Can the Metropolitan Transportation Authority‘s chairman and CEO Jay Walder convince New Yorkers to embrace the bus? That’s the question New York Magazine asks in a thoughtful exploration of the MTA’s introduction of bus rapid transit — the challenges, the opportunities, and above all the politics.
What’s most surprising about Walder’s vision is its politics: Unlike most proposals to fundamentally change how the city operates, there’s an unusual amount of consensus — among bureaucrats and transit geeks, Upper East Side assemblymen and outer-borough activists—that it’s time to embrace the bus. The debate, then, is about execution.
Walder’s focus is pragmatic: Keeping bus lanes for buses, speeding up boarding, and providing real-time service updates. “I firmly believe that if you give people the information so that they know what’s going on, then they relax,” he said. Link to full story in New York Magazine.
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