. Major corridors such as Broadway and the northern portion of Woodhaven Boulevard will still lack bus lanes under the current proposal.

The New York City Department of Transportation should physically separate bus lanes wherever possible. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems, wherein bus services act more like a train than a traditional bus, employ physically separate lanes extensively. Beyond physical separation, bus lane designs should follow ITDP BRT standards when possible. In particular, New York City should roll out center-running bus lanes on roadways that are more than 100 feet between building lines in order to minimize conflicts.

Bus stop spacing and quality

Although bus stops are vital parts of the transportation system, too many bus stops along a route significantly slows travel. In Queens today, many bus routes stop every ⅛ mile on average. Since every stop adds around 20-30 seconds to a bus trip, overprovision of stops has a large impact on service, reducing speed and reliability for all.

Happily, the Queens bus redesign proposes consolidating many stops in order to improve service. Although details vary by route, most of the proposed local lines will stop approximately every ¼ mile. Along an entire route, stop consolidation can boost the average travel speed by 25%, not only improving service, but circulating buses faster, decreasing waiting times overall. Thus, stop consolidation exchanges more stops for more frequent, faster, and more reliable service, improving overall convenience. Nevertheless, the distance between stops must be balanced against the increased walk time. Based on current bus usage in New York, optimal stop spacing appears to be between ¼ and ⅓ of a mile.

Longer distances between stops, as long as ⅓ of a mile, are especially useful for routes that serve an important transportation node, such as a subway station. A wider stop spacing is balanced by most riders only having to walk farther at one end of their trip. Faster travel times also counterbalance the extended dwell times at key connection points. Conversely, on routes that are expected to serve a variety of local trips, the optimum distance between bus stops is closer to ¼ mile. Given these realities, the Queens redesign’s proposed ¼ mile stop spacing is the right choice, and ought to be the standard in redesign efforts going forward.

Stop consolidation also makes it easier to improve the quality of bus stops themselves. With fewer stops, New York City Transit can install a bench and shelter at every bus stop citywide. The impact of shelter on the passenger experience can’t be overstated: a study in Minneapolis found that passengers perceived their waiting time to be 2-2.5 times longer than it actually was, whereas with a shelter, a bench, and a display indicating the arrival time of the next bus, the perceived wait was only 1.2 times the actual time. The study also found that shelter particularly improves the rider experience for women, especially in environments that are perceived as unsafe. At stops without a shelter where women felt they were unsafe, wait times were perceived to be three times as long as they actually were, as compared to only 1.5 times when waiting at a shelter.

Obviously, improving bus stops does come at a cost: based on observations from transit planners in other American cities, the cost generally ranges from $10,000 to $40,000 per stop, with the higher figures generally corresponding to stops with more infrastructure (for example, real-time arrival information) or where sidewalks needed repair. But the redesign’s proposed consolidation will help reduce the citywide cost of bus shelters and speed up the installation of these key pieces of infrastructure.

Connectivity and coverage

In addition to refining the existing network, the Queens bus redesign rationalizes routes and proposes new services. Most notably, where today every bus that goes to Jamaica terminates there, the proposal introduces three through-running routes (Q1, Q25, Q57). This involves a tradeoff between the greater reliability of shorter routes and the greater connectivity and one-seat rides offered by through-running. But the redesign incorporates other reliability improvements, and in this context, through-routes are a welcome reform.

In addition, the Q51, an entirely new route, would connect South Jamaica and Cambria Heights to the A subway line, reducing travel time and transfers to get to Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. The Q44’s extension to Fordham, a major destination, is welcome as well.

Conversely, some routes are cut. One bad example is the Q1’s change to avoid the JFK terminals and force a transfer to the Q3, which runs only every 20 minutes off-peak. The Q50 is mixed: today it connects Coop City with Flushing, and the redesign would extend it to LaGuardia but cut it from Co-op City to Pelham Bay Park.

Local-express consolidation

Today the busiest bus routes in New York City feature a complex and unusual service pattern. Often, a single corridor has both Local buses typically stopping every ⅛ mile and Limited buses stopping every ½ mile. Moreover, different buses on the same route—often carrying a similar route number—stop at different stops. Although this can allow the MTA to avoid closing a stop, it makes service both difficult to understand and less frequent than it should be.

Unfortunately, as it stands, the proposed Queens bus redesign would expand this division of services, introducing rush routes with long nonstop segments. For example, along Main Street in Flushing, the Q20 would continue running as a local service, stopping approximately every 1,000 feet, while the Q44 would run as a limited service that stops about every ½ mile. Thus, riders would choose between a Q20 that runs every 12 minutes and a Q44 that runs every 9, as opposed to enjoying a single route with a bus every 5 minutes. A combined service serving consolidated stops spaced ¼ to ⅓ mile, with every other bus continuing into the Bronx, would serve riders better than the currently proposed system.

Across Queens, the following Local-Limited pairs should be consolidated into more frequent single routes:

The main benefit of Rush routes is that during rush hour, frequencies are higher, which reduces the value of consolidation. There are large volumes of passengers who only ride at peak from outer ends to the subway. But off-peak, the need for high frequency is such that passengers would benefit even in outer ends thanks to shorter waits.

Moreover, because combining local-limited pairs means buses don’t need to pass each other, doing so makes it easier to implement BRT-standard bus lanes. The benefit of physical separation from traffic, keeping service running smoothly, is greater than that of comparatively infrequent express service.

Conclusion

The Queens bus redesign as it currently stands would measurably upgrade many New Yorkers’ bus experience. The proposed improvements, such as stop consolidation, bus lanes, and higher frequencies, stand to decrease travel times and improve reliability for travelers.

At the same time, however, it falls short of the service standard set by the world’s highest-ridership bus systems. Largely, the shortcomings stem from not doing enough to standardize service and separate buses from traffic. Implementing best practices as detailed above allows the MTA to make the most of this opportunity.