Can camera enforcement speed up New York's sluggish buses?

NEW YORK — When the newly minted president of New York City Transit Richard Davey set out to personally ticket vehicles blocking Manhattan’s perpetually choked 42nd Street bus lane, he had no shortage of targets.

On a recent August day, Davey took a small pool of reporters along to demonstrate the agency’s commitment to speeding up one of the city’s slowest buses, scribbling off four tickets for commercial vans clogging the arterial busway during an hour-long patrol.

Then, during his own planned outing, Davey came across a New York City Transit vehicle parked in the M42 bus lane, with the driver nowhere to be found.

“We have to remind our own people — and its Transit, it's some of our other [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] brethren, as well — to remind them that this is not a luxury,” Davey said, adding that the parked vehicle was “not acceptable” outside of an emergency. He made a phone call to report the issue, but the vehicle remained parked as reporters continued on their way. The employee was on the job responding to a train with activated brakes and instructed on prohibited parking locations, an MTA spokesperson said after the incident.

The tableau perfectly demonstrates NYCT’s uphill battle as it endeavors to curtail a practice so ingrained in New York drivers that its own employees cannot help themselves.

Despite New York’s 140 miles of dedicated bus lanes, other large U.S. cities put it to shame when it comes to average bus speed. Now, after years of political gridlock and declining MTA revenue, city and state authorities are trying to lure riders back to the country’s largest bus system by adding hundreds of new cameras to one of the nation's few automated enforcement programs.

Life in the slow lane

The M42 bus’ manifold roadblocks show how spectacularly the city’s bus lanes can backfire.

The bus runs on its own stretch of red paint through the heart of Broadway, bridging the roughly 2-mile gap between Manhattan’s East and West sides, where it’s used on average by nearly 7,000 people every single day.

Yet it’s still among the city’s slowest bus routes, crawling along at roughly 5.5 miles per hour on average this year — according to data from the MTA. That’s well below the system-wide average of 8 miles per hour, which still ranks behind other major cities that record bus speeds of at least 10 miles per hour.

The disparity shows how painting new bus lanes — often the culmination of years of public pushback and ensuing lawsuits — is only the first step toward improving bus service for the 312 million people who relied on it last year.

Despite having dedicated access, vehicles parked in bus lanes continue to mar the city’s efforts to dramatically improve speeds and service reliability.

During a 20-minute ride along the entire 42nd Street bus lane on a Thursday afternoon in August, POLITICO counted 11 vehicles idling or parked in the busway — including a UPS truck, taxis and SUVs and a commercial delivery van. One car used the bus lane to cut ahead of the gridlock traffic in Times Square, temporarily blocking access as it attempted to merge back into the crowded lane.

An existential problem

Amid low ridership and sagging revenue, transit officials see an urgent need to improve service and win back riders.

The people movers are essential to New York’s economic recovery — the bus system is the largest in the United States, with close to 6,000 vehicles crisscrossing the five boroughs every day. But service in many corners of the city remains subpar.

Bus riders said wait times are the top issue needing improvement in a June MTA customer survey, where more than 20 percent of respondents said shorter weekday wait times would encourage them to ride more often.

“New York has the most bus riders and the slowest buses in the United States,” said Danny Pearlstein, the policy and communications director for the public-transit advocacy group Riders Alliance. “It’s an immense shame.”

Now, transportation leaders are pledging a larger crackdown on the issue.

Mayor Eric Adams recently focused on bus speeds in his first Transit Improvement Summit, a quarterly conclave designed to “foster collaboration” to improve public transit service. While the state-controlled MTA operates the bus system through NYCT, the city ultimately has jurisdiction over its streets, requiring multiple agencies to oversee the sprawling network of dedicated bus lanes.

That kind of bureaucratic maneuvering has not always played out smoothly.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio once lugged out a giant check at a press conference to accuse the MTA of dragging its feet on the state’s congestion pricing plan. Sarah Feinberg, the interim head of New York City Transit in the early days of the pandemic, repeatedly criticized de Blasio for not increasing a police presence in the subway system. Fingerpointing among state and city leaders over key transit issues was a common feature of the former Cuomo and de Blasio administrations.

Top transit officials under Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul are now pledging to play nice, starting with the bus network.

“This is a new era of city-MTA collaboration that will speed up buses, make the subways safer and more reliable, and prioritize equity and accessibility in mass transit,” MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber said in a press release after Adams’ 45-minute summit.

