The Commute: Why We Need Better Bus Service — Part 3 Of 3

THE COMMUTE: In parts 1 and 2, we specifically discussed routing deficiencies in Brooklyn and hinted at similar deficiencies in Staten Island and Queens that are even more severe. This week, we will discuss…

Routing Problems In Borough Park And Bensonhurst Go Back To The 1940s!

There has been a need for through Fort Hamilton Parkway and 13th Avenue routes since the 1940s. Instead, one route fulfills the need for two. However, there was an obstacle that prevented a through 13th Avenue route. There was no bridge over the Sea Beach cut at 62nd Street until 1937, which separated the two portions of 13th Avenue. A trolley line operated over the former B1 route along 86th Street, 13th Avenue and Bay Ridge Avenue to access the ferry to Manhattan since the 1890s. The B16 bus route was added in the early 1930s along Fort Parkway and 13th Avenue to Ocean Avenue, a logical route back then. Israel Zion Hospital, a small institution located at 49th Street and 10th Avenue, did not require a north-south bus route. However, during the last 70 years it has greatly expanded, serving all of southern Brooklyn and changed its name to Maimonides Medical Center. Still, it has no north-south bus service.

A local businessman named Dominick Sabatino saw the need to combine the two portions of 13th Avenue and lobbied city officials to construct a bridge along 13th Avenue connecting the two portions of the street. Today the portion of the street over the Sea Beach cut is co-named after him. (That is one co-naming I support, perhaps the only one. By the 1950s, Maimonides Hospital had become a major institution, but the New York City Transit Authority saw no need for additional bus routes to better serve the hospital.

Better serving schools and hospitals was a major focus of the Department of City Planning’s study. We greatly improved bus service to Coney Island Hospital, which had also been deficient, and sought to do the same for Maimonides. In that effort we proposed to extend the B11 eastward from 18th Avenue to Coney Island Avenue to improve bus connections, trying to be conservative in our approach. The MTA in their infinite wisdom insisted the route extend well into Canarsie.

Community Board 12 feared reliability issues with such a long route and proposed a compromise to Brooklyn College. The MTA prevailed, but the Canarsie extension only lasted a few years because the reliability issues the community feared were realized, so the route was cut back to where it ends today and remains one of the very few routes where you can take three buses and not be charged an extra fare.

I pointed out the inconvenient connection between the B16 and B9 and how routes along Fort Hamilton Parkway and 13th Avenue would solve that problem. The MTA offered to reroute the B16 from 56th Street and 57th Street to 60th Street in exchange, to improve the connection. I refused, because it would have had the side effect of further inconveniencing B16 riders destined for Maimonides Medical Center. So the north-south routing deficiencies between Borough Park and Bensonhurst remained. You can read more about this routing problem here.

Fast Forward To 2004

I did not give up because I knew I was right, just as I was with the other changes I had proposed, which the MTA implemented years later when they first realized they were needed. As an MTA employee, just before I retired, I submitted dozens of bus routing suggestions to the Employee Suggestion Program. All were dismissed using contradictory logic. Finally, the director of Bus Service Planning proposed we meet face to face to discuss my proposals. At the head of the list was improved north-south bus travel in Borough Park and Bensonhurst. We discussed how someone coming from the B9, needing to go to 13th Avenue, must first needlessly ride to Fort Hamilton Parkway, then double back to 13th Avenue because of the current routing. (See the above “Existing Routes” picture.)

After he explained how the MTA could not afford to provide the extra service I was recommending because of increased operating costs (assuming it would not yield any increased revenue), I suggested the MTA proposal to me in 1978, which I rejected. He thought it was ingenious! He said he would hold a public hearing to get the views of the community.

Well, guess what. The Community Board unanimously voted down the suggestion stating it would not meet their needs and what they needed was two separate routes, one along Fort Hamilton Parkway and another along 13th Avenue, just as I proposed 30 years earlier! Of course the MTA would hear none of that.

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, to improve bus connections, but instead gave them an erroneous reason that traffic was too great on 56th Street and 57th Street. Did they purposely sabotage their own proposal, which they later withdrew, and held the hearing just to appease me?

I also made the proposal, through the Committee for Better Transit, for separate Fort Hamilton Parkway and 13th Avenue and 14th Avenue routes and a dozen others as part of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council’s (NYMTC) Southern Brooklyn Transportation’s Investment Study, held from 2003 to 2006. We were given a standing ovation from community representatives from throughout southwest Brooklyn. Throughout the presentation, the representative from New York City Transit’s Operations Planning Department nervously paced when he saw the community’s reaction. Even the MTA’s liaison to the study, who departed from the MTA a few months later, walked up to me after the meeting and privately told me that I “did a good job.”

When NYMTC incorporated these suggestions in their draft report and requested the MTA comment, the response by the MTA’s then-head of planning Larry Fleischer, stated at a meeting in Borough Hall, “We do our own planning and no one tells us how to plan.” That was the same reaction the MTA had after they were forced by a lawsuit to make the southwest Brooklyn bus changes in 1978 — that no other agency would ever again tell them how to plan.

In their formal rejection of the through route along Fort Hamilton Parkway, enumerated in NYMTC’s Technical Memorandum #4, the MTA merely stated: “Other than Maimonides Hospital, there are few traffic generators along Fort Hamilton Parkway between 36th and 56th Streets.” They also spoke of current riders being inconvenienced without mention of riders whose service would be improved. Excuses always prevail which show only the negatives and ignore the positives when routing changes are proposed to them. However, when they make proposals, they only tell you the positives and either ignore and dismiss the negatives.

It is the MTA’s arrogance, stubbornness and hostility toward other agencies, the unions, and the public that keeps bus routing stagnant. They prevent routing changes from occurring that could benefit thousands of New Yorkers. This is not to say that everyone at the MTA is bad, or that they do not have planners who understand what the problems are. It is just that those employees do not have the power to make the changes that are needed a reality.

As one top MTA planner once privately explained to me during a job interview after I attempted to return to Operations Planning, ‘We want to make the needed changes, but those above us won’t let us so we have to be satisfied with the minuscule changes we are allowed to make.’ When I asked why they are being stymied, he replied that there is no incentive for upper management to make major changes. Any major change involves political risk that someone will not like it. If he is powerful enough their job is now at risk. Since they get paid the same salary whether changes are made or not made, it is easier to leave everything the way it is now.

Conclusion

At some point in time, the good of the public must prevail — not a bureaucrat’s self-interest. That will only happen when citizens become more involved in the process by approaching their elected officials who were successful in getting bus studies performed in Co-Op City and northeastern Queens. However, these types of studies are needed in many more areas. The MTA will not act on their own because their prime interest is minimizing operating expenses, not serving better serving the public.

On August 26, 2014, NYCT President Carmen Bianco stated, “New York City changes all the time and we must keep up by making accommodations and adding service when the need arises.” Mr. Bianco, the need arose about 70 years ago, and you still refuse to add the necessary service.

The Commute is a weekly feature highlighting news and information about the city’s mass transit system and transportation infrastructure. It is written by Allan Rosen, a Manhattan Beach resident and former Director of MTA/NYC Transit Bus Planning (1981).

Disclaimer: The above is an opinion column and may not represent the thoughts or position of Sheepshead Bites. Based upon their expertise in their respective fields, our columnists are responsible for fact-checking their own work, and their submissions are edited only for length, grammar and clarity. If you would like to submit an opinion piece or become a regularly featured contributor, please e-mail nberke [at] sheepsheadbites [dot] com.