Want fewer cars in Queens? Build a bus lane
If Western Queens had 20,000 fewer cars the borough would have 80 football fields worth of new space. Here’s how we get it done.
Lowering car ownership rates in Western Queens could reclaim hundreds of acres of parking for open streets, new transit, and greenspace. But that reality is only possible if we actually make it easier to get around Queens without a car.
Queens is New York's largest borough by land area, yet our subway system is mainly designed to move people in and out of Manhattan rather than between Queens neighborhoods. That often leaves residents choosing between a long transit trip and a much shorter drive.
Just look at how long the transit commute is between my apartment near Astoria Park and Travers Park in Jackson Heights. A quick search on Google Maps shows it would take 40 minutes and two buses to arrive by transit, versus a 13-minute trip by car. As long as that type of discrepancy exists between driving and transit, car ownership in New York will be higher than it could be.
But there is a solution: elevating our bus service to a world-class level. Imagine a reality where buses arrive every 5 minutes on major corridors, traveling by bus is as quick as driving, and it becomes the first transportation choice of Queens residents. Many cities across the country and the world have achieved this type of system. We can do it too.
MTA Data Tells Us How to Make The Buses Better
It’s 8:30 a.m.; you’re running to catch the bus. You arrive at the bus stop, and you wait. The Transit app has been telling you the bus is 1 minute away for the last 5 minutes. It finally arrives, but it’s now packed, taking longer to board. Delays ripple forward.
That’s the experience many Western Queens bus riders face. Civic Pulse evaluated the performance of 14 bus routes serving Western Queens from 2019-20241, and according to MTA data, only 64.5% of passenger journeys on these routes were completed within five minutes of their scheduled time. Riders on these routes spent an average of 2.75 additional minutes waiting at the bus stop beyond their expected wait.
These delays may sound small, but they add up. If you can’t reliably predict whether a trip will take 30 minutes or 40 minutes, you start planning around the delay or choosing another way to get around.
The Q69 local bus route, connecting Jackson Heights and Long Island City, offers a useful case study. Performance hasn’t improved in a straight line, but there are clear trends. Bus lanes were implemented on a large chunk of the Q69 corridor in 2022. Between 2019 and 2024, the share of Q69 passenger journeys completed within five minutes of schedule increased from 65.7% to 73.8%, while additional time spent waiting at the bus stop fell by about 40 seconds. As service improved, ridership also recovered: average weekday ridership increased from 6,698 in 2022 to 7,358 in 2024, about a 10% increase.
One route does not prove causation. But when we zoom out across Queens, the same pattern emerges. We analyzed ridership data for 41 Queens bus routes 2 over a five-year period from 2019 to 2024 and found that each additional minute of additional bus-stop waiting was associated with about a 3.6% reduction in weekday ridership3. Conversely, the model implies that one minute less additional waiting is associated with about 3.8% higher weekday ridership4.
New York isn’t an outlier; research across the country has found the same relationship between service and ridership. Transit researchers in Los Angeles found that cutting bus headways by 10 minutes increased the odds that car owners would choose transit by roughly 30%.
A 2021 comparison of bus service in Portland, Miami, Minneapolis–St. Paul and Atlanta similarly found that increasing service increased ridership, with the biggest returns on routes that were less frequent to begin with. A roughly 10% increase in service was associated with about a 7% increase in ridership.
It’s a pretty simple idea….. make buses frequent, and people ride them! But doing that requires attacking the problem from both sides: running buses frequently enough that riders can count on them and redesigning streets so buses can move as quickly as possible.
If buses are getting stuck in traffic due to poorly designed routes or unenforced bus lanes, the impact of improvements will be diluted.
This dynamic stood out in the data we analyzed. Many bus routes achieved their highest reliability during COVID, when traffic cratered, and buses owned the streets. But by 2022, as normal traffic patterns returned, reliability plummeted and—on many routes—was worse than pre-pandemic.
Service and street improvements go hand in hand; we can’t have one without the other. But the goal always remains the same: creating a bus system that riders can count on, where jumping in a car for daily life becomes optional.
So Where Does This Leave Queens and New York’s System
What does getting to world-class transit mean? It means the MTA and the NYC Department of Transportation should commit to clear, systemwide service standards: buses at least every 5 minutes during rush hour and every 10 minutes the rest of the day. And those buses should be held to clear reliability standards so riders can actually count on that frequency.
Major east-west corridors like Astoria Boulevard and 30th Avenue should be upgraded with dedicated bus lanes or busways where appropriate, all-door boarding, transit signal priority, and the frequent all-day service needed to make routes like the Q19 and Q18 true rapid-transit options. The service standard—not the number of bus lanes, signals, or individual projects completed—should drive investment.
People can’t take transit that never shows up or doesn’t exist. If we’re going to have poor weekend transit with 15- or 20-minute headways on our buses and trains, then, yes, many households will continue to own cars. But that’s a choice.
So is the alternative. Twenty thousand fewer cars wouldn’t disappear from Queens because we asked people to drive less. They would disappear one household at a time because thousands of Queens residents decided they no longer needed one.
That’s how those 80 football fields of space become possible. If we want fewer cars taking up space in our neighborhoods, we first have to provide a transit system good enough to make people leave their cars behind.
We used 2019-2024 ridership numbers and performance data due to the 2025 Queens Bus Redesign. Many routes changed substantially, making an apples-to-apples comparison difficult 2025 onwards.
These routes were chosen because they had the most reliable yearly and daily ridership counts. At least from what I found!
Other measures of bus performance, including additional travel time and overall journey reliability, moved in the expected direction but were not statistically significant. We used a regression to evaluate trends and correlations. Tables linked above for reader review and oversight.
The regression found that one additional minute of waiting was associated with a 3.6% reduction in ridership. Because the analysis uses a log-linear model, reversing the change implies about a 3.8% increase in ridership for one minute less waiting. The relationship is associative, not causal.