BY KEVIN DUGGAN
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will remove nine bus stops along the B38 between Ridgewood and Downtown Brooklyn when it adds longer buses to the line this September.
The transit agency plans to remove five stops along the route in Ridgewood — and four more in Brooklyn – as it introduces longer buses that will carry up to 20 more passengers at greater speeds starting Labor Day, according to a notice agency’s New York City division sent out to Brooklyn Community Board 2 on Aug. 13.
“These 64-foot articulated buses will replace the 40-foot standard buses that have been operating along the B38 route, in order to improve the route’s efficiency for our customers, and also increase seat capacity on buses in operation,” according to the statement.
The agency will also remove five stops in neighboring Ridgewood, all of which are at one to two block intervals along Seneca Avenue. The lost stops are located at Seneca Avenue at Putnam Avenue (Downtown Brooklyn-bound), Madison Street (Ridgewood-bound), Palmetto Street (Downtown Brooklyn-bound), Grove Street (both directions) and Harman Street (both directions)
Three Bushwick stops will be removed, namely the Ridgewood-bound Kossuth Place and Broadway stop, along with the Downtown-bound Bushwick Avenue stop at DeKalb Avenue, and the two-way stop at Cypress Avenue also at DeKalb Avenue.
The reductions are part of the authority’s plans to take buses off the road and lengthen waits along 23 bus lines citywide — including up to three extra minutes on the B38 — which it says will save $7 million in operating costs, according to internal documents released last month.
Spacing out stops like this is one of the ways the agency plans to make the city’s bus system — the slowest of any major city in the nation — run faster and more reliably, a policy the agency piloted in the redesign of the Staten Island network last year.
Earlier this year, the MTA embarked on efforts to redesign the entire Queens bus route network, something which hasn’t happened in decades. A similar re-examination of bus routes in Brooklyn is also planned.
Robert Pozarycki contributed to this report for QNS.
