Centro buses carried almost 10,000 fewer people in May 2024 than they did in May 2023. That’s the second time year-over-year ridership has declined in the last 3 months after 35 straight months of growth. With overall ridership still 25-30% below pre-pandemic levels, the causes of the drops need to be identified and addressed.
One obvious culprit for lagging ridership is insufficient service. May’s drop in absolute ridership (1.8%) was accompanied by an even bigger drop in service (2.7%), so ridership per revenue hour actually increased for the 36th month in a row. Syracuse’s transit service still hasn’t recovered from the drastic 2021 cuts caused by Centro’s inability to hire and retain bus drivers—scheduled weekday hub departures are down 17% compared to 2020—and fewer buses on the streets mean riders have fewer opportunities to catch a ride. It’s a fair bet that total ridership would have continued its post-pandemic recovery if service levels had remained stable or improved.
May’s ridership decline is complicated by the new service model in Rome. Centro combines Syracuse and Utica-Rome in its monthly reports to the Federal Transit Administration, and recent drops in overall ridership have coincided with Centro’s rollout of a new two-tiered service model that pairs higher frequencies through high-ridership areas with on-demand service for lower-ridership neighborhoods. In theory, that model could improve overall ridership by focusing service where it’s most likely to be ridden, but those service improvements might take time to generate increased ridership while cutting lines from lower-performing areas might have an immediate negative effect on ridership.
So it’s possible that the moderate declines in total ridership over the Syracuse-Utica-Rome area are the result of a transition to Rome’s new service model, or it might be the case that the new service model is improving ridership and covering up even greater losses in Centro’s other markets.
Whatever the explanation for May’s ridership declines, it’s a worrying sign. Syracuse needs and deserves better transit service—we punch above our weight nationally on bus ridership, walkability, and car-independence. All of that makes this a better place to live, and all those good things are only possible with a useful and reliable public transit system.
But the past few years of poor service are enough to push people into cars. When the bus runs less than once an hour, when it doesn’t run past 7pm, when it can’t get you where you need to go when you need to be there, people are going to look for other options to get around. A lot of the time that’s going to mean buying a car, and once someone has made that investment they’re not coming back to the bus even if service does eventually get better. In order to build a better Syracuse, we need to keep that from happening by getting buses back on the streets.
Centro’s bus network is built around the ‘lineup’—a tool that facilitates connections between bus lines but constrains Centro’s ability to provide the fast, frequent, reliable service that Syracuse needs and deserves. The lineup influences almost every service decision Centro makes, and so it is an extremely important principle for understanding why Syracuse’s transit operates as it does and how the system might be made better.
A lineup is when multiple buses—as few as 8 and as many as 20, but usually about 15—arrive at the Hub, layover, and then depart simultaneously. It’s an impressive sight as buses pull in one after another, riders speedwalk between connections, operators trade off shifts, and then all the buses leave together with a cacophony of honking, shouts, and revving engines. If you’ve ever seen a row of buses running north up Salina or State Streets, that’s the immediate aftermath of a lineup. On Centro’s current reduced (since 2021) service, 89% of runs begin at one of the 31 daily lineups. They are the organizing principle of Syracuse’s transit network.
Buses leave the Hub in bunches throughout the day
Lineups allow Centro to facilitate transfers despite its terrible service frequencies. Buses regularly run on 40 minute (or longer!) headways, so if the schedules weren’t timed to all arrive at the Hub simultaneously, then riders trying to make connections could be stranded at the transfer point. Anybody unwilling or unable to wait that long would be effectively confined to travel along whatever bus line was within walking distance from their home. Lineups avoid that problem by scheduling many different lines to meet up at one place at the same time so riders can easily transfer between a number of different lines. This gives riders access to a huge portion of Centro’s total network whenever they catch a bus heading to a lineup.
That’s the central promise of Centro’s service: the buses might not run very often, and they might not run very fast, but if you catch one headed Downtown, then you have access to a pretty large area of Onondaga County.
