Ride another day: the MTA is finally testing out bike racks on city buses

Just in time for the school year, public transit is finally getting its sh*t together. The MTA, long notorious for disallowing bicycles on city buses, is changing its tune (up) by testing bicycle racks at the front of buses on two of its routes! The routes are just Staten Island-Brooklyn for now, but it’s only a matter of time before it becomes abundantly clear that they should’ve been doing this all along, and the MTA expands the program onto the B-buses in the borough.

Meanwhile, you’ll start seeing those bike racks on the S53 and S93 lines as early as Sunday. This is great news for so many reasons, but mainly because it’s always felt absurd that bikes should be allowed on trains but not on buses. Especially since Brooklyn’s particularly well-equipped with bus lines that take you to corners of the borough you can’t really get to (or from) by subway.

Don’t get too excited about the racks just yet, though: there’s only two on each bus. And they’re first-come first-serve, obviously, so you might be SOL if both spots are taken when you flag down the bus.

But hey, we’re not complaining. This is still a significant win for cyclists, and a welcome improvement from the stringent bus-riding days of yore.

2 Comments

1. 

   Isaac Anderson Sep 2, 2015

   this is so great because now you can do the formerly impossible: take your bicycle over the verrazano-narrows bridge!

   Sep 2, 2015 at 11:27 am

   Reply
2. 

   Matthew Gonzalez Oct 27, 2015

   Now that’s a good government in action – this is not a very expensive improvement that will definitely improve the quality of life of cyclists. Thanks for the article, keep up the awesome blog!

   Oct 27, 2015 at 6:37 pm

   Reply

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