Transcript of Allan Rosen's Speech on the Brooklyn Bus Network Redesign

Brooklyn Bus Network Redesign. Map by MTA.

On May 2, 2024, Allan Rosen, former director of MTA NYCT Bus Planning who now serves on Passengers United's Board of Directors, spoke about the Brooklyn Bus Network Redesign at a meeting by Our Communities Count, a coalition of grassroots groups, at the Emmanuel Baptist Church in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

Good Evening. I have been retired from the MTA for nearly 19 years and do not represent the MTA and am not speaking on their behalf. It is imperative we have a bus system that is both efficient and effective in transporting people. Unfortunately, that is not the case today. There are many service gaps, also known as transportation deserts, and bus routes that are outdated or indirect requiring unnecessary transfers and extra fares.

​Service reliability is also a big problem and sometimes you feel like you are playing Russian Roulette. Some days the system works fine; other days you seem to wait forever. The MTA recognizes all this. So after years of mostly incremental changes they have undertaken a necessary redesign of the entire bus network throughout the city, by borough. They are now finalizing Queens and produced the first draft for Brooklyn which has received very negative criticism, as did the first draft for Queens. They claim they are trying to make the system better. Unfortunately, they are very misguided which I will explain.

Their goals are not our goals as passengers. They are mainly concerned with what the system costs to operate and care less about how passengers are served. Rather than caring about how long your trip takes, they are instead obsessed with bus speeds. Also, the redesigns are not filling service gaps.

I know something about buses because I spent my entire career, over three decades, fighting for better bus service after getting my Masters from Columbia in Urban Planning and the last ten years writing about it. In 1981 and 1982, I briefly directed the MTA’s first attempt at updating the Brooklyn bus network to reflect the needs of its passengers. 

I was also Director of Bus Planning for the MTA. Previously, I was responsible for changing almost a dozen bus routes in Southern Brooklyn in 1978, including the B1 which is now one of the most successful routes in the borough. I worked for the Department of City Planning at that time, and in fact the MTA had to be sued to make those changes because the MTA never had interest on their own to improve the bus system for their passengers.

The MTA’s only interest is to ensure public safety and to keep costs manageable, probably by reducing them. That doesn’t mean no one at the MTA doesn’t want to do the right thing. They just are not in positions where they have the power to improve the bus system.

The MTA’s supposed outreach for the redesign is merely a charade to give the appearance of public involvement. The purpose of this involvement is to remove the most objectionable parts of their plan to make it politically palatable for the plan to come to fruition, and giving the illusion they are making the system more passenger friendly. You should still make comments on their website regarding what you think of their plan.

How do we know public involvement is a charade?

For one thing, although the initial Brooklyn plan was released over 15 months ago, there have not been any notices on the buses before or after the release of this plan to alert passengers. The exception was one week when handouts were placed in the take one containers on the buses notifying passengers of a website to go to for further information. Who would even know to look there?

When, after three years, the MTA finally decided to announce the Queens Network Redesign on the digital displays on Brooklyn buses, they just as easily could have mentioned the ongoing Brooklyn study, but decided not to. The result is that anyone without computer access has been completely left out of the process and that is mostly seniors who use buses a lot and are affected the most.

Their Zoom meetings attracted only 20 to 50 people at each session which were broken into groups of ten to limit the discussion that everyone could hear. Their so called pop-up sessions consisted of two employees wearing buttons saying “Ask me about the Bus Redesign” hiding in subway stations away from heavily trafficked areas.

The MTA and most elected officials refuse to hold open forums such as this one where one can freely discuss the proposals. I called each one multiple times, asking them to hold such a forum. The MTA outreach has reached less than one hundredth of one percent of the bus riders. When they do publicize the study a week before the public hearing probably in 2026, it will be too late to make any changes. The time to act is now.

The worst feature of the plan is the removal of one third of the bus stops, over 1,000 of them in Brooklyn alone, which is why I started a petition on Change.org, which now has nearly 3,200 signatures. In order to obfuscate the changes, the MTA doesn’t mention the number of stops to be eliminated. You have to count them up individually. Nor do they tell you the walk to the closest bus could be as far as 3/4 of a mile. They don’t even call it bus stop elimination or removal, but bus stop balancing, just to confuse you. Are bus stops unbalanced today?

• Rerouting the B52 off Greene and the B26 off Putnam also mean longer walks. 
• B41 Flatbush Avenue service north of Empire Blvd will be cut in half despite Downtown Brooklyn being the neighborhood growing the fastest.
• Overnight B25 service between Water Street and Franklin Ave would be eliminated being replaced by a B26 extension. Who wants to change buses at 2 in the morning when they don’t have to do that now? No one. 
• With the opening of Wegmans, the decision to move the B57 from Flushing to Park Avenue is also questionable.
• Flipping the northern termini of the B48 and B69 also means reduced service in Williamsburg and Greenpoint since the B69 generally runs less frequently than the B48.
• The B57 will no longer serve Smith and Court Street so it can be further extended into Queens without showing that any demand exists for such an extension. Smith and Court Streets will be served by the new B27 which is being set up to fail with infrequent service and few destinations. 
• The B67 will no longer serve the Navy Yard.

