Manhattan gets new 96th St. bus lane in effort to speed up crosstown travel
"Traffic on 96th St. leaves buses traveling an average of just 4 mph," Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said, touting the need for the new bus lane. "You can walk faster than [that]."
Crosstown commuters can expect a quicker ride across upper Manhattan after the NYC Department of Transportation opened a new bus-only lane along 96th St. Tuesday.
“Traffic on 96th St. leaves buses traveling an average of just 4 mph,” Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez told reporters at a press conference on the Upper East Side. “Think about that — 4 mph. You can walk faster than a bus when it is going that slow.”
The 1.7 miles of new bus lane are part of a package of improvements that also includes longer bus stops, meant to allow buses from both lines that serve the street — the M96 and the M106 — to make stops simultaneously.
According to the MTA — which runs the city’s bus system — roughly 15,500 people ride a bus along 96th St. each weekday.
“I grew up on the West Side in the 1970s, and I rode this bus,” MTA Chairman Janno Lieber said. “It was slow — it was really slow. And it’s still really slow.”
The new lanes — known as “offset” bus lanes — replace one lane of ordinary car traffic in each direction while maintaining curb space for parking.
“Bus lanes actually work,” Lieber added. “When there are 50 or 60 people on a bus, and there’s one person in a car, I’m asking all of us to get in touch with the fact that we’ve got to prioritize the bus.”
According to the DOT, a similar bus lane on Lexington Ave. has sped up travel by 19%, and the 21st St. bus lane in Queens has sped up travel by 10%.
But, as previously reported by the Daily News, the DOT has regularly fallen behind the city’s benchmarks for bus lane construction.
As reported by Streetsblog earlier this year, the Adams administration has proposed just 7 miles of new bus lanes in 2024, including the 96th St. project — well short of the 30 miles required of it by the City Council’s “streets master plan.”
“We always want more,” Rodriguez said Tuesday when asked why the city has fallen short of its own goal. “We are doing a great job — no other city in this nation is able to do the number of bus lanes that we do.”
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