Subway on the Street The MTA has a simple, not very expensive ticket for improving how the city gets around: Revolutionize t he bus. But can even the most sensible ideas get implemented these days? By Robert Sulliv an Published Jul 4, 2010 Illustration by Bob ScottYou would never guess it from the dispiriting news coming out of the MTA, but if you want to see the future of New York, then head up to the Bronx and take a bus. This is not the future of New York in which everyone has a solar-powered jet pack that takes them high o ver the city’s organic farmyards. Nor is this the apocalyptic future in which the final few New Yorkers with health care live just beyond the moat that surrounds what was once called Yankee Stadium. This is the future as seen in a new bus line: the Bx12 Select Bus Service, or SBS, for short. The future highlighted by the Bx12 SBS takes as a very depressing starting point the fact that the New YorkCity subway system, once the envy of the world, is stalled. Not literally—as when we sat on dark, un-air- conditioned cars between stations on the way to Simon and Garfunkel reunion concerts—but still, our subways are strained under a ridership that has grown 60 percent since 1990 and a permanent budgetarycrisis that has, over the past two years, o nly gotten worse. Last month, faced with an $800 million budget gap, the MTA canceled two subway lines and 37 bus lines and dramatically reduced late-night and we ekend service. No one is expecting Albany’s fiscal situation to improve anytime soon. If this were, say, Shanghai, one could imagine the federal government sweeping in and not just restoring transit funding but modernizing and expanding our underground tracks. Shanghai didn’t even have a subway system until 1995, and it is now in the midst of dramatically expanding it to 22 lines. But this is not Shanghai; this is New York, where the first subway line was built in 1904 and many lines still use the antiquated (and sometimes dangerous) signal system that was installed about 25 years after Edison patented his lightbulb. The New York subway system’s grandest plan at the moment involves completing one new line on Second Avenue. It was proposed in 1929. It is currently s cheduled to open its first branch in 2016. It will stretch 33 blocks, or just under two miles.
