Evaluating the Bronx bus redesign
New York City’s buses are among the slowest in the country. Slow and unreliable transit places a burden on residents who rely on the bus to get around. The worst routes can be slower than walking. This is an especially salient problem in the Bronx where many residents, frequently working-class and Black or Brown, do not live near a subway station.
Declining performance and ridership in the 2010s led to calls for reform. The MTA began studying ways to redesign the bus systems in each borough. In October 2019, the first redesign process began in the Bronx.
The redesign sought to make buses faster and more reliable. Straighter routes with fewer twists and turns would travel faster and minimize the exposure to unpredictable traffic conditions when turning at intersections. More frequent service would be concentrated on major corridors, reducing wait times. Controversially, it also featured wider spacing between stops. New York’s buses stop far more frequently than what international best practices call for. Stopping too often slows down the bus and introduces unpredictability in the schedule. Yet some Bronx residents objected to the longer walks to the nearest stop, particularly for seniors and people with disabilities.
While the design and public outreach process was delayed due to the pandemic, the new Bronx bus network was implemented at the end of June 2022. Has the experience improved for riders?
The MTA publishes what it calls “customer focused journey metrics” for its buses and subways. These metrics are based on industry best practices that attempt to best measure delays that passengers experience.
Using GPS trackers on buses and data from MetroCard and OMNY payments, the MTA calculates three metrics for each route:
Additional Bus Stop Time, or the delay that passengers experience at the bus stop.
Additional Travel Time, or the delay that passengers experience while the bus is moving compared to the scheduled travel time.
Customer Journey Time Performance, or the proportion of passengers who complete their trip within 5 minutes of the scheduled time.
Importantly, the MTA’s metrics account for time spent waiting for the bus as well as time spent riding — a realistic assessment of how long a transit trip actually takes. Both reliability and speed are captured.
Does the Bronx have better buses now? Let’s dig into the performance data using R. Looking just at Bronx local, limited, and Select Bus Service routes (Express routes charge a different fare and usually only run during peak periods), we can assess the impact of the bus redesign. We are most interested in performance in September 2019 (right before the redesign process began), May 2022 (the last month before the redesign was implemented), and September 2022 (the latest month after the redesign for which we have data). Although COVID greatly affected transit in 2020, traffic congestion has returned to pre-pandemic levels. Thus we assume that traffic conditions between 2019 and 2022 are comparable. Moreover, we aren’t assessing the impact on ridership, just performance for those who do ride the bus.
Broken down by peak and off-peak travel, we see that Customer Journey Time Performance has improved since 2019. More passengers are getting where they need to go on time. However, the impact of the redesign is at best unclear.
An interesting trend is that the performance gap between peak off-peak has closed. Further study might examine local traffic patterns in the Bronx and how they might have actually changed due to the pandemic.
We also want to address the controversial stop consolidations. MTA staff have argued that fewer stops will speed up the buses. Even if passengers might have to walk more, they would now be walking to faster and more frequent service. Overall trip times would still be consistently shorter.
Let’s see what percentage of the total delay was due to Additional Travel Time. We can see that travel delays played a smaller role in 2022 compared to 2019. If the faster buses were working as intended, we’d expect any remaining delay to be dominated by time waiting at the stop. Again, there is not a huge different before and after the redesign. It is hard to argue that the redesign has achieved its purposes of moving passengers faster and more reliably.
Transit analyst Alon Levy at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management argues that the Bronx redesign did not go far enough in reducing stops and focusing bus service onto high-frequency corridors. Perhaps after seeing the lackluster early results of the redesign, there is good data to back their argument.
There are many other factors that could confound our analysis. Perhaps not enough time has passed since the redesign for us to gather enough data and for passengers to adjust to the new network. Moreover, travel patterns and traffic congestion vary seasonally based on factors like weather, school schedules, and construction work. Comparing May to September may not be an apples-to-apples comparison. Finally, the redesign was not the only improvement to Bronx buses during our study period. The city has also added new bus lanes and give priority to buses at traffic signals, shielding buses from the effects of traffic. Much of the improvement between 2019 and 2022 could be explained by these measures.
Bronx residents deserve buses they can depend on. While cost-neutral redesigns can help marginally, they need far greater investment to run more buses and build dedicated infrastructure to keep them out of traffic congestion.
Data and code: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bt4q7wp4a8q19uz/AAA3X3RDqqpRRDiJHXAG10hya?dl=0
Graphs created in Google Sheets and edited in Canva: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JTbytVxNCQDgAYodZPC4Be-7H7MW2eTIztGheYxkTy0/edit#gid=0