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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