But to get this massive benefit, Centro has to give up a lot. Because the lineup requires scheduling every single bus line in relation to the entire system as a whole, and because it requires every line to start from a single point, it makes the transit network difficult to adapt and imposes huge efficiency costs. Here are three ways the lineup constrains Centro’s service
Two buses on their way from a lineup run back to back on James Street
Bunching
In a high frequency system, ‘bunching’ (when two buses on the same street run close together) is a huge problem that agencies spend a lot of time trying to solve. Bunching is bad because it effectively lengthens headways and makes some buses overcrowded while leaving others relatively empty. This wastes valuable operating capacity.
The lineup is basically one big intentional bus bunch. The buses all leave at once, and they travel in packs through the City’s center before eventually branching off to serve individual neighborhoods. The most egregious case of bunching occurs on James Street below Oak. There, the 80 and 20 buses run back to back 20 times a day. Centro spends enough operating money on this corridor to run 17 minute headways, but the lineup’s forced bunching wastes so many resources that Centro only manages 26 minute headways here. A similar example occurs on the Eastside where the 76, 62, and 68 have the resources to run on 16 minute headways from Downtown all the way to Westcott Street, but forced bunching doubles average headways on the Eastside to 32 minutes.
Inflexible route design
If every bus line is supposed to arrive at and depart from the Hub at the same time, then every line needs to take the same amount of time to make its run and return to the Hub for the next lineup. Look at Centro’s timetables and you’ll see that most buses take about 35 minutes to get from the Hub to their last stop, and another 35 minutes to get back to the hub.
But it doesn’t make sense for every bus line to go in one direction for exactly 35 minutes. To fit that rigid schedule, some buses crawl along meandering routes and others drive into low-ridership areas just to fill the time. This wastes valuable operating capacity that could be better used running more buses through high ridership areas.
The lineup forces bus lines to terminate Downtown instead of allowing riders to travel across town
No crosstown lines
If every single Centro bus line starts and ends its runs at the Hub, then no lines run through the Hub. That means every crosstown trip requires a transfer, and it makes many trips take longer than they really should.
Since every bus line starts at the Hub, it’s simple enough to imagine combining lines from opposite sides of the City—the 52 (Court Street) and 54 (Midland Avenue), say, or the 10 (South Salina) and 16 (North Salina) maybe—to reduce the need to transfer by giving people seamless crosstown rides. In fact, Centro does this in a way by interlining those routes; if you take the 110 to the Hub and just stay in your seat through the lineup, your bus will eventually turn into the 116 and take you up North Salina Street. But this doesn’t really give people the benefits of a crosstown route because they still have to hang out at the Hub through the whole lineup process. In effect, it imposes the time penalty of a transfer on every single crosstown rider even if they don’t have to transfer at all.
Without the need for a lineup-induced layover, a single bus could run straight through the Hub, and Centro could link routes from opposite sides of the City to give people seamless crosstown rides.
The lineup is highly effective at connecting a couple dozen different bus lines so that riders can make transfers relatively easily. But the lineup also stands in the way of Centro making the kind of service changes that riders have been demanding for years now. Above all else, riders want more buses running more often, and the lineup fundamentally reduces service frequency. Any realistic path towards providing the kind of high-frequency transit service that Syracuse needs and deserves leads away from total reliance on the lineup.
“Affordable housing” has at least three different meanings in Central New York right now, and as more and more people are talking about housing, those conflicting definitions are confusing our conversations on the topic.
The first and most common meaning is something like ‘reasonably priced housing.’ Housing costs were pretty low and pretty stable around here for decades before the pandemic. Most people who had a full-time job expected to be able to find housing where they wanted to live without breaking the bank. Our area’s ‘affordable housing’ meant people could comfortably find a place to live, and it has long been one of the first things people point to when talking about local quality of life. Maybe you couldn’t find a mansion, but there are plenty of starter homes, fixer uppers, and good deals out there for people to find housing they can afford.
At root, this is a first-person understanding of affordability. What’s ‘reasonable’ is what I’d be willing to pay, and a lot of people who paid a lot less for their housing a long time ago find today’s prices unreasonable. People who paid $75,000 for their house 30 years ago and might have thought they could sell for $150,000 in 2019 can’t believe similar houses in their neighborhood now go for $300,000. People who have paid $900 a month in rent for years are now seeing apartments listed for $1,500, $2,500, and $3,500. It’s shocking, and people reasonably ask “who can afford that?”
The second definition of ‘affordable’ attempts to answer that question. Banks and nonprofits and policy people consider housing to be affordable when it costs 30% or less of the occupying household’s income. The idea is that when a household spends more than 30% of their income on rent or the mortgage payment, that starts to squeeze out their ability to pay for other necessities like food and transportation. This is the standard government agencies use to come up with measures like “about half of all renters and one fifth of all homeowners in Onondaga County are cost burdened.”
This definition of ‘affordable’ is based on a relationship between the cost of individual homes and the incomes of individual households, so it’s impossible to say that any rent or mortgage payment is or isn’t affordable without knowing how much money the people who live in it make. According to this definition, those $3,500-a-month apartments in Downtown Syracuse or Cicero are ‘affordable’ to households making $140,000 a year, and they’re ‘unaffordable’ to households who do not.
Think of this as a way to universalize the first definition of affordability by creating a standard that accounts for all income levels. Like any universal standard, it has its exceptions—households who don’t spend as much on transportation can ‘afford’ to spend more on housing, for instance—but it establishes a definite, measurable goal for public policy to pursue.
The third definition of ‘affordable’ outlines the tools public policy can use to achieve that goal for households with lower incomes. ‘Affordable Housing’ (with a capital ‘A’ and a capital ‘H’) refers to subsidized, income-restricted housing. This kind of housing requires some level of government intervention that trades public money (or some other in-kind benefit like free land) for a developer’s or landlord’s agreement to set rents at levels that households with lower incomes can afford.
This definition of ‘affordable’ is based on any housing unit’s participation in a program that guarantees it will be occupied by a low-income household. These programs all determine who can live in a unit with a measure called the Area Median Income (AMI). The US Department of Housing and Urban Development calculates AMI every year for every metropolitan area in the country. In Syracuse, the 2023 AMI for a 3-person household is $84,000. HUD considers households that only make 80% of AMI ($67,200) to be low-income, households that make 50% of AMI ($42,000) to be very low-income, and households that make 30% of AMI ($25,200) to be extremely low-income. Different Affordable Housing programs restrict occupancy to these different levels.
These three definitions are all related and sometimes end up meaning the same thing. A person making $35,000 a year might think that $875 (30% of their monthly income) is a reasonable monthly rent for a 1-bedroom apartment, and that’s the rent you’d get in an apartment restricted to households earning 50% of AMI. In that situation, different people can use different definitions of the term ‘affordable’ and still understand each other.
Other times, these definitions do not line up so well. A reporter might ask a developer if their proposed apartment project will include affordable housing and really just be asking what the rents will be. The developer might respond ‘no’ because they don’t intend to apply for funding under any of the Affordable Housing programs that would require them to restrict occupancy to low-income tenants. A person reading about the project in the newspaper might then conclude that all of the apartments will be unreasonably expensive or unaffordable. In this situation, all three people understand the term ‘affordable’ to mean something slightly different, so they misunderstand each other.
Onondaga County is talking about housing a lot now. That’s good—this is a conversation we need to have—but it’s going to be a much more productive conversation if we can get a clearer understanding of what we all mean by key terms like “affordable housing.”
Centro’s newly announced service update for Rome offers a glimpse of how the transit authority might improve service in Syracuse. Rome’s new network features higher service frequencies on high-ridership routes, a clockface timetable, and on-demand service to cover lower-ridership areas.
Centro currently runs six bus lines in Rome. The routes with the highest ridership (accounting for more than half of all trips in the network) are the 2 and 6 buses. The next two highest performing lines (providing more than 1 out of every 4 rides) are the 5 and 9 buses. The two lowest performing routes (carrying fewer than 1 of every 6 passengers) are the 4 and 7 buses.
Under the new network, Centro will increase service frequency on the high-performing 2 and 6 buses by a whopping 41%. The 5 and 9 buses will also see a comparable service increase, although they will be combined as a single route.
These service improvements are also service simplifications. Centro’s current Rome schedules don’t follow a regular pattern—different buses run at different times of day, and headways range from 30 to 90 minutes depending on the route and run. That all makes it difficult to use the system without consulting the schedule.
The new timetable will be identical for all three lines, and it will run on regular 30-minute ‘clockface’ intervals all day. This makes it much easier to memorize each bus route’s schedule—they all leave Downtown at 10 and 40 minutes past the hour.
In order to provide all of this new service on high-ridership routes with existing resources, Centro is cutting fixed-route service from some low-ridership areas. The 2, 5, 6, and 9 buses are losing some of the zigs and zags that allow them to cover a greater area at the expense of speed. In the new network, these routes will run in straight lines, and buses will be able to complete each run in 30 minutes (compared to 40 minutes today). Centro is also cutting the 4 and 7 buses entirely.
Together, these changes will reduce fixed-route revenue hours (a major driver of operating costs) by 18% even as Centro increases service frequency on remaining bus lines. Those operating savings will fund a new on-demand service in areas losing fixed-route service. This new on-demand service will likely be similar to Uber pool, where riders request a ride via phone or an app, and Centro will dispatch a jitney-style vehicle to pick up multiple riders traveling in the same direction.
We still have to see how this plan works in practice. ‘Low-ridership’ areas might see a lot more demand after their spotty bus service gets replaced with a subsidized taxi. In that case, Centro will either have to divert more resources to its on-demand service—reducing or eliminating the projected cost savings that are supposed to make higher bus frequencies possible—raise the on-demand fare, or riders will have to deal with longer wait times for pickup.
But if Centro can manage that balance, this new service model can make a big difference in Rome, and it should be applied to Syracuse. The model’s principles—prioritizing high-frequency service on direct bus routes running through high-ridership areas—are exactly what planners and advocates have pushed for in Syracuse for years.
When the Syracuse Police Department moves its main offices out of the Public Safety Building on State Street, City Hall should build a path through the property to reconnect Downtown with the neighborhoods immediately to its east.
City Hall built the present Public Safety Building as part of an urban renewal project explicitly designed to cut Downtown off from Syracuse’s close-in residential neighborhoods. It did this most effectively by totally demolishing one such neighborhood—the 15th Ward—and by closing short local streets better suited to pedestrian traffic than long-distance car commuting. South of Genesee Street, five local streets used to enter Downtown from the east. Today, only two—Harrison and Adams—are left, and both are too wide and carry too many cars driving too fast to be a safe and pleasant route for anybody travelling by bike, foot, or mobility device.
If I-81’s removal is going to really change the way people get around town—and it must—then City Hall needs to find ways to reestablish those lost connections. Piercing the superblocks around the Public Safety Building is a good place to start. All three of the lost east-west connections—Jefferson, Cedar, and Madison Streets—were removed to build Presidential Plaza and the Courthouse/Public Safety Building/Justice Center/Everson Museum complex.
Madison and Townsend Streets, 1951Madison and Townsend Streets, 1966Madison and Townsend Streets, 2021
street grid removal for urban renewal superblocks
Traces of each remain. The tree-covered walk along the north side of the Everson fountain follows Madison Street’s path. Privately-owned Presidential Court sits where Cedar Street used to run. Eastbound traffic on Genesee Street runs south of Forman Park on what used to be the easternmost block of Jefferson Street.
But although there are pieces of all these old streets, they are disconnected and do not form a path between University Hill and Downtown. Urban renewal superblocks, highway offramps, and a distinct lack of crosswalks all conspire to create a sort of pedestrian black hole between State, Genesee, Harrison, and Almond Streets.
traces of Cedar Street between Montgomery and Almond Streets
I-81’s demolition and the police department’s move out of the Public Safety Building present the opportunity to restore connections to Downtown. First, City Hall should pierce the State Street superblock by building a path across it in the area of the present Public Safety Building (the remainder of the large site can be redeveloped with homes and commercial space, some of which should front the path). Second, City Hall should work with NYSDOT and Sutton Real Estate Company—the owