All-Door Boarding Stuck in Neutral in New York City

Pretty much every city that has considered all-door boarding for buses in the past decade-and struggled to roll out the change on a timeline that would seem commensurate with the task. San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles. The one exception might be Boston, but for some reason, all-door boarding is a lot harder than it looks.

The latest example of the obstructions and frustrations of all-door boarding can be found in New York City. Dave Colon reports that nothing has changed in the city since MTA chairman and CEO Janno Lieber decided in March 2022 to mothball the system’s 10-route all-door boarding pilot.

“When asked if the agency could share anything about whether it was actually going to follow through with the long-delayed pilot, a spokesperson said that the lack of any update spoke for itself,” writes Colon. “That signaled to some longtime advocates that the MTA might never actually do it — and that could result in even more people demanding free buses, which Lieber has dismissed as difficult and experimental.”

As noted by Colon, the MTA doesn’t even need to leave the city for examples of all-door boarding success. “The practice has been used on Select Bus Service, and has even been found to reduce dwell times by as much as 40 percent on some of those routes because passengers were able to pay their fares at fareboxes located at bus stops.”

The saga is made all the more confusing by the fact that the MTA installed OMMY readers on every bus in the MTA fleet in 2021, but it has not turned the machines on. Los Angeles bus riders will also remember riding rapid buses in the Metro system for months with the system for all-door boarding installed but not activated.

Planetizen has been tracking New York’s challenges with all-door boarding since at least 2016, though when last we checked in 2022, it seemed like the city’s improving bus speeds were making a compelling case for all-door boarding throughout the MTA bus system, despite Lieber’s opinions on the subject.