MTA Bus Schedules

To the MTA:

This letter has been ten years in the making. Back in 1997, when I first started taking city buses regularly, I'd hop on the Q30 to my high school in the morning and take it back home in the afternoon. Although I haven't ridden the bus on a daily basis since then, I still ride it often enough, now mostly within Manhattan.

One gripe I've had with nearly every busline I've ridden, throughout the five boroughs, from swerve of Shore Road to bend of Bay Ridge, is the complete and utter uselessness of the bus schedule.

Sure, a bus schedule looks good on paper: there it shows buses arriving at fixed times spaced out throughout the day. But if you manage to actually ride the bus, you realize that the times listed on the schedule are wholly unconnected with the times at which the buses actually come. The buses come when they come, regardless of the schedule. The schedule times don't even seem to reflect the amount of buses that come during a particular time period. For instance, I've noticed that the Uptown M4 schedules seem to list about twice as many buses arriving each hour than actually arrive.

Maybe I'm wrong for consulting the schedules in the first place. Typically mounted on a crooked bus stop sign, they tend to be faded to near illegibility and covered in Dinkins-era scratchitti--all signs that seem to scream, "I AM UNRELIABLE." But I'm not the person I'm writing this letter for. I'm writing for the millions of tourists and transplants who come to this city and decide to take the bus, only to stand slack-jawed when they see that their bus hasn't come, even though the schedule says that two should have. For these people, the system needs to be fixed.

Now I'm not going to suggest that the MTA have its buses run on time. In this town, it's hard enough to approximate how long it might take to walk two blocks in midtown, so I don't expect a bus driver to be able to stick to a specific time table for a 20-mile route. And after all, we're not some fancy-pants European city. We're not Tokyo. We're New York, goddamit, and crowded streets and hectic mass transit systems are part of our way of life. I wouldn't dream of changing it.

Instead, I'm writing to recommend one of two simple solutions:

1) Rather than listing specific times, simply list the number of buses that come during the hour, and state when they generally show up (e.g., Sunday: One around 2:00, one about 2:30, and then two right after each other around 2:45).

2) Add a general disclaimer about the unpredictability of bus arrival times. (e.g., Please note that bus arrival times cannot be predicted with any reliability. The times listed on the schedule should therefore be understood to represent only approximate arrival times).

The above are just two ways of telling Joe and Jane Tourist that the bus system isn't exactly a Swiss clock. Or a Swiss bus.

With such a change in place, the bus schedules might actually become more than just a scratchboard for vandals.

Thank you,
Christopher W.