Eyes on enforcement

But don’t expect NYCT president Davey to pound the pavement writing tickets. Going forward, MTA officials are leaning on bus-mounted cameras and automated enforcement to keep lanes clear.

After Adams’ summit, city officials pledged to install more than 50 cameras along bus lanes, bringing the total to 100. Meanwhile, the MTA recently awarded a contract to California tech startup Hayden AI to mount 300 more cameras on buses — bringing its automated enforcement program to 473 buses by the end of this year. Officials want to hit 1,000 bus cameras by 2023, Davey said. The MTA couldn’t immediately say whether the M42 would be among them.

It’s still a small pilot, but it’s one of the few automated enforcement programs to exist in the United States. California recently passed legislation that will allow public transit operators to install forward-facing cameras on buses. There’s also a push in Chicago to resurrect a surveillance system for traffic violations, which it piloted two decades earlier.

The MTA and city DOT first rolled out an automated enforcement program in 2012 along one bus route in Manhattan. It has since expanded to seven routes, with plans to cover 13 total routes across the five boroughs by the end of the year.

Cameras along bus lanes and on the buses themselves capture the license plates of any vehicles in an enforced busway. If cameras capture the same plate in the same location at least five minutes apart, the driver could be fined. Motorists usually receive a warning — then face a $50 ticket for subsequent violations.

Last year, the city and state's fixed cameras captured more than 551,000 violations for blocking bus lanes, and its bus-mounted cameras issued over 51,000 tickets to violators. That’s much higher than what patrol units catch on foot — the New York Police Department issued roughly 12,800 bus lane violations last year, according to NYPD data.

“Enforcement really needs to be automated. With all the other priorities that law enforcement officers have, buses need their own system,” said Pearlstein, of the Riders Alliance.

The tickets have an impact. Less than 20 percent of drivers who are issued a bus lane violation go on to commit another, according to the MTA, which started tracking the data in 2019 when it began mounting cameras on buses. Only 8 percent of motorists have gone on to commit more than two violations.

Davey said commercial vehicles are the “frequent flyers” clogging up bus lanes and that many commercial companies have factored in the cost of a ticket into their business model.

But most cities don’t use cameras the way major European transit systems do, given pushback from drivers can make it difficult to sway Legislatures in more car-centric areas, said Ashley Pryce, a program manager at TransitCenter, a public transit advocacy nonprofit.

“It’s not common,” Pryce said. “It really isn’t up and running in that many places.”

Parochial interests have prevented automated enforcement from growing in the United States. Bus routes can span several local jurisdictions, creating more opportunities for political pushback.

“That was, sometimes, the tension in Boston,” Davey said.

New York’s program has its short fallings. The city can’t issue violations for offenses captured outside the bus lanes, even if they’re caught on camera. Davey said “double parking” next to the bus lane is “notoriously a challenge” to bus speeds, but doesn’t currently fall under the program’s purview.

“What we want to do — and what we asked Albany to do, and I expect we'll be asking Albany the next legislative session to do — is allow us to ticket some other traffic violations that also slow down our buses,” Davey said, pointing to offenses like double parking, illegal U-Turns and running red lights.

The city is on the hook to add 150 miles of dedicated bus lanes over the next five years, under a Streets Master Plan law the City Council passed in 2019. Adams has pledged to install 20 miles this year — enough to service 327,000 passengers. Meanwhile, the MTA is redesigning its bus routes to improve speed and reliability, beginning in Staten Island and the Bronx.

Providing the dedicated space for buses has a notable impact on speed, though expansion efforts have moved in fits and starts.

The addition of the 14th Street busway — a half-mile stretch of red paint spanning half a mile across the width of lower Manhattan — increased speeds as much as 24 percent and caused ridership to surge by 30 percent. And while the M42 still suffers from below-average speeds, it’s notably faster than the average speed it recorded before the lane was installed — 3.2 miles per hour.

But short of physically separating the busways from cars, automated enforcement will be key to ensuring the city’s lanes work as intended and move the needle beyond a 2-mile-per-hour bump.

“Monitoring the bus lanes and enforcing the bus lanes is a huge one,” Pryce said. “The [city] has put out a really ambitious program over the last few years — and it’s exciting they’re putting in lots of lanes — but the lanes are only as good as they are with enforcement.”