Chart of the Day: Speed of Dedicated Bus Lanes in New York City

New York City dragged their crosstown buses kicking and screaming into the 21st century last year with dedicated bus lanes on the East Side. For anyone who hasn’t experienced it, New York City generally has great north-south travel, but horribly slow east-west travel.

Anyway, via Streetsblog, here’s a chart showing the time differential that having dedicated ROW made for the bus system:

nyc bus lanes chart

Dedicated ROW (right of way) for transit is the epitome of prioritization. Without doing this, it’s very difficult to say that a city actually values transit ahead of priority for private automobiles, but in America, these kinds of lanes remain as rare as rare as  a Murray’s silver butterknife steak. (See also: the proposed Nicollet Streetcar.)

Bill Lindeke

About Bill Lindeke

Pronouns: he/him

Bill Lindeke has writing blogging about sidewalks and cities since 2005, ever since he read Jane Jacobs. He is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota Geography Department, the Cityscape columnist at Minnpost, and has written multiple books on local urban history. He was born in Minneapolis, but has spent most of his time in St Paul. Check out Twitter @BillLindeke or on Facebook.