BusTalk

[Mr. Linsky]

'NIGHT WORKERS LAMENT BUS CUTS'



By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Published: December 29, 2009 The New York Times.

One night next summer, after the last reel unwinds and the time ticks past 2 a.m., Elaine Beverly might clock out of her job at the AMC Loews multiplex near Lincoln Center, head up Broadway and, as she has for months, wait to catch the crosstown bus that carries her home to the Upper East Side (If all goes as planned, it will never arrive!).

There are four buses that currently cross Central Park in the early morning hours, a longitudinal link that acts as the sole option for east-west transportation in the 50 blocks north of 59th Street. Starting in July, only one will remain.

The cuts are part of a reduction in bus service across the five boroughs that was approved this month by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is scrambling to shore up a sudden shortfall in financing. And while not all of the cuts will be devastating, some will reshape the rhythms of nocturnal New York, when buses and subways are already scarce and routines forged over many years can be tough to shed.

Transit officials studied ridership patterns and considered the proximity of other public transportation options when deciding which bus lines to reduce or erase.

But that is little consolation to Ms. Beverly, 44, who already faces a wait of up to 45 minutes for an M104 bus after she leaves the AMC Loews at West 68th Street. The trip up Broadway takes her to 96th Street, where the M96 crosstown provides a sprint across Central Park — and home for some sleep before the 8 a.m. alarm for her daytime job at a hospital in Brooklyn. She works two jobs to support herself and her 14-year-old son, Javon.

“The quicker I get home to sleep, the better,” Ms. Beverly said, staring at the passing street from a bus window at a quarter to 3 the other morning.

Ms. Beverly will lose both the M96 and the M104, which runs along the backbone of the Upper West Side. One alternative, the M10 along Central Park West, will also vanish, even during the daylight hours, and late-night Upper East Side bus service will be trimmed, if not eliminated.

The loss of the crosstown routes late at night will also affect doctors, nurses and support staff members at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell and Mount Sinai hospitals who rely on them to reach connecting bus and subway lines during the hours when the park is at its most forbidding.

“There are a lot of residents in the hospital who have shifts that end late at night,” Patrisha Woolard, a second-year resident in pediatrics, said as she left Mount Sinai around 1:30 a.m. last Wednesday. “That would be horrible.”

The M86 crosstown bus, with 8.8 million annual riders, is the most popular of the five Central Park routes; it will continue to run at all hours. But the M79, with 5.9 million riders — the only bus that reaches East End Avenue — will not run after 1 a.m., nor will the M66. (The M72 crosstown route already stops service at midnight.)

“This is really the lifeblood connection between the east and west,” said Vincent Wright, 57, a bus driver for 24 years. Mr. Wright was driving “the hawk,” the lone overnight bus that runs along the M96 route, around 2 a.m. last Thursday.

“This is a 24-hour city, and you can’t have a 24-hour city without a 24-hour system,” he said. “The taxi business is probably going to love this; they’ll throw a big party if all the cuts happen.”

But many of the workers who depend on the overnight buses said there was no way they could afford a cab, particularly every day.

“This is the only way to get back and forth,” said Carlos Rosario, 44, who takes the M96 from Broadway to the Lexington Avenue subway station around 2 a.m. most weeknights from his job at a Rite-Aid drugstore. The subway takes him to the Bronx.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “You have a lot of people working overnight.”

Still, no one could say these late-night buses are packed. At most, a dozen seats are filled, and often only a handful. Onboard are dazed revelers with happy, sleepy grins; the undaunted elderly who refuse, on principle or paycheck, to splurge on a cab; and service workers who face a long journey home after last call.

In fact, eliminating overnight service, to one lifelong New Yorker, seemed something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“I’ll tell you the truth — I usually don’t take it because the service is so lousy,” said Linda Gallo, waiting at a bus shelter at 96th Street and Madison Avenue around 1:30 a.m. Ms. Gallo, who uses a cane, was heading back to her West Side apartment from a friend’s home.

“You wait forever, which is ridiculous because, you know, part of the reason they do not have ridership at night is it doesn’t run very often,” Ms. Gallo said, looking east for an approaching bus. Staying out late, she said, would no longer be an option.

That could hurt local commerce, said Jayci Nieves, a bartender at One Fish, Two Fish on 97th and Madison.

“People don’t come to a business if there’s no easy transportation,” said Mr. Nieves, 34, adding that many of his regulars stay until 2 a.m. “If they have to pay for a cab, they only have one drink — or they don’t come at all.”

For Oumar Ndiaye, staying out late is not a luxury. Mr. Ndiaye, 40, works as an event coordinator at the Lotos Club, the esteemed literary society whose French Renaissance-style house off Fifth Avenue is near the 65th Street transverse. He uses the M66 bus to catch the A train at Columbus Circle for his trip home to Inwood.

“I’d have to walk through the park,” Mr. Ndiaye said when told of the impending cuts. “It’s the only way to get back.” He sighed. “You’re tired at the end of the night. You just hope the bus will be there to get across the park.”

Photo for NY Times by Piotr Redlinski

Mr. Linsky - Green Bus Lines, Inc., Jamaica, NY


Vincent Wright on his M96 bus after midnight last week. “This is really the lifeblood connection between the east and west,” Mr. Wright said.

[HwyHaulier]

Mr "L" -

Sigh! We have lost so much, especially since the "know it alls" are without any clues about management of transit operations, barring
criminal creeps from aircraft, and myriad other issues. But, "...they are solid, college trained, public administrators..."

Bah! Gimme the Bad, Old Days, when a capricious PUC or PSC simply would not let this happen!

So much for restatement of the old Steven Foster item: "Crosstown Trolley Runs All Night! Doo dah! Doo dah!....". Shoot! Even NCL didn't
kill the all night car, Roger Rabiits in its collections...

...................Vern.................

[ripta42]