What Happened to the Bus Lanes New Yorkers Were Promised?

This is Street Wars, a weekly series on the battle for space on New York’s streets and sidewalks.

Buses have little of the subway’s sex appeal. In New York City, their riders lean working class and older. A transit advocacy group gives out decidedly unglamorous “Schleppie” and “Pokey” awards to the city’s slowest and most unreliable buses. It has many to choose from.

But in the age of bloated subway construction costs, subway extensions are almost never built here. And transit experts consider improving bus speeds low-hanging fruit in the effort to make New York City, which has the nation’s largest bus system, a more navigable (and tolerable) place to live.

And yet, in the jurisdictional tangle that is the city, building better bus routes requires the cooperation of the mayor, whose Transportation Department controls its streets, and the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees its buses.

In an indication that all is not well between the two, the departing president of New York City Transit, which operates the subway and buses for the M.T.A., delivered a broadside against the administration of Mayor Eric Adams.

The president, Richard Davey, in his final week on the job in June, sent a letter to Mr. Adams’s transportation commissioner, declaring that his agency was “very disappointed” with the administration’s decision last year to water down a proposal to speed up buses in a busy section of the Bronx. The weakened version, he wrote, has instead done next to nothing. The New York Times acquired the letter through a Freedom of Information Law request, and it was first reported by Streetsblog.