MTA Announces Bus Time Roll Out Plan
Bus Time has been a huge hit for riders since it initially debuted on 2 Manhattan bus lines & eventually leading to 2 in Brooklyn & all of Staten Island & most recently the Bronx. The agency has announced a roll out plan which will bring it to the rest of the city. Here is more on that:
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) today announced the timetable and sequence in which it will expand MTA Bus Time™, the agency’s online real-time bus tracking service. All bus routes in Manhattan will receive Bus Time this year, followed by Brooklyn, and then Queens, which will be completed by April 2014.
“Bus Time has proven extremely popular among bus riders on Staten Island and the Bronx – and I can tell you that because customers have come to me on buses in the Bronx and said we did a really great job on Bus Time,” said Fernando Ferrer, MTA Acting Chairman. “They find it useful and easy to access, and I think that’s a tremendous endorsement of what we have been doing. Bus Time is so helpful to our customers that we have scheduled an extremely aggressive timetable to introduce it to three other boroughs.”
Bus Time takes the wondering and uncertainty out of waiting for the bus. Through text messaging, web, or apps, Bus Time allows customers to learn how far away the next bus is from a given stop.
To use Bus Time, customers simply send a text message from any cell phone with SMS or MMS text messaging to 511123, visit bustime.mta.info, or use a variety of apps created by third party tech developers using Bus Time data.
For a short MTA video explaining how Bus Time works, click this YouTube link: http://youtu.be/eIBcn3tCLMg
Bus Time launched on Staten Island in January 11, 2012, and was expanded to the Bronx in early November 2012. In addition to all bus routes serving those boroughs, it is also available on the B61, B63, M34, M34A, M100 and Q50.
The MTA operates the largest bus fleet of any public transportation provider in North America: 5,700 buses operate out of 28 depots on 300 routes serving 2.6 million customers per day.
Hopefully riders throughout the city will take advantage of this when it becomes available systemwide. While it is not a cure all for all that is wrong with buses in the city, it does help you make decisions with actual useful information.
xoxo Transit Blogger
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