The subway system is one of the crowning achievements – and most frustrating burdens – of New York City.
In contrast, the bus system is the poor relative, often ignored or taken for granted, the last resort for people who need cheap, reliable transportation to the many areas of the city that are harder to reach, and probably always will be.
But the bus system is the lifeline, the “jugular,” one rider observed, for millions of people. In the Bronx, daily ridership is more than 500,000 passengers a day, out of a daily citywide ridership of 2.5 million on roughly 6,000 MTA buses.
City Limits and the NYCity News Service at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism sent reporters out to ride some of the Bronx buses on a recent mid-summer weekday. Here’s what they saw and what they heard about how Bronx passengers rely on bus service – even as they grumble that it is sometimes unreliable.