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To get all this information from the MTA website, you would have to sift through 400 pages. There are no summaries of the proposals by neighborhood to make the plan more understandable. Although some parts of the borough will receive increases in service, this area  isn’t one of them. I don’t see a single improvement here as well as for the area I live in, only longer walks and longer trips.

The MTA document, available only on the internet, is intentionally misleading and doesn’t explain the reasons for any of the proposed changes or why alternative plans were eliminated.  Nowhere do they talk about disadvantages. Everything that is written is disguised as an improvement.

The plan implies the MTA knows what’s best for you because they are the experts. Nowhere do they even show how trips will be quicker or if you will need fewer connections. The opposite is usually true. They need to show how their plan helps more than it hurts, which they fail to do. If the MTA really knows what is best, why are they undoing many of their changes of the last 25 years? They are keeping the bulk of the changes I had made nearly 50 years ago. 

The first misconception the MTA perpetuates is that buses are slow and eliminating bus stops and adding bus lanes will make them faster. The truth is buses are not slow when compared to cars which average 9 mph on city streets. Brooklyn buses average about 7.2 mph on city streets. It stands to reason that buses have to go a little slower than cars because they must make more stops. So the entire premise for eliminating bus stops is incorrect. Bus lanes are only necessary where bus service is very frequent, not on every street with bus service.

The second misconception is the MTA assumes each eliminated bus stop saves 20 seconds on the average. That number is inflated because they fail to consider increased dwell time at the remaining stops and that buses skip infrequently used stops most of the time if no one is getting on or off, and virtually no time is saved by eliminating those bus stops. The MTA only considers acceleration and deceleration in their time savings calculations which are not the only factors.

The MTA pretends bus speeds are a problem when the biggest problem is reliability which the redesigns do nothing about. Reliability is improved by increasing supervision, having more buses make shorter trips and reducing double parking mostly by trucks. A handful of supervisors for the entire city cannot guarantee reliability for the MTA’s over 6,000 buses.

A state law I proposed to the MTA requiring non-emergency vehicles to give the right-of-way to buses leaving bus stops would save buses more time than eliminating thousands of bus stops which causes unnecessary inconvenience to bus riders. They like the idea, but still want to eliminate bus stops.

The accepted domestic walking guideline to a local bus is 1/4 mile. Increasing the distance between bus stops to 1/4 mile, as proposed, flagrantly violates this standard since we know most people do not live at a bus stop or only 1/8 of a mile from one. They usually live up to 1/4 mile from a bus stop. Increasing bus stop spacing increases the present 1/4 mile walk to 1/2 or 3/4 mile at each end of your trip. That is unacceptable, especially for those with mobility problems.

​The average local bus trip is 2.3 miles. So who would want to walk up to a mile and a half just to ride a bus a little over 2 miles? Few if any. They will make the trip another way or not at all. We shouldn’t be using European bus stop spacing standards as the MTA proposes instead of the US standards we are currently using.

The Redesign will result in less ridership causing greater service reductions in the future. After years of research I developed my own plan for Brooklyn that fills service gaps, reduces needed connections, improves reliability and will increase patronage. The MTA refuses to even discuss my plan with me, although I have a successful track record. It is also available on the Passengers United website which I invite you to peruse. If you like it better than the MTA Plan, please let everyone know, especially your elected officials. 

If eliminating bus stops saves the bus three minutes, but you now have to walk five minutes more, you still have a longer trip, and if the extra walk results in you missing your bus, your trip is now much longer. Nowhere does the MTA even mention passenger trip time. They are only obsessed with bus speeds.

So why is the MTA so insistent on eliminating so many bus stops? It’s to reduce the pay hours of its bus drivers, not to help the passengers. The MTA has refused to divulge if the Redesign results in an increase or decrease to revenue hours and miles so we could determine if the redesign results in overall service increases or decreases.

In Queens, they claim to be spending an additional $30 million per year in operating costs. They want you to assume this means added service. However using data available through open source, it has been determined that revenue hours are being decreased in Queens. So what the extra $30 million really means is that service will now be more inefficient with more buses traveling to and from depots without passengers. Is this what we want for Brooklyn? Or do we want better service?

It is imperative that we let our elected officials know we will not be fooled by the MTA’s charade to improve bus service. We cannot let the MTA destroy our bus system by believing buses operate more efficiently without passengers than with them because without passengers, they can make the trip quicker, and I have that in writing from the MTA.

I also suggest you join Passengers United, the only organization representing bus riders fighting for improved mass transit. Riders Alliance, Transportation Alternatives, the PCAC, and others, are all in bed with the MTA and support the MTA’s proposed changes. 

Also, check out my Brooklyn Bus Redesign Facebook Group and sign the petition. We have strength in numbers and need to fight for what’s right.