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| Re: Queens Transit Service Sufficiency Study (334818) | |||
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Re: Queens Transit Service Sufficiency Study |
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Posted by BrooklynBus on Wed Jun 12 07:09:29 2019, in response to Re: Queens Transit Service Sufficiency Study, posted by Union Tpke on Wed Jun 12 04:44:34 2019. A little personal history first which is relevant. After I got my MS in urban planning from Columbia with my masters thesis on revising Brooklyn bus routes,, I got a job as a planner in the Transportation division at the NYC Department of City Planning. They asked me what I would like to do. I told them study Brooklyn bus routes. They responded that they just got federal monies and they don't know what to do with it so they will do a Brooklyn Bus Study. That was in 1974. We soon realized that $200,000 was not enough to study the entire borough so it was limited to 86 Street and to East New York. The 86 St part was then expanded to southwest Brooklyn. (I have both reports in my house.)The result was the Southwest Brooklyn changes in 1978 that only happened because of a lawsuit, because the MTA resisted making any changes. They vowed that no other agency would ever again tell them how to plan. That still stands today. So they said they will apply for any federal monies so that DCP or DOT doesn't get it. So when more federal monies became available in1979, They received money for a Zone Express study in Southeast Queens which was just concluding when I arrived at NYCT in 1980. They also got money for a Bronx Study also completed in 1980. That may have resulted in the Bronx changes of the mid 1980s. And they got funding for a Brooklyn Sufficiency study in 1979 or 1980. They received $625,000. By the end of 1980, they has spent 2/3 of the money and completed only one third of the tasks. That's when I was brought in to save the study. First I had to apply for $200,000 more to complete the study. But after six months, I was no longer head of bus planning because I couldn't take the diesel fumes because of my asthma. Others were also sick and my boss was afraid I would sue them, that's when I was transferred from East NY to Jay Street where I continued to head the Brooklyn study and bus and subway planning was combined to form Operations Planning in November 1981. It was previously called Rapid Transit Operations Planning and was a division of RTO. The director of Operations Planning was more interested in creating an empire. He wasn't interested in making any improvements. So he applied for grants to study Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island so he could expand his group which only had about ten people, but now had 35. Soon there were about 50 by the time I left. Several years later after long disputes with Surface (the previous name for Buses) they took Schedules and doubled the size of the department to 100. It steadily grew after that. I do not remember which two routes were changed from the Staten Island study but I think it was improved changes to the mall. As far as the Brooklyn Study was concerned, I had designed and costed out in only three months proposals for the entire borough but my boss sabatoged the study by makng me do over the proposals five times creating endless series of alternatives just to keep the study going because he was afraid of repercussions from his bosses if any proposal failed. I was then forced out of Operations Planning. I still think many of the proposals I created then and which were in my masters thesis are still good today. The final report ended up having no proposals, but only showed data from the borough survey of bus riders from the first $300,000 spent. Sorry if I told you more than you wanted to know. Anyway, I have recently resurrected my ideas and am almost ready to publish them. |
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