Buses on Fordham Road in the Bronx are set to get faster under a new redesign plan for one of the borough's busiest corridors. On Wednesday, the city's Department of Transportation and the MTA announced that work is beginning to change the bus lanes along Fordham Road, a route where buses currently crawl through heavy traffic at painfully slow speeds.
The centerpiece of the plan is a new set of offset bus lanes, which will be built from Bronx Park to Sedgwick Avenue. Instead of running along the curb as they do now, the bus lanes will be shifted away from it, a change the city says will give buses a clearer and less congested path through the corridor as they move riders across the borough.
With the bus lanes moving off the curb, the curbside lane will take on a new role under the redesign. That lane will instead be set aside for deliveries to local businesses and for pickups and drop-offs, an arrangement meant to keep those everyday activities from blocking the buses that have to share the busy street.
City officials say the overhaul is designed around how the neighborhood actually gets around, noting that most of the community relies on mass transit rather than cars. Clearing the way for buses, they argue, is about saving people time and money while making daily commutes more comfortable and far less stressful for those who depend on them.
The scale of the route helps explain the push behind the project. According to the Department of Transportation, an average of 130,000 people ride the bus on the Fordham Road route every single day, making it one of the most heavily used bus corridors in the Bronx and across the wider city.
The need for the changes is clear in the numbers on the ground, where buses along the route currently travel at less than five miles per hour. The city says the redesign will help riders get where they need to go faster, more safely and more reliably, easing one of the slowest stretches of the bus network in the borough.