In the battle for riders, New York City’s subway has always trounced buses. By a lot.
But at the height of the coronavirus pandemic the equation was flipped on its head — average daily ridership in April and May was 444,000 on the subway and 505,000 on the buses.
It was the first time that happened since the transit agency started keeping such records more than half a century ago.
Buses have held on to their lead even as the city has begun reopening after a three-month shutdown and more commuters return to work. Average daily counts in June were 752,000 riders for the subway — and 830,000 riders for the buses.
The city’s sprawling bus system, which has long been overshadowed by the subway, has emerged as a crucial part of its recovery. Buses are being counted on to keep people out of cars and to relieve subway crowding as more commuters come back, drawing many riders who said they felt buses were a safer and less-stressful alternative because riders can wait outside for the bus, see how clean or crowded a bus is before paying the fare, and hop off at any time and be back outside again.
“I’m more comfortable on the bus,” said Arturo Carrion, 52, who works as a cleaner for Uber. “The train is tight with a lot of people like sardines.”
Buses also reach into parts of the city where the subway doesn’t and serve a less well-off ridership. And when the subway started shutting down overnight for cleaning in May some workers turned to buses to get to their jobs.
To speed up buses, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city would install five busways that would push cars off some of New York’s busiest arteries, including Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and Main Street in Flushing, Queens.
The mayor had been under growing pressure from advocates and bus riders to create more busways before the pandemic, and the outbreak has intensified a focus on how better public transit can reduce car traffic as the city slowly resumes normal life and more people return to work.
The city opened a busway last fall on 14th Street in Lower Manhattan that has significantly boosted bus speeds and ridership. Before the pandemic, the average time it took to complete a trip had dropped by 36 percent. Weekday ridership had increased 19 percent and as much as 25 percent during morning rush hour.
Still, the new busways have angered some business owners who are already struggling to survive the economic fallout of the virus.
“This is Queens — people here drive,” said Dian Song, executive director of the downtown Flushing Business Improvement District, which serves around 2,000 businesses. “Adding driving restrictions on Main Street, you will scare away those customers. You are really going to bankrupt those businesses.”
The health crisis that has changed so much about New York has upended its transit patterns and unexpectedly allowed buses to shine. By most measures, buses have received far less attention and resources than the subway. If the subway was slow and crowded, the buses were usually worse. The buses were often the ride of last resort for those moving about the city.
When the subway plunged into a crisis in 2017, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declared a state of emergency. Yet the buses have been on a steady decline for more than a decade. Bus speeds dropped year after year — to almost four miles per hour — as congestion worsened. Riders fled for faster options, including Uber, Lyft and Citi Bike.
But during the worst of the pandemic, as subway ridership was wiped out, buses still carried as many as half their riders, including essential workers.
“This is what I have to do to get to work,” said Jackie Inabinet, 57, a security guard who never stopped riding the bus from her home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to her job in Long Island City, Queens.
Other riders are newcomers to the bus like Toddara Galimore, 23, a junior office manager in Brooklyn who traded in the J train for the B44 bus. “I can see the outside, said Ms. Galimore, who never took the bus to work until the pandemic. “If I need to get off quick, I can get off fast.”
Bus service even improved. With the city nearly shut down, buses zoomed down empty streets — at speeds up to 19 percent faster than normal — in a tantalizing glimpse of just how much better service could be.
“Buses are no longer seen as second tier anymore,” said Tom Wright, the president of the Regional Plan Association, an influential planning group.
Across the nation, buses have lost ground to subways and trains for decades even as city populations grew and local economies boomed. Bus ridership fell every year for the last seven years, reaching its lowest level last year since the early 1970s.
Bus systems have been battered by reductions in service, competition from ride-hail services and bike share programs, and low gas prices and car loan interest rates that made car ownership more appealing, according to transit researchers.
But since the pandemic, buses have increasingly emerged as a reliable, flexible and efficient way to bolster public transit systems that face their worst financial crisis in generations.
“This may be the start of a comeback for buses,” said Joseph P. Schwieterman, a professor of public service at DePaul University. “Buses are versatile in a time of crisis. They serve a wider range of riders than trains. As transit agencies pinch pennies to stop the flow of red ink, the bus may take center stage.”
In Los Angeles and Washington, bus ridership dropped only about a third during the pandemic, according to analysis from the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.
In Seattle, extra buses had to be added to a half-dozen routes to ensure that riders, including many essential workers, had enough room for social distancing. “The bus system in Seattle is deeply ingrained in our culture,” said Bill Bryant, a King County Metro official.
New York’s buses have carried more riders than the subway every day for more than two months — the first time that has happened since the Metropolitan Transportation Authority began keeping track in 1963.
Bus ridership dropped to a low of 430,000 riders one day in April, or 20 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Subway ridership hit bottom with 403,000 daily riders, a 93 percent drop.
Transportation experts said expanding the city’s bus network was essential to attracting more riders, especially in transit deserts outside Manhattan without subway lines. Improvements to buses can also be made faster and cheaper than to the subway, they said.
“The city’s bus system has always sort of been the unwanted step sibling of transit in New York,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, a former city transportation commissioner. “But buses are a more attractive option when they can operate above ground just like subways operate underground.”
Kate Slevin, a senior vice president of the Regional Plan Association, said faster bus trips would also mean less time that riders could be potentially exposed to the virus. “It’s a public health issue and an equity issue as well,” she said. “The last thing you want is essential workers stuck in traffic behind single-occupant vehicles.
Currently, there are 144 miles of bus lanes across the city, and M.T.A. officials have called for an additional 60 miles. City officials have promised a total of 20 miles of new bus lanes, including the five new busways and four new bus lanes that together will serve about 750,000 daily riders.
In recent years, the city has also expanded a program that gives buses priority at traffic signals to 1,025 intersections, or about 13 percent of all such intersections along bus routes.
“We can do this — we can have buses that are faster and more reliable,” said Polly Trottenberg, the city’s transportation commissioner.
Even before the pandemic, M.T.A. officials were overhauling New York’s bus system by redesigning the city’s outdated and inefficient bus network borough by borough, and installing bus-mounted cameras to issue tickets to cars that blocked bus lanes.
“When people are getting to where they want to go in a safe and reliable manner, the bus is a viable alternative to subway or rail,” said Craig Cipriano, acting president of the M.T.A. Bus Company. “We need to build upon this momentum.”
Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
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