Tools · Interactive

Draw a bus lane

Every block where buses run with no lane, shaded by how slow they are. Click the ones you would fix. See the hours riders get back, and what they are worth.

Slow buses are darker. Blocks that already have a lane are left off.

Streets, by time to give back

or pick whole streets

    Click a block to add a bus lane

    Rider-hours back a weekday
    0
    Value of their time a year
    $0
    Lane-miles
    0

    How this works

    This tool does the sums of the bus lane proposal on the blocks you pick. Pick the plan’s 12 streets and you get its figures.

    • BlocksEach shaded line is a piece of street, about a fifth of a mile, that buses use with no lane within 15 m. It holds the time all the routes on it spend there on a weekday, 7 am to 7 pm, from the MTA’s bus speeds between timing stops (). A bus spends the same time on each foot of its stretch. Where several routes share a block, one lane helps all of them. Only stretches whose two stops are on one street are counted, so blocks near a turn are missing.
    • What a lane doesNew lanes opened in 2023 to 2025 made buses 3.3% faster than matched stretches without a lane (95% range 1.9 to 4.7%). A gain of g% cuts bus time by g ÷ (100 + g). The ranges on this page use that interval.
    • Riders and dollarsBus-hours saved × 14 riders aboard a bus (National Transit Database) = rider-hours. × 250 weekdays × $19.60 an hour (USDOT’s value of local travel time) = dollars a year. The range counts only the lane effect, not the rider count.
    • Lane-milesStreet length with no lane, in each direction buses run. Routes on the same block count once.

    Caveats: the effect is an average from lanes already built; a given street can do better or worse. Weekdays and buses only. It leaves out cost, lost curb space, and what a faster bus saves the MTA. The 12 worst streets are the ones losing the most bus time with under half their route on a lane. Blocks are our own cut of the MTA’s stretches, so a block can start mid-intersection.