March 20, 2004 |
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Editorial |
If the people at RIOC can’t manage a four-vehicle, three-mile bus line, can RIOC run a community? It’s been over three months since the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation started fiddling with Red Bus. The first plan, started December 14, provided unwanted and unneeded northbound service to the small population in Southtown’s underoccupied buildings by reducing northbound service at the subway to every second bus. Any bright third-grader at PS217 could have explained why it was a bad idea to leave the bulk of the Island’s homebound commuters waiting a half-hour and more at the subway for transportation. The February 9 plan provided a southbound stop at Southtown, and any below-average third-grader can observe that the stop is going unused while residents there cut across the landscape to the subway, demonstrating once again that actual users are a whole lot better than a visiting bureaucracy at figuring out what works. Even morning-rush subway riders from the northern reaches of the bus line have figured out that it makes sense to get off the bus at 475 Main Street and follow Southtowners across the landscape, rather than wait through an unwanted side trip to the Tram station. RIOC President Herb Berman has pointed out that the second route was concocted with the help and assent of a committee that included some residents. But none of those residents commute at rush hour, and they chose the route only when Berman accepted a veto, by Southtown developer David Kramer (who says he was speaking for Cornell-Weill and Memorial Sloan-Kettering), that nixed the obvious solution – a safe shortcut path to the subway. (Meanwhile, the top housing managers for both institutions failed to respond to a WIRE e-mail query this week – not even a “no comment.”) Furthermore, no resident on that committee passed on the idea of bus service disconnected from Tram arrivals and a reliable standardized departure time from Motorgate. After day one, hour one of the new schedule, it was clear that unscheduled buses lead to a bad case of bus bunching, leaving huge gaps in service. (Now, the only people working on this matter are RIOC staffers, none of whom live here. The people who’ve already proven they can’t visualize the transportation needs of residents have been given sole charge of finding a solution. In short, baseball fans, we’re probably well on our way to a third strike.) The only sensible response to the first-day failure of each of these attempts would have been a second-day return to the standard routing and scheduling that has worked well for two decades. But RIOC instead kept each failure in place, giving it an undeserved chance at the expense of thousands of Islanders. A conservative calculation suggests that, over the 98 days of this fiasco, at least 13,000 hours of Islanders’ time has been flushed down the drain, and that figures only those forced to wait at the Tram station for an unscheduled bus. The only remaining “experiment” is the one that asks the question: How long will this community of experimental test subjects put up with this? And then, there is the other question: If the people at RIOC can’t manage a four-vehicle, three-mile bus line, can RIOC run a community? |