Court-ordered delay of bus plan is costing riders time: advocates

Transit activists are tired of waiting for bus improvements on Manhattan’s 14th Street, delayed over a month thanks to a court-ordered injunction.

The court directive has cost rush hour bus commuters the equivalent of 52 weeks, or 8,654 hours, of travel time since July 1, the planned start date for the city’s 14th Street car ban, advocacy groups Riders Alliance and Transportation Alternatives argue in a briefing filed ahead of a Tuesday court hearing on the plan.

The filing from advocates aims to buoy the MTA’s argument that the delay has impacted riders.

To calculate the total time lost, advocates drew from the MTA’s anticipated bus speed improvements of 2 to 9 minutes, depending on direction and time of day, and multiplied those savings by the route’s estimated 5,000 daily rush hour riders and the 36 days since the car ban would have gone into effect.

“Transit riders have been absent from the litigation,” Riders Alliance spokesperson Danny Pearlstein told the Post. “Collectively, rush hour commuters have lost a year’s worth of time in the weeks this has been delayed. It’s time they’ll never regain.”

Judge Eileen Rakower put the kibosh on the car ban in response to a lawsuit from West Village and Chelsea block associations arguing it would result in “horrific traffic jams” on residential side streets, and should have undergone an official environmental review.

In responses filed in court, the city and MTA have said the impacts on side streets would be fairly limited — adding just a minute-and-a-half to crosstown trips on 12th, 13th, 15th, and 16th streets — while time saved for bus riders would be between two and nine minutes.

The city further argues that implementing traffic restrictions fits squarely into its mandate, and therefore does not require an environmental review.

But Arthur Schwartz, who represents the block associations and is himself a 12th Street resident, told the Post that the agencies and advocates are comparing apples and oranges.

“Doubling the number of cars on my street is a greater injury than the loss of a two minute speed-up of the buses going across 14th Street,” he said. “What I expect and what I hope for is that [the judge] will grant our petition and order them to cease the [plan] until they do environmental review.”