Methods

The Buses measure checks the “Next Stop” plan (July 2026) against the MTA's published bus speed data. The plan's targets: 20% faster buses on 50 priority corridors, saving riders up to six minutes per trip.

The rules

• Year-over-year, same month, only. Bus speeds swing seasonally (faster in summer, slower in fall). Comparing July to June manufactures phantom progress; comparing July to last July measures change.
• Weekdays, 7am–7pm. The hours most riders ride.
• Weighted speed = total bus-miles ÷ total bus-hours across every segment a route ran in a month (trip-count weighted), from the MTA's segment-level speeds dataset.
• Baseline = July 2025–June 2026, the twelve months before the plan. June 2026 was not yet published at launch, so the baseline currently covers 11 of those 12 months and will be finalized when June lands (the MTA publishes on a ~6-week lag).
• Riders weight everything. Corridor and citywide averages weight each route by average weekday fare ridership, so a change on a 30,000-rider route counts more than one on a 3,000-rider route. (One exception: the fare-free Q70 uses the plan's cited 9,000 riders, since free rides don't appear in fare data.)
• Express, school, and shuttle services excluded.
• The 20% goal has no plan-stated deadline. DOT and MTA evaluate each corridor 6–12 months after its improvements are built; this measure reports monthly and imposes no deadline of its own.
• Pre-registered next step: today's scores are route-level. Before the first post-plan month is scored, each corridor will also get a segment-clipped baseline - the same weighted-speed formula computed only on the corridor's own street segments - so improvements on a two-mile treatment aren't diluted across a ten-mile route. Both views will be shown; neither replaces the other after results exist. Until then, corridors that share all their routes (the two Lexington Avenue segments, Tremont and Tremont/Cross Bronx) show identical scores.

What this can't see

• Speed isn't reliability: bunching and wait times aren't measured here (yet).
• Fare ridership undercounts free transfers and fare evasion, and counts boardings, not trip lengths. The undercount is not evenly spread across the city, which also tilts rider weighting; plan-cited rider figures (all riders, all day) run higher than the fare-paid 7am–7pm counts shown here.
• Two corridors are future services with no route yet (Tremont/Cross Bronx rapid, Kensington–JFK); they're tracked via today's overlapping routes, clearly marked.
• Corridor→route mapping choices are documented per corridor (“route mapping provenance” on each page). A few of the plan's route counts (e.g. Flatbush's “six routes”) are unnamed in the plan; where sources didn't resolve them, we track the certain core and say so.

Data: MTA Bus Route Segment Speeds and MTA Bus Hourly Ridership. The corridor table is downloadable as CSV; corrections welcome.