5 years after the MTA first set about reorganizing the bus community within the borough of Queens, transit officers say they’ve a closing plan — and the brand new routes might be in place by summer season.
“[This] is a big day for Queens and for the MTA,” company chairman Janno Lieber stated Tuesday. “After a lot of back and forth that was conducted with Queens riders, with elected officials and with community stakeholders, we’re now putting out the final version of our proposed Queens bus-network redesign.”
Roughly 80,000 riders use the online of 113 bus routes that run by way of Queens every day — a few of which began as trolley traces greater than 75 years in the past.
“[Queens riders] deserve a system that gets them where they want to go, where they’re trying to go, rather than on routes designed based on where jobs and schools and retail were back in 1950,” Lieber stated. “That is literally the system that we have now, and we have to change it.”
The MTA Mixed Community Map for Queens. (MTA)
Pending an approval of the MTA’s board, the re-drawn Queens bus map may have 124 routes — 94 native and 30 specific — with an emphasis on connecting bus riders to the remainder of the town’s transit programs.
Tuesday’s plan, a sweeping overhaul of the largest borough’s buses, is an addendum to a proposal that was itself billed as closing final yr.
However Lieber and others stated the plan laid out Tuesday represented a sequence of tweaks revamped a yr of public outreach.
“We needed to take the time to hear from all of the communities in this incredibly large bus-customer population,” Lieber stated.
“It’s final,” Lieber added, “We look at this as a finished product.”
Among the many modifications from final yr’s plan, the MTA will run the Q10 as a so-called “rush route,” with quicker service to subway and Lengthy Island Rail Street stations. The plan will even attempt to deal with considerations a few proposed Q110 connection on the Floral Park LIRR station.
The brand new map retains the Q100 in operation and retains the Q102’s connection between Roosevelt Island and Queens Plaza. Bus service might be prolonged within the Rockaways, with the Q22 working restricted journeys to Bayswater and the Q52 SBS working additional east into Edgemere.
The plan reroutes the Q75 to Jamaica, the Q31 down Bell Blvd. from forty eighth Ave. to twenty third Ave., and runs a brand new Q74 bus from Forest Hills to Queensboro Neighborhood Faculty alongside Jewel Ave.
The total set of modifications may be seen on the MTA web site.
The MTA board is predicted to vote to approve the redrawn bus map early subsequent yr. Transit officers stated Tuesday that pending approval, they hope to enact the brand new bus community in two phases through the summer season months.
