Staten Island Riders Flunk Local Transit on Reliability, Eye OMNY and Brooklyn Ferry Fixes

Grim rider verdicts in Staten Island’s latest transit survey signal deeper metropolitan headaches over reliability, crowding, and an uneasy path toward modernization.

A failing grade is usually reserved for the worst offenders. This spring, a transit survey of Staten Island’s bus service—with 908 respondents, representing roughly 23% of those polled—delivered one with a thud. Commuters, battered by delays and busloads packed as tightly as sardines, handed out C’s and F’s for local buses, citing chronic unreliability and endemic crowding on routes such as the S44 and S93. Fare evasion also took a drubbing: 40% of respondents rated fare enforcement as an outright failure, echoing a broader citywide headache.

The survey, orchestrated by Councilmember Kamillah Hanks of the North Shore, is at once a local indictment and a metropolitan symptom. Riders openly cherish the borough’s lifelines—its buses and ferries—but their day-to-day experiences teem with frustration. “Staten Islanders deserve a transportation system that works for them,” Ms Hanks intoned, voicing exasperation that spans the physical divide between the borough and the rest of New York City.

While some surveys, such as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s own polling, told of a slight uptick in satisfaction this spring—including marginally better waiting and travel times—this local effort suggests the bar remains punishingly low. Long waits, recurring trip cancellations, and perennial crowding have left many commuters skeptical of official optimism. In particular, lines connecting major destinations at school transfer and dismissal hours become bywords for discomfort.

Such dissatisfaction transcends inconvenience: buses on Staten Island are not an indulgence, but a daily necessity for thousands otherwise cut off from subway arteries. The borough’s geographic insularity, bounded by water and highways, deepens transit dependency. A failing homegrown network strains already tenuous links to jobs, education, and city life. For seniors and students, the pain is especially acute—OMNY’s widely praised payment system might be fast, but a system only half adopted by express bus riders and the elderly offers little solace to those still fumbling with obsolete MetroCards.

The repeated refrain about fare jumping paints an unflattering picture of the city’s grip on revenue and public order. Passengers, it seems, are regularly boarding via the back without payment, a scenario hardly unique to Staten Island—but one the survey renders in sharper relief. Transit agencies talk a good game about enforcement, but New Yorkers know when rules are selectively observed, and the invisible hand extracting cash from the system as it swells beyond capacity.

As for solutions, Ms Hanks recommends a familiar parade: more buses on overcrowded routes, articulated “accordion” vehicles, a spike in security presence at pressure points, and—crucially—a redesign of the local bus map, whose ossified lines have long lagged behind shifting patterns of demography and commerce. Survey respondents were not all gloom: over half say they would eagerly board a new fast ferry connecting to Brooklyn, a proposal gathering political momentum but long mired in funding uncertainty.

A borough’s ailments, a city’s forewarning

Staten Island’s predicament is, in miniature, a warning for the wider metropolis. Decades of underinvestment and bureaucratic inertia bedevil not just its buses, but New York’s entire surface transit system. While the subway’s struggles tend to dominate headlines, buses—by far the city’s most widely used public vehicles—suffer quietly from slow speeds, unpredictable timetables, and rising fare noncompliance. Nationwide, only a handful of American cities with their scale match New York’s reliance on buses for intra-city movement, and few match its propensity for service interruptions.

The MTA, for its part, points to incremental progress. Customer satisfaction is “up across all boroughs,” the agency’s spokesperson insists, and not without some data to back it. Increased use of OMNY has, indeed, made payment swifter and less prone to jamming at inopportune moments. Yet New Yorkers, Staten Islanders foremost among them, are rightly piqued by the gap between on-paper improvements and the lived reality of a cold platform after three missed buses.

The second-order effects loom large. Chronic unreliability and crowding eat away at productivity, making already puny commutes longer and costlier. Fare evasion starves the system of vital revenues, undermining future investment and risking a spiral into further decline. The political implications, too, are hardly trifling: in a city where outer-borough neglect is a finely honed grievance, local leaders leverage transit woes as evidence of City Hall’s stubborn insularity. Each failed commute is a case study in disaffection.

Nationally, the malaise is familiar, if not as acute. American bus systems are typically farebox-reliant, suffer similar struggles with ageing fleets and weak enforcement, and must now compete with a pandemic-induced surge in car usage. Yet few places combine the logistical challenges of New York’s islanded boroughs with the sheer volume of ridership. London and Paris, by contrast, have poured money and policy muscle behind reliability and criminalized fare evasion more assertively. The MTA’s patchwork progress portends a bumpier path.

What can be done? New York is hardly without remedies, at least on paper. Towering construction budgets, a revitalized city budget, and a visible political consensus all point to the possibility—if not yet the reality—of more resilient, rider-centred transit. Streamlining and redesigning bus routes, adding higher occupancy vehicles, shoring up fare collection (preferably with less paperwork and more muscle), and experimenting with new connections such as brisker ferries constitute a prescription that is tried, if unglamorous.

But progress depends not only on wallets and willpower, but on trust. Surveys such as Ms Hanks’ tell transit officials what their own data sometimes obscure: that for commuters, marginal gains are not enough, and patience is ebbing. Staten Island—the perennial afterthought in the city’s grand schemes—now demands to be heard. Fixing its buses will cost money and political capital. But it would also show that New York can, occasionally, heed its own consultations.

For now, the borough’s failing grades simply codify what most New Yorkers already suspect—a tale of tepid official progress and unflagging civic demand. That politicians and agencies are listening is a start. Turning those ambitions into smoother, swifter journeys will be the real, and overdue, test. ■