Talk Bronx New York

Riders Will Pay Before Boarding, and Save Time, on Revamped Bus Route

Beginning on Sunday, passengers on a revamped bus route in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan will pay their fares before they get on the bus, as part of a series of innovations intended to allow faster travel.

The time it takes to cross the Bronx on the upgraded Bx12 route should eventually drop by 20 percent under the new system, said Ted V. Orosz, the director of Manhattan and Bronx bus service planning for New York City Transit.

The new service will replace the Bx12 Limited, which took 58 minutes at midday on a weekday (when traffic is usually heavy) to travel the full seven-mile length of the route, from Co-op City in the Bronx to 207th Street and Broadway in Upper Manhattan. The buses travel for long stretches on Pelham Parkway and Fordham Road, across the heart of the Bronx.

Officials hope to ultimately shave 10 or 12 minutes off that trip. But the initial schedule does not reflect such large savings. The transit agency has scheduled the new buses to make the midday trip in 55 minutes, just three minutes quicker than before. But more buses are being used on the route, so at the busiest times buses will run from four to eight minutes apart.

Officials said that they would monitor the route closely and that they expected to see increasing improvements in time.

Mr. Orosz said he expected 25,000 people a day to use the new service at the start, with the number growing as more people become familiar with it.

“It looks cooler, it’s faster, it will run a little more frequently,” he said. “All those things should increase ridership.”

The new service, called Select Bus Service, will save time mostly by requiring riders to pay fares before they get on the bus, using coins or swiping their MetroCards at curbside machines at each stop.

The idea is to cut boarding times by eliminating the lines that often form at the front door of a bus while passengers wait to swipe or pay. That wait is a primary factor in slow travel times for buses.

There will be more than one machine at each stop, to keep lines from developing there. The machines will provide receipts, and when the bus arrives, passengers may board either in the front or the back, with no need to show the receipt to the driver or to swipe again.

To keep people honest, inspectors will ride the buses and ask passengers for their receipts. If a passenger does not have one, the inspectors may give them a $100 ticket for fare-beating. Officials said that during the first week, while passengers are adjusting to the system, the inspectors will hand out warnings instead.

The route will have other innovations as well.

The Fordham Road part of the route will have computerized traffic signals that communicate with the buses, helping them by holding a green light or shortening a red light by up to 15 seconds as a bus approaches.

And the stretch of the route along Fordham Road and 207th Street will have dedicated bus lanes painted in red with overhead signs telling other vehicles to stay out of the lane on weekdays from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

What the route’s buses will not have are cameras mounted on the front to take pictures of cars and trucks encroaching on the bus lane. Legislation pushed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to allow for such cameras was blocked in committee in the State Assembly.

“It hurts bad,” said Mr. Orosz of the absence of the bus cameras. “That would have been a huge lift, a huge improvement in the bus lane.”

Instead, the police will patrol the route to keep other vehicles away.

The buses, all articulated models, with two carriages connected with accordianlike devices, will look a little different too, decorated on the outside with a wavy blue pattern covered with blue plus signs. Inside, the seats are covered in a blue polka dot fabric.

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M.T.A. Cuts Delay Some Big Projects Until 2010

The subway station at Smith and Ninth Streets is one of 15 in Brooklyn that will not be renovated as scheduled. Four stations in the Bronx also will wait.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority released a cascade of grim financial assessments on Monday that mean delays in subway station renovations and other major improvements, as well as possible cutbacks in service and increases in fares and tolls.

In a series of public meetings of authority board committees, officials said the authority would be forced to cut projects valued at $2.7 billion from its 2005-9 capital spending program, largely because of soaring costs on construction projects already under way.

The projects being cut include 19 subway station renovations and important projects for the modernization of subway signals and repair facilities. The authority’s chief executive, Elliot G. Sander, said those projects were expected to be included in the authority’s next five-year spending plan, which begins in 2010. But he acknowledged that the authority did not yet know how it would find the financing for that plan.

Officials also said the revenues from taxes on real estate transactions, which have buoyed the day-to-day operations of the transit system in recent years, were falling off at an alarming rate, resulting in a shortfall this year of $122 million. Revenues from the real estate taxes are on track to end the year about $280 million below budget projections.

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Public Housing Residents Face Loss of Their Community Centers

Ishmael Sylle, 12, focusing on a chess game at Parkside Houses’ community center in the Bronx. After-school programs are popular.

 Marc Anthony Reyes, 10, left, and Andre Delgado, 9, worked on a computer.

 Children made Father’s Day cards.

An average of 200 people of all ages use the center daily at Parkside Houses, where girls recently walked an imaginary fashion runway.

The community center at Parkside Houses, a public housing complex in the Bronx, has one floor, four rooms and many uses.

Adults work on their résumés on one of 10 computers or play Scrabble on Friday nights. Teenagers congregate around the pool tables in the game room or train for competition as part of the Parkside Knights track and field team. But the center, on the ground floor of a red-brick building across from a wooded stretch of the Bronx River Parkway, is really a children’s place.

After school on Thursday, about a dozen children sat in the multipurpose room making Father’s Day cards out of construction paper and buttons while several boys and girls played chess and video games down the hall. They ate turkey and cheese sandwiches. They got help with their homework.

Andre and Giovani Delgado spend their afternoons at the center, waiting for their mother, Ruth Delgado, to pick them up at about 5:30 p.m. Ms. Delgado, a building custodian and single mother, said she trusted the staff and liked the price: $80 a year to enroll Andre, 9, and Giovani, 11, in the center’s after-school program.

But Ms. Delgado and other parents are worried about the fate of the center. The city’s public housing agency, the New York City Housing Authority, announced last month that budget problems could force it to close Parkside and hundreds of other community centers, senior centers and recreational, job-training and educational programs throughout the five boroughs.

Ms. Delgado said that she made $11.10 an hour and could not afford to hire a baby sitter. She would be left with one option if the center closed: “I’m going to have to get my oldest one a key so they can be home by themselves,” she said, shaking her head.

The proposed cuts would affect hundreds of thousands of children, adults and older people who live in the city’s 343 public housing complexes, as well as thousands of others who are not residents but regularly use the centers. The plan has outraged tenants, public housing advocates and City Council members, focusing renewed attention on the New York City Housing Authority’s budget shortfall and its financial dealings with the city.

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Talks Focus on Bronx Golf Course

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. announced on Monday that the city had started talking with Sanford Golf Design to design and build a championship-caliber golf course over a former garbage dump at Ferry Point Park in the Bronx, potentially giving new life to a project that has been dogged by years of delay and problems. The project’s price tag has nearly quadrupled since it was proposed in 1998, to well over $80 million, by one estimate.

The proposed 18-hole, links-style Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course would be built using city capital funds, with an estimated completion by the fall of 2010. A public hearing on the proposal has been scheduled for 10 a.m. on June 26, 22 Reade Street in Manhattan. After construction has begun, the city plans to seek proposals from businesses to operate the golf course and make additional improvements, including a clubhouse and restaurant.

However, New York City Park Advocates, a community group that has often been critical of the Parks Department, quickly issued a statement criticizing the proposed deal. The group said that the city had not completed a study of the project’s environmental impact, noting that the site included a former landfill.

The project has a long and troubled history.

In 1998, during the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Parks Department announced plans to have a developer, Ferry Point Partners, build a golf course. It would have received a 35-year lease in exchange for financing the $22 million project, which was to be completed by 2001. The 222-acre site called for a driving range, a clubhouse, two playgrounds, a banquet hall and a restaurant overlooking the East River, as well as a waterfront esplanade.

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Increased Flow of Council Grants to Private Groups Leads to a Backlog 

Speaker Christine C. Quinn said, “It’s fair criticism to say there wasn’t enough vetting of capital budget allocations” in the past.

 The Northeast Bronx Development Corporation received City Council grants of $4.7 million despite a troubled financial history.

Increased Flow of Council Grants to Private Groups Leads to a Backlog 

An Orthodox Jewish school in Queens was to get $500,000 for a swimming pool. A social service agency in Queens plagued by financial mismanagement was set to receive $100,000 for a shelter and a van.

A nonprofit corporation in the Bronx that has filed only one tax return in nine years was to be granted more than $4.7 million for a housing complex, a community center and a hip-hop museum.

Every year, the City Council receives a huge wish list of requests for capital project money for local organizations. And in recent years the Council leadership has deemed some $500 million in projects worthy of public finance, even projects that are sometimes parochial, overly ambitious or sponsored by organizations with spotty financial histories.

Investigators reviewing Council spending have focused on grants that community groups receive to offset their operating expenses. But the capital budget that legislators use to finance big-ticket items like new buildings or buses is a larger pot of money: a half-billion dollars versus $360 million. And for years it has been shrouded in bureaucratic secrecy.

Once, council members rarely used their capital money to do more than finance a pet project within a city agency, perhaps road repaving in their districts. But increasingly, larger amounts of taxpayer dollars have been set aside for church groups, nonprofit groups and other private organizations, earmarked by council members to buy these groups equipment or renovations, or sometimes new buildings.

The practice has grown so expansive that the city has hired extra staff to shepherd the projects, which are often fraught with legal complications. Hundreds of groups approved for the money, meanwhile, have never received it. Some requests have been stalled because of constitutional questions over the separation of church and state, others because the groups did not have the financial or technical means to carry out the project — even with city aid. Many simply languished, yet remained on the books, year after year.

In fact, the backlog has grown so big that last year the Council and the Bloomberg administration stopped financing any new capital projects for private groups until they could develop a better way to choose which programs deserve the money.

“We really had to find a way to get this under control,” said Speaker Christine C. Quinn. “What was happening is the money was getting put in the budget and then it wasn’t moving, which is really a waste.”

The unspent money could have gone to schools or libraries or health clinics, Ms. Quinn said.

Advocates say it would be wrong, however, to view the broad expanse of capital spending on nonprofits as wasteful.

“Without city assistance, the not-for-profit sector would not be able to maintain the quality of facilities that are necessary to meet the needs of the poor and vulnerable citizens of New York,” said Ronald Soloway, director of governmental relations for the UJA-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies.

The city’s capital budget is meant to finance permanent improvements to its infrastructure, like new buildings or bridges, or expensive equipment like buses. As with the operating budget, the mayor’s office sets aside a portion of the capital budget for the Council to spend as it deems fit.

The Council spends most of its money on public schools, libraries and parks. But increasingly over the last five years, resources have been directed to outside nonprofit groups. The current capital budget shows at least 570 projects totaling more than $490 million, though the city no longer supports many of the projects.

Many of those projects that never came to fruition had sailed through a review process that required only minimal vetting and that the City Council used for many years to set spending priorities, according to city records and interviews. Only after the money was allocated and on the books did the vetting process really begin.

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