Buses: methods

The Buses measure checks the “Next Stop” plan (July 2026) against the MTA's published bus speed data. The plan's targets: 20% faster buses on 50 priority corridors, saving riders up to six minutes per trip.

The rules

• Year-over-year, same month, only. Bus speeds swing seasonally (faster in summer, slower in fall). Comparing July to June manufactures phantom progress; comparing July to last July measures change.
• Weekdays, 7am–7pm. The hours most riders ride.
• Weighted speed = total bus-miles ÷ total bus-hours across every segment a route ran in a month (trip-count weighted), from the MTA's segment-level speeds dataset.
• Baseline = July 2025–June 2026, the twelve months before the plan. June 2026 was not yet published at launch, so the baseline currently covers 11 of those 12 months and will be finalized when June lands (the MTA publishes on a ~6-week lag).
• Riders weight everything. Corridor and citywide averages weight each route by average weekday fare ridership, so a change on a 30,000-rider route counts more than one on a 3,000-rider route. (One exception: the fare-free Q70 uses the plan's cited 9,000 riders, since free rides don't appear in fare data.)
• Express, school, and shuttle services excluded.
• The 20% goal has no plan-stated deadline. DOT and MTA evaluate each corridor 6–12 months after its improvements are built; this measure reports monthly and imposes no deadline of its own.
• Segment-clipped baseline (built July 2026, as this page committed to in advance, before the data existed): alongside the route-level score, each corridor carries a second baseline - the same weighted-speed formula computed only on the corridor's own street segments - so improvements on a two-mile treatment aren't diluted across a ten-mile route. Both views are shown; neither replaces the other. The clipping rule: a segment counts when both of its timepoint endpoints match the corridor's street terms (the same terms that mapped routes to corridors), and corridors named with a cross-street span - the two Lexington Avenue pieces - additionally require the endpoints' cross-street numbers to fall inside the span, which is what finally separates their scores. Where a route has no both-endpoint segment on a short corridor, segments with one matching endpoint stand in, and the corridor's page says so. Timepoints are spaced about a mile apart, so a clipped extent is approximate at its ends by up to a timepoint spacing.

What this can't see

• Speed isn't reliability: bunching and wait times aren't measured here (yet).
• Fare ridership undercounts free transfers and fare evasion, and counts boardings, not trip lengths. The undercount is not evenly spread across the city, which also tilts rider weighting; plan-cited rider figures (all riders, all day) run higher than the fare-paid 7am–7pm counts shown here.
• Two corridors are future services with no route yet (Tremont/Cross Bronx rapid, Kensington–JFK); they're tracked via today's overlapping routes, clearly marked.
• Corridor→route mapping choices are documented per corridor (“route mapping provenance” on each page). A few of the plan's route counts (e.g. Flatbush's “six routes”) are unnamed in the plan; where sources didn't resolve them, we track the certain core and say so.

Data: MTA Bus Route Segment Speeds and MTA Bus Hourly Ridership. The corridor table is downloadable as CSV; corrections welcome.