Queens Buses Are Running Faster After the Redesign, the MTA's Own Figures Say
A year into the Queens Bus Network Redesign, the MTA's spring-to-spring numbers show local buses 1.7 percent faster on weekdays, the new Rush routes 4.6 percent faster, and some riders saving up to 18 minutes.
Queens is the borough that rides the bus — around 800,000 riders a day, in the city where the subway reaches least of where people live — and a little more than a year after the MTA rebuilt its entire bus map, the agency has published its first broad verdict on the experiment: the buses are faster. Comparing spring 2025 with spring 2026, the MTA found Queens local buses traveling 1.7 percent faster on weekdays and 1.9 percent faster off-peak, with the redesign's new Rush routes — local stops at the far end, then express running toward the trains — averaging 4.6 percent faster.
The borough-level average hides the routes where the change is large enough to feel. Riders on the Q51 between South Ozone Park and Cambria Heights are saving up to 18 minutes with new Limited service; B62 riders between Greenpoint Avenue and Queensbridge save up to 11 minutes from a route extension; and new and upgraded bus lanes on Hillside Avenue, installed alongside the redesign, are producing speeds up to 28 percent faster. Citywide, 24 of the 25 routes with the greatest speed increases were Queens routes. Reliability moved with speed: 71.2 percent of Queens trips arrived within five minutes of their scheduled time in the May figure the agency cited, the highest May since the measure began being published outside the pandemic years.
The access numbers may matter more than the speed ones. Since the redesign, 124,000 more Queens residents have a bus that comes every 10 minutes or better between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m., and 68,000 more have 24-hour service, across a network of 124 routes — 94 local and 30 express — drawn from six years of planning, 300 public events and nearly 20,000 comments. New York City Transit President Demetrius Crichlow, in the agency's account, said the redesign is delivering on its promises of faster buses, greater reliability and increased access. The honest caveat is the one the borough figures carry on their face: they describe Queens as a whole, not route by route, and the rider whose bus did not get faster will judge the redesign at their own stop.
