• B36 Service To Be Slashed 17 Percent On Saturdays


    by on Jan 28th, 2011

    Source: TheGirlsNY via Flickr

    THE COMMUTE: MTA’s New York City Transit Committee presented a wide range of bus service adjustments across the City to take effect next April. Although these are nowhere as significant as last June 27′s service reductions, and do not require any public hearings, they should not be ignored. They are what the MTA calls routine service adjustments to reflect demand, made four times a year.

    Sounds good, because before these were instituted in the 1980s, the MTA had no handle on bus ridership at all other than during rush hours. Schedules often had no relationship to the numbers of riders using a particular route during a certain time of day.

    At least today, the situation is better. What is troublesome, however, is that most of these “adjustments” are really service reductions.

    The NY Post reported that these adjustments will save the MTA $300,000 annually, which is incorrect. It will actually cost them about that much in additional operating costs. The problem is that the savings from the bus cuts across the City will go toward one specific population: providing two additional trips on the J train.

    The MTA has long favored subways over buses because they claim that a higher percentage of the fare is recovered by subways which asks the question, how do they know this and which costs are they including? After all, the subways have an infrastructure that must be maintained, much less so for the buses because street maintenance comes under the jurisdiction of NYC DOT, not the MTA. Have they ever reduced subway service to provide additional bus service? Not to my knowledge.

    Locally, according to the Post, the B36 will suffer the greatest cut, a 17 percent reduction in service. Present 12-minute service will be reduced to 15 minutes and 15-minute service will be reduced to 20 minutes. Of course when two buses run together, service would actually often vary from every 30 minutes to every 40 minutes.  This just increases the demand for car service in the area, which is already high. Once these riders stop using MTA buses, the MTA no longer counts them, fueling future service reductions.

    One would think that with the elimination of some weekday and all weekend service on the B4 in Sheepshead Bay last June, ridership on the B36 would have increased. After all, in its report prior to the major cuts last June, the MTA cited the B36 as the alternate route to use when the B4 would be eliminated. Or did the placing of both routes along Avenue Z cause B36 ridership to decrease? Still yet, a third possibility is an arithmetic or logical error in the processing of the data making it appear that B36 ridership declined when in fact it did not.

    We do not know the answer because Operations Planning makes its decisions in secret. Service changes are supposed to be made according to Service Planning Guidelines, but try and find these guidelines on the MTA website, http://mta.info/. I was not able to.

    More on Monday…

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

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    • levp

      B36 buses are always packed, and not only during rush hours. WTF?

    • Anonymous

      i would like to know…… Who made a Crackhead in charge of this?

      That is all. Levp said it right, the B36 is PACKED all the time!!

    • http://www.bksouthie.com/ Brian Hedden | BK Southie

      Those changes are only to the Saturday schedule, though, right? I thought weekday and Sunday schedules stay the same. I understand the Post was just scanning percentages the right side of the Board report, but it seems a little misleading to say service is being cut by 17% when that only applies to 14% of the schedule.

      Not saying I enjoy waiting half-an-hour for bunched buses, just saying the statistic is misleading.

      • levp

        Indeed, the word in the “Day” column for B36 route does NOT look like “wkd”, and COULD be “sat” – but it’s damn hard to read that scan:

        http://www.nypost.com/r/nypost/2011/01/24/news/media/mtapdf2.pdf

        • Tinafg

          It does say Saturday. So much for Mayor “Third Term But Now He’s In Favor Of Term Limits” wanting us to take public transportation. Please will just use their cars more.

          • Tinafg

            Oops. Sorry. I mean “People will just use their cars more.”

      • Allan Rosen

        Brian you are correct. Thank you for spotting it.

        The change is for Saturdays only. (Weekday and Sunday service remains unchanged.) I shouldn’t have trusted the Post and looked more closely at the report itself. After all they already made one mistake by stating the plan will save the MTA $300,000 when in fact it will cost them more than that.

        Still the questions I ask are valid and even more pertinent for a Saturday than a weekday, when the B4 lost all of its service ins Sheepshead Bay.

        If the B36 is given as the alternative route to take when the B4 does not run and B36 patronage goes down not up, clearly former B4 passengers are not using the B36. The only route they could have switched to would be the B44 for a very few trips. Either former B4 Saturday passengers stopped making trips, switched to car service, or have friends and family drive them to the subway or other bus route. Either way, what the MTA predicted did not.happen.

        Ned perhaps you should change the headline.to read “Saturday Service”

        • BrooklynGirl

          Saturdays only? That’s a relief… it seems to me that weekday B36 service has been better lately than a couple of years ago, but it’s a very busy line.

          I think B36 might have low weekend ridership precisely because it’s not reliable. I know quite a few people near that line who have pretty much given up on it on weekends and either take the B44 to the 2/5 line or get someone to drive them.

    • Linda

      On weekday mornings, the B36 comes fairly regularly on Avenue Z & Coney Island Avenue to Sheepshead Bay. But it’s true, it’s always packed (and not only during rush hour). I’ve taken the bus to Nostrand to go to Blockbuster in the late mornings and it’s still packed. Coming back, the B36 on Nostrand is a hell of a long wait. I’ve seen several B44′s come and go in the amount of time in takes for one B36 to show up. If this goes into effect, we’ll probably never see a B36 more than once every hour and it’ll be so packed they people won’t be able to get on it.

      • Allan Rosen

        Service is proposed to be cut for Saturdays only. Weekday service is unchanged.

    • L7jr

      The B36 is a joke…plain and simple. It’s quite often I can beat the bus home walking on Ave Z from the train station to Nostrand Ave.

    • Rufina_yagudina

      B36 is one of the shortest routes in Brooklyn yet it is one of the worst! They run so sporadically that you might wait for one for 20 min and then it comes so packed, but right in the back of him is another one that is empty. I have a feeling that bus drivers sit somewhere and BS until one is late and one is one time.
      How else would anyone explain two three buses coming at the same time?
      Another thing is-they run B36 from Coney Island to Lincoln high school even on the days when there is no school!!!!! Southern Brooklyn got hit the worst in this MTA nightmare – X29-eliminated, B4-cut and Neptune Avenue is not services at all, B1-looks like cut as well – my kid goes to school in Bensonhurst and she says in the morning she sometimes can not get on the bus on Neptune and Ocean Pkway.

      • Allan Rosen

        It’s actually not that difficult for two bunches to bunch up with an eight minute separation between buses. I’ve been on the B36 when the bus gets caught in traffic for three minutes around East 12th Street and then misses the light at Coney Island Avenue for two minutes. Gets stuck again at East 7th and then at the light again at Ocean Parkway for two more minutes. All of a sudden there is an empty bus right behind who just happened to make all the lights and didn’t run into the same traffic jam.

        The key is what to do after this happens and how do you get the buses back or close to schedule again.