Anyone who rides buses that travel close to the Atlantic Yards site knows how painfully slow they can be. And in fact three of the buses that serve the area – the B63, B52 and B41 – are some of the slowest in Brooklyn, according to the recently released results of the Straphangers Campaign's Pokey Awards (click here for the table of results). The B63, which runs along Flatbush Avenue and Fifth Avenue, was found to be Brooklyn's second slowest bus; the B52, which serves Greene Avenue and Fulton Street, is the third slowest; and the B41 on Flatbush is only marginally faster than these routes. And if the Atlantic Yards plan gets built as currently proposed, these buses will get even more unbearably slow.

This is because the Atlantic Yards project, despite sitting adjacent to the some of the best transit connections in the city, hasn't been planned with transit in mind. Despite the fact that the DEIS anticipates that traffic generated by the development will slow buses, the only mitigation proposed is to simply add more buses: "additional buses may therefore be needed…to maintain the current headways and service schedules”. But adding more vehicles to already congested streets will simply make things worse.

A real transportation plan to make buses work given the transportation impact of Atlantic Yards would look very different. It would push people away from driving cars that clog the streets by reducing parking on the site (and therefore the incentive to drive to and from the site), incorporate traffic calming measures and reduce or eliminate the so-called "drop-off" lanes that will interfere with bus routes. And it would maximise the speed of buses by incorporating exclusive bus lanes on Flatbush Avenue, and not rule out the possibility that the city could implement Bus Rapid Transit in the future (to read more on the possibility of BRT along Flatbush Avenue, see the Atlantic Yards Report article by clicking here). Forest City has publicly acknowledged that we need a transportation plan for this project that works – but right now, the current proposal will make an already congested area much worse.