The city transportation department has another street fight on its hands.
A group of Upper West Siders backed by Councilmember Gale Brewer held a rally on Thursday, arguing the Department of Transporation should drastically scale back its plans to paint a bus lane across 96th Street.
The project, which was proposed by DOT officials in May, would replace a traffic lane with a bus lane in each direction on the street between First and West End avenues with the goal of speeding up the slow-crawling M96 and M106 routes. The redesign would also lengthen three existing bus stops, which would allow for both an M96 and an M106 bus to park at the stop at the same time.
But Brewer — who represents the Upper West Side and parts of Midtown — said the lanes shouldn’t be painted on the West Side, and demanded the DOT consider other ways to speed up bus service in the neighborhood.
“In this particular case, there are concerns that we have,” Brewer said at a rally Thursday. “I think that you have to look at alternatives to making the bus go faster.”
It’s a change of tone for Brewer, who previously publicly supported bus lane redesigns on 14th, 34th and 181st streets. Other neighbors argued the new bus lanes would make it harder for residents to access the curbs and get picked up by cars, even though the proposal would take away hardly any curb space..
It’s the latest instance of a community group pushing back against a street redesign proposed by Adams administration officials. The Department of Transportation last year ago nixed a plan to convert a section of Fordham Road in the Bronx to a bus-priority street after local businesses objected to the idea. The city in 2023 also scaled back its plans to remove traffic lanes on Brooklyn’s busy McGuinness Boulevard after business groups launched an aggressive lobbying campaign against the change.
Sara Lind, co-executive director of local advocacy group Open Plans, said the opposition to the 96th Street plan was made in bad faith, and argued the change would reduce congestion on the street, where city data shows buses average speeds of just 4 mph during the busiest hours of the day.
“The opposition to this bus lane isn’t just out-of-touch, it’s not factual,” Lind said in a statement. “This is a smart, common-sense proposal from DOT that puts the bus lane in the existing travel lane — meaning it won’t change a thing about residents’ access to the curb, or their free parking.”
Transportation department officials said they plan to implement to bus lanes later this year.
“96th Street is one of the city’s busiest crosstown routes for bus riders, yet at rush hours it can be just as fast to walk as it is to take the bus,” department spokesperson Will Livingston said in a statement. “Dedicated bus lanes will make bus service faster and more reliable for more than 15,000 daily bus riders on the corridor.”