Manatees, fittingly called “sea cows,” drift languidly through the shallow ocean at 5 mph, munching on plants and fattening up to 1,300 pounds. For much of 2019, the sluggish creatures swam faster than New York City’s 14th Street bus, the M14A. The bus typically inched across car-clogged Manhattan at around 4 mph — so slow that local transit groups crowned M14A the slowest bus in The Big Apple.
Yet in early October 2019, the maligned 14th Street buses were bestowed a change of fate. The city banned private vehicles from driving — or, more aptly, sitting in bumper to bumper traffic — on 14th Street, a route striking straight through the heart of Manhattan. For 16 hours a day, essentially only buses and trucks are now allowed on a vital stretch of 14th Street. A sea of polluting, honking automobiles has parted; the municipal buses can taste freedom.
The results are no joke. According to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s latest numbers, 5,000 more people rode the bus each weekday after the ban started, and travel times across the most congested portion of 14th Street were slashed by over 35 percent. In December 2019, average bus speeds doubled from the previous December — to speeds even faster than a manatee.
In our growing cities and urban places, where more and more Americans are expected to settle in the coming years, cars don’t always have to be dominant, just because for the better part of a century, they have been. One lane of traffic can, generally, carry between 600 to 1,600 cars per hour. Yet a lane for buses transports between 4,000 to 8,000 people each hour, according to the National Association of City Transportation Officials. Car bans aren’t rebellious or radical — they can be positively logical.
“You’re seeing something long overdue in realizing that we have to undo the dominance of the car in order to create space for the modes that can most effectively carry people,” said Steven Higashide, the director of research at TransitCenter, a public transit organization.
