‘Get Out of Our Bus Lanes’: New York’s Message to Drivers

Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out how a push to keep bus lanes clear is going. We’ll also get details on legislation to limit background checks on prospective tenants in New York City.

They are almost as much a part of the cityscape as the buildings: Cars or delivery trucks stopped in lanes painted red and marked for buses only.

Richard Davey — the president of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority unit that runs the buses and subways in the city — said he saw multiple cars and trucks parked in bus lanes when he took the M31 bus to a news conference last week. The route includes a 1.1-mile-long stretch of bus lanes on 57th Street.

The news conference was about cars and trucks parked in bus lanes. When Davey got there, he stood at a podium with the words “If you’re not on the bus” under the microphone. He did not take long to finish the sentence: “Get out of our bus lanes.”

It is a message that has been amplified in the last couple of weeks by the Police Department’s Bus Lane Enforcement Task Force, which assigned roughly 85 traffic enforcement agents to bus-lane duty on weekdays. The agents are writing summonses when cars or trucks are parked in bus lanes; they are also calling in tow trucks when drivers are nowhere to be seen.