Five years after the MTA first set about reorganizing the bus network in the borough of Queens, transit officials say they have a final plan — and the new routes could be in place by summer.
“[This] is a big day for Queens and for the MTA,” agency chairman Janno Lieber said Tuesday. “After a lot of back and forth that was conducted with Queens riders, with elected officials and with community stakeholders, we’re now putting out the final version of our proposed Queens bus-network redesign.”
Roughly 80,000 riders use the web of 113 bus routes that run through Queens each day — some of which started as trolley lines more than 75 years ago.
“[Queens riders] deserve a system that gets them where they want to go, where they’re trying to go, rather than on routes designed based on where jobs and schools and retail were back in 1950,” Lieber said. “That is literally the system that we have now, and we have to change it.”
Pending an approval of the MTA’s board, the re-drawn Queens bus map will have 124 routes — 94 local and 30 express — with an emphasis on connecting bus riders to the rest of the city’s transit systems.
Tuesday’s plan, a sweeping overhaul of the biggest borough’s buses, is an addendum to a proposal that was itself billed as final last year.
But Lieber and others said the plan laid out Tuesday represented a series of tweaks made over a year of public outreach.
“We needed to take the time to hear from all of the communities in this incredibly large bus-customer population,” Lieber said.
“It’s final,” Lieber added, “We look at this as a finished product.”
Among the changes from last year’s plan, the MTA will run the Q10 as a so-called “rush route,” with faster service to subway and Long Island Rail Road stations. The plan will also try to address concerns about a proposed Q110 connection at the Floral Park LIRR station.
The new map keeps the Q100 in operation and keeps the Q102’s connection between Roosevelt Island and Queens Plaza. Bus service will be extended in the Rockaways, with the Q22 running limited trips to Bayswater and the Q52 SBS running further east into Edgemere.
The plan reroutes the Q75 to Jamaica, the Q31 down Bell Blvd. from 48th Ave. to 23rd Ave., and runs a new Q74 bus from Forest Hills to Queensboro Community College along Jewel Ave.
The full set of changes can be seen on the MTA website.
The MTA board is expected to vote to approve the redrawn bus map early next year. Transit officials said Tuesday that pending approval, they hope to enact the new bus network in two phases during the summer months.
