Latest New York City Comptroller report shows over 50% of NYC bus lines across five boroughs received D or F grade

A new report by New York City (NYC) Comptroller Brad Lander showed 186 of 332 of NYC’s bus lines operating across the five boroughs received a D or F grade. The report evaluated every city bus line’s on-time performance, speed and the frequency of service delays by leveraging real-time Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) bus data.  

The report, Life in the Slow Lane: A Report Card for NYC Buses, builds on Lander’s April 2025 report, Behind Schedule, that documented how bus speeds remain stagnant over the last decade despite the NYC Department of Transportation and MTA’s pledges to improve the nearly one-in-three buses that fail to arrive at scheduled stops on time. 

“New York City is home to the largest bus network in all of North America, yet pedestrians can walk faster than some buses, like the M34 in Midtown,” Lander said. “New Yorkers deserve a system that actually gets people where they need to go. From Brooklyn seniors waiting over 20 minutes for bunched buses to Manhattan commuters crawling at slow five mph speeds, the impact of the city and MTA’s failures is unmistakable and felt daily for thousands. Our office’s report card offers a clear roadmap to pinpoint the most necessary interventions to improve bus service for all.”  

Key findings of the report 

The report found consistent patterns of underperformance across the city’s bus system and provides granularity to the disparities between boroughs and service lines: 

• A majority of buses perform  below average standards: 56% of bus lines received a grade of D or lower due to bunching and consistently failed to arrive at scheduled stops on time. By comparison, only 27 lines (8%) received a B or higher. Just seven bus lines throughout the city received an A grade. 
• Almost three-quarters (73%) of Manhattan buses got a D or F, worse than in any of the other four boroughs, largely due to heavy traffic in Manhattan, where some buses run at speeds as low as five mph. 
• Approximately 15% of Brooklyn buses are bunched, meaning they fail to maintain even spacing along their routes, creating unreliable service and wait times regularly in excess of 10 minutes for riders on lines where average wait times should be no more than five minutes. The 15% rate is considerably higher than the citywide average of 10.6%.  
• Express buses have higher average speeds but a much lower on-time reliability rate than the system overall. Many express buses travel across bridges, highways and tunnels, allowing them to reach speeds most local buses cannot. However, they fail to reach stops at their scheduled times compared to local or Select Bus Service (SBS) buses. All of the 10 bus lines with on-time performance rates below 50% are express buses. 
• SBS lines perform slightly better than local and express buses overall, as 16% of SBS bus routes received A or B grades compared to just 8% of routes overall. The report notes the success is likely attributable to stop consolidation and all-door boarding on these routes. 

According to the report, while the persistent issues with bus speeds and reliability hamper bus services, they’re some areas of improvement. Using the most recent data before and after the implementation of congestion pricing in January 2025, Lander’s report finds that the 106 bus lines operating in the congestion pricing zones say reliability scores improve by 9.2 percent in the five months after implementation. Express buses saw the largest growth in speeds throughout this period. 

The report says that while solutions like dedicated busways, transit signal priority and automated enforcement are effective tools to boost bus performance, they have not met their full potential in NYC, and the report offers a clear path for identifying underperformance and provides a framework to measure meaningful outcomes.  The report recommends the city and MTA set performance-based goals for improving bus performance.  

According to the report, public reporting should link policy interventions and new infrastructure to impacts for bus riders. Potential performance targets could include: 

• Increasing speeds by 15% citywide, moving 90% of C-grade bus lines to B-grade or better. 
• Reducing the bunching rate on high-frequency bus routes from 10.6% to 5%. 
• Improving reliability on the 40 worst-performing bus lines. 

“The more than one million New Yorkers who rely on the bus every day experience a system that is too often unreliable and slow,” said Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. “We know how important reliable bus transit is for our communities and our economy, and we must take steps to speed up service, from fully funding and implementing the Streets Master Plan and improving bus lanes citywide, to implementing all-door boarding on all buses. Thank you to Comptroller Lander for continuing to shed light on the need for more reliable bus service in Manhattan and across the city.” 

Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso added, “Comptroller Lander’s report shines a light on an issue all too familiar to New Yorkers: slow, unreliable bus service. Buses are essential for intraborough transit in Brooklyn and yet there has been no measurable improvement to service in decades. My 2025 Comprehensive Plan for Brooklyn outlines several solutions for improving bus commutes, including a redesigned bus network that better connects riders to the subway, improving crosstown service between Bushwick, Bed-Stuy and downtown Brooklyn, automated parking enforcement and upgrading select bus service to a fully traffic-separated bus rapid transit network. New Yorkers deserve a bus network that is speedy and effective, and I thank Comptroller Lander for holding our leaders accountable.” 

The full report can be found on Comptroller Lander’s website.