In May, bus speeds throughout the city averaged 7.9 miles per hour, about where they were in 2019.

“Definitely there’s a lot of congestion on the road these days,” said Chris Pangilinan, the MTA's chief of operations planning. “I think we’ve seen in some of the stats that the car entries into the city have actually gone up higher than pre-COVID levels on some days.”

Riders along Flatbush Avenue say because of it, routes like the B61 and B41 need improvement.

“We going all the way down by Church Avenue,” said Brooklyn resident Luis Valdez, who added that it is a long ride. “With the bus, like a half an hour trip. With your own car: 15, 10 minutes.”

The city said help is coming. Even though congestion pricing is paused, the Department of Transportation is proceeding with projects it laid out in its “Connecting to the Core” plan. One of them is a bus lane on Flatbush Avenue.

“This is one of 37 projects that we’ve been working on for months at DOT,” Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said. “And this is only the beginning of the community engagement.”

The first phase will run through Downtown Brooklyn from Tillary Street to about Grand Army Plaza, where speeds in some parts, especially between Livingston and Atlantic, can average below 4 miles per hour.

The DOT has three options for the public weigh in on: a curbside lane, which has its pitfalls with delivery trucks parking to serve businesses along the route; offset lanes that allow for parking, though some drivers end up double-parking; and center-running, which on 161st Street in the Bronx increased speeds by as much as 45%.

Riders say anything is better than nothing.

“That would do very, very good,” Canarsie resident Colin Franlyn said. “They have that in Downtown Manhattan.”

Flatbush Avenue carries on average 132,000 daily riders on a dozen bus routes, one of the busiest in the city. The MTA is pushing the DOT to add bus lanes to more corridors, as required by the New York City Streets Plan.

“We’ll continue supporting our partners at DOT to get more bus lanes out,” Pangilinan said.

Other major streets getting new or enhanced bus lanes include 96th Street, 79th Street, 34th Street and 2nd Avenue in Manhattan; a handful in Brooklyn, including Church Avenue; Richmond Avenue on Staten Island; and Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. Hillside Avenue is among the three in the works in Queens. But bus lanes are not the only strategy for speeding up buses.

“There’s gonna be the enforcement efforts that we're working with our partners [on],” said MTA senior vice president of buses Frank Annicaro. “With the traffic enforcement division of NYPD, and then again ABLE and ACE.”

Automated cameras mounted to buses that issue parking tickets to vehicles blocking buses and bus stops are critical. That’s because the paint on the new bus lanes probably won’t dry until the spring of 2025.  

Meanwhile, the city is way behind the amount of bus lanes it is supposed to build by law. Last year, the DOT produced only 15 new or enhanced miles of bus lanes, far from the 30 expected per year.