Bus Problems Continue;
RIOC Considers Action

by Jami Bernard

There’s no more depressing sight to a mother trying to herd two young children with colorful backpacks to school than the double doors of a Red Bus slamming shut in her face. That’s what happened at 7:35 a.m. Thursday as one particular mother and her children (and their backpacks), along with an older schoolchild and another woman on her way to work, were turned away from a packed bus at the stop outside the Church of the Good Shepherd.

Thus it goes on the Red Bus line every morning during the commuter rush these days – and this happened to be an unseasonably mild November day. Although rain, even storms, were expected – one man ran to the curb with his umbrella pointing as if to skewer the bus and hold it steady – it was a morning in which anyone who was hale, hearty, and on time could conceivably walk instead of ride. Imagine a colder, wetter day.

This has come to the attention of RIOC president Herb Berman, who acknowledges the problem in his WIRE column today. He proposes commandeering one of the seven Red Buses for Octagon express service during rush hour.

"We are discussing the possibility of using one of our buses as an express bus during rush hour from Octagon to the subway and Tram to relieve the pressure," writes Berman. "That express bus would run every half hour making the express loop, leaving the other buses to handle the remaining demand."

In his column, Berman attributes this possiblity to "the stronger financial position that the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation finds itself in, which in turn is tied to the increased revenue that comes from responsible development." He cites a $30 million reserve fund, the addition in the past year of three buses to the previous fleet of four, and a commitment to preserving "a multiplicity of transportation options because, after all, this is an island."

Berman’s pledge of an express bus is a change from the September RIOC Board meeting, when DHCR Commissioner and RIOC Board Chair Judith Calogero said the only way to improve Red Bus service would be to raise the 25-cent fare, because RIOC didn’t have the funds. Calogero also said at that meeting that RIOC would improve transportation at cost to Islanders only if Islanders took it into their hands to tally daily ridership and get up a petition demonstrating rider frustration.

On Thursday morning, the mother and children who didn’t make it onto the 7:35 a.m. bus were demonstrating their frustration a different way – through the body language of annoyance and despair. Along came another full-to-bursting Red Bus five minutes later; it didn’t even make a pretense of stopping, just zoomed on down Main Street toward the subway station, leaving a growing sea of colorful schoolchild backpacks bobbing on the sidewalk.

According to the bus schedule posted on the website of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corp. (RIOC), rush-hour buses run every 7½ minutes. But because of an increased passenger load from the new Octagon apartments at the north end, the buses have become unmoored from their schedules, which means they bunch and run in packs, leaving gaps in the service.

That’s how the mother and her kids finally got a lift. Hardly three minutes after the second bus ignored the family, a third with plenty of room trundled along. The double doors opened and the bus swallowed up the mother, her children, the older kid, the businesswoman, and six more riders who had joined their group.

Winter 2006-07 can be expected to present new challenges to transportation on Roosevelt Island. The Octagon at the north end and the new buildings of Southtown have added hundreds of apartments to the Island’s population density. The Octagon and 455 Main Street filled up during this past spring and summer, with notable effects on the subway rush hour already observed and reported in The WIRE. Now that the weather is turning, surface commutes are increasingly compromised as well.

As one resident of Island House put it, "It used to be you could time leaving your apartment within two minutes in order to make it to work at a certain time. But now the wait for the Red Bus can be up to half an hour, which adds an hour to your commute. There’s no way to know if you’ll make it on time now."

RIOC hasn’t announced a schedule for implementing an express bus. When it starts, certain kinks will need to be worked out. For instance, would Octagon riders be eligible for only the express service, or would they continue to crowd the regular buses as they came by?

Until that is worked out, there will be more scenes like the one on Thursday, when the Red Bus acted like a toddler who sometimes dawdles, sometimes skips ahead in a burst of energy. There was a nine-minute wait between the nearly empty 7:47 bus and the overloaded 7:56 bus, which then turned away eight riders. In between, a Q102 City bus happened along and picked up stragglers willing to pay full MetroCard fare for the five-minute ride.

The eight left behind by the 7:56 were picked up by the 7:57. The 8:01 picked up 14, including a man on crutches, and the 8:04 and 8:06 had plenty of room to spare. Some buses disgorge riders at the subway and Tram like a clown car, in a seemingly never-ending stream, while others have empty seats.

At 8:14 and 8:15 there was a switcheroo, in which a "bunched" bus pulled around and passed the bus ahead of it outside the Trellis diner.

After the 8:15, the wait for the ensuing buses was, in minutes: 5, 3, 2, 5, 1, 4, 5. A man in a wheelchair waited patiently through four buses, not even trying to get on, until a poky bus ambled along; it was clear that mounting this bus was unlikely to aggravate too many type A clock-punchers.

As a comparison, a WIRE reporter rode one particular Red Bus around and around the Island during a balmy rush-hour morning in October. Again, there was a chance of rain and most people carried umbrellas, but it was still warm and dry enough to walk if necessary.

During those October circuits, no one at a Main Street stop was turned away. But neither was it particularly easy to get on. Morning commuters are disgorged through the Octagon’s main doors in rhythmic bursts tied to the tides of the elevators. Just when the bus doors are about to close, another elevator-load of worker bees swarms forth, delaying that bus and tying up the bunched one behind it.

The average age of an Octagon resident is 27, so the unfortunate visual effect is of a bus service in which the youngest, healthiest specimens always get on and always get seats, while mothers struggling with wriggly children, older people with limited range of motion, and, basically, anyone downriver of the Octagon greets each bus with anxiety, wondering whether this is the bus with their name on it.

"Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s really, really bad," said the October bus driver. "Today is good; I don’t really know why."