Street Cheats: One Cop Delaying Hundreds of Bus Riders

Yesterday, multiple members of the City Council used their platform on the transportation committee to vent about buses that leave the bus lane and venture into general traffic lanes.

Despite representing districts where the vast majority of people don’t own cars and rely on buses and trains, council members including Ruben Diaz Sr. and Fernando Cabrera just couldn’t see past their own experience behind the windshield. Instead of seeing bus lanes as a way for New Yorkers to bypass the congestion caused by space-hogging personal cars, they perceive them as slights to their personal status as motorists.

Maybe because so few council members ride the bus, no one at the hearing mentioned one of the real scourges of the city’s bus lane network: cops in bus lanes. Someone should show them this photo that @TheDistancePlan tweeted out last week.

It’s a view of 125th Street from Metro-North’s Park Avenue viaduct, in the 25th Precinct, where several buses had to merge into the general traffic lane in the span of a few minutes. In other words, hundreds of people were delayed by this single police officer who couldn’t be bothered to park a few feet away:

The most frustrating part is that there are parking spots well within walking distance @NYCMayorsOffice @NYPDONeill pic.twitter.com/olEYfET27z — Garrett Paul Benson (@gpaulbenson) April 7, 2018

A City Council oversight hearing castigating NYPD for degrading the city’s transit improvement projects could have sparked some fireworks and generated a few stories in the major dailies. Stuck in their windshield perspective, Diaz and company missed their chance.