Research · Proposal · Updated Oct 5, 2026

Bus lanes on 12 slow streets? About 700 hours back to riders every weekday.

Lanes on the 12 streets where buses lose the most time, and have little or no lane, would save riders about 180,000 hours a year. At the value USDOT puts on travel time, that’s about $3.5 million a year. Each mile of lane takes about 20 seconds off a bus trip, so a half-hour ride gets about a minute shorter.

Where a lane would save the most

Rider-hours saved each weekday if the blocks of each street without a lane got one, at the typical gain of 3.3%. Flatbush Av and Broadway save the most in all. Per mile of new lane, Madison Av is far ahead: 17 routes share its blocks.

    Under each street: the share of its route-miles already on a lane, and the miles of street that would need one. Weekdays, 7 am to 7 pm. Hover or tap a street for the details.

    Different versions of the proposal

    The fewer the streets, the more each mile of lane gives back; the more streets, the bigger the total. How well the lanes work matters as much as how many there are.

    If the new lanes speed up buses by
    VersionLane-milesRider-hours a weekdayRider-hours a year Riders’ time a yearBus service a yearPer lane-mile

    Is the 3.3% real?

    Buses ran 3.3% faster on 53 stretches that got a new lane from 2023 to 2025 than on similar stretches without one, over the same months (95% interval 1.9% to 4.7%). Before the lanes opened, the two groups moved together; the gap opens the month the lane does and holds for a year. Dropping any one corridor leaves the answer between 2.7% and 3.7%, though single streets range from 1.4% (East Gun Hill Rd) to 8% (East 96 St). It is the same kind of test as on the congestion pricing evaluation: compare what changed with what didn’t, over the same months.

    Bus speed on stretches that got a new lane, minus matched stretches with no lane, by months from the lane’s opening. Each period is measured against the six months before opening. Weekdays, 6 am to 8 pm; 53 stretches on 23 routes.

    How this works

    For each street, we take the time buses spend on it each weekday, keep the part on blocks with no bus lane, and cut it by the speed gain new lanes have delivered. Then we turn bus-hours into riders’ hours and dollars.

    • The streetsThe MTA’s bus speeds between timepoint stops, weekdays from 7 am to 7 pm, March to August 2026. A stretch counts for a street when both its stops are on that street. The 12 are the streets losing the most bus time, against each stretch’s fastest hour, with under half their route-miles on a lane.
    • Bus time without a laneFor each stretch: miles ÷ daytime mph × buses a weekday gives bus-hours, times the share of its path not within 15 m of a DOT bus lane. This assumes a bus spends the same time on each block of a stretch.
    • The savingA 3.3% gain in speed cuts travel time by 3.2%. On these 12 streets buses now lose 45% of their time against the street’s fastest hour; the lanes would win back about 6% of that lost time. Some delay is boarding, which no lane fixes.
    • Riders and dollarsBus-hours × 14 riders aboard a bus (National Transit Database, passenger-miles over bus-miles; 10 to 18 across MTA agencies and years) × 250 weekdays × $19.60 an hour, USDOT’s value of time for local trips. Bus-hours × $250 to $290, the MTA’s cost to run a bus for an hour.
    • Lane-milesRoute-miles overstate it: on Madison Av 17 routes share the same blocks. We merge the routes’ paths in each direction, cut out blocks that already have a lane, and measure what’s left. A two-way street needs a lane each way.

    Caveats: the 3.3% comes mostly from offset lanes in Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx; few Brooklyn lanes were in the study, and none were busways. A new lane comes with cameras, signal changes and curb rules, so this is the effect of the package, not paint alone. We use 14 riders aboard a bus, a citywide figure; the street table’s riders are boardings on every route that touches a street, not riders on that street, so they can’t be used here. This counts weekdays from 7 am to 7 pm only, and buses only: not weekends, not riders drawn by faster trips, and not what lanes do to car traffic. Bus speeds on these streets are averages over six months, and each street’s gain will differ from the average. This is an estimate for planning, not a forecast for any one street.

    The arithmetic, for the 12 streets