Better Buses Will Be Big for Business on Flatbush: Report

Bus lane paint is red but buses bring the green for local businesses — someone tell Mayor Adams.

Bus riders on Flatbush Avenue do big work propping up the local economy, according to a new report showing that almost 70 percent Flatbush bus riders use it to get to shopping, eating or entertainment destinations — as the mayor’s years-old pledge to build bus lanes on the strip has failed to materialize.

The report from the Riders Alliance and Pratt Center — Better Buses For Flatbush Avenue — relied on interviews with 1,800 bus riders to better understand how people use the bus on Flatbush Avenue and their experience riding. That such an overwhelming number of riders on Flatbush rode to spend money at local businesses demonstrated a phenomenon often overlooked in debates over bus lanes: Bus service is a boon for business.

“I did not expect that the most-common reason people were taking the bus was to spend money,” said Sylvia Morse, the senior program manager of research and policy at the Pratt Center and the research manager for the paper.

“We don’t know if that’s essential errands like grocery shopping or entertainment, dining, things like that, but it’s important that we emphasize that for businesses, having better bus service is good for them. There’s sometimes some tension about that question.”

That “tension” is a frequent roadblock to city efforts to improve speeds and service for riders. In 2020, then-Council Member Peter Koo whipped up a crowd opposed to the Main Street busway in Flushing by yelling that BLM stood for “Business Lives Matter”; in 2019, local merchants sued the city to try to stop a small bus lane project on Fresh Pond Road in Ridgewood.

When the Adams administration proposed a new bus lane or busway on Fordham Road in 2022, business groups came together to kill the sorely needed project, dooming bus riders on the corridor to painfully slow service. On Flatbush Avenue as well, the New York Times in 2022 found a small business owner to complaint that a bus lane on Flatbush — which, again, has yet to materialize — would wreck his business of selling gas to cars.

Opposing bus lanes based on the “…but the economy” argument persists as a myth despite the fact that, like this new report, Department of Transportation surveys frequently show that shoppers get to commercial districts via walking or public transit.

Buses may be crucial to economic activity on Flatbush, but riders on the street’s B41 route are stuck in buses that move slower than 7 miles per hour. As a result, 71 percent of riders who take the bus once per week find it unreliable and experience negative impacts due to slow buses, according to the new report.

Those consequences include 48 percent of Flatbush Avenue bus riders opting to pay for a cab instead of taking the bus and 32 percent of riders losing pay, getting fired or being reprimanded at work for being late because of bus delays.

Mayor Adams, who once vowed to be the “bus mayor,” has also frequently talked about how he’s the mayor for blue collar New Yorkers. But his failure to aggressively push for real bus priority around the city, which hit its nadir this year when the city installed just five miles of bus lanes, contradicts both self-descriptors: Fifty-nine percent of bus riders on Flatbush are Black, 72 percent are women and 49 percent make under $50,000 per year, the study found.

The slow bus service on Flatbush Avenue “is a racist and class-based attack,” Transport Workers Local 100 Vice President JP Patafio said. “We’re talking about working class, poor people that rely on the busses. Who wants to use a bus and to get fired, who can be afford to be fired in this economy?”

“We have to focus that energy that these politicians keep on looking towards middle income or upper income people that drive cars,” Patafio said. “That really takes away from the issue of where it’s supposed to be, which is on the working class people of this city.”

The DOT has pitched three concepts for a bus lane for Flatbush Avenue north of Grand Army Plaza, specifically between Livingston Street and Grand Army Plaza. But it’s unclear what if anything the city will do south of Empire.

A rep for DOT said the agency will study the rest of the corridor in phases after the project north of Grand Army Plaza is finished.

“By redesigning Flatbush Avenue we can speed up bus service to improve the lives of bus riders currently stuck on one of the most congested corridors in Brooklyn — while also enhancing pedestrian safety,” said agency spokesperson Vin Barone.

“We look forward to continued public outreach, design refinement, and completing our traffic analysis in consultation with the community. This process will help inform the best way to make Flatbush Avenue work best for all New Yorkers using the corridor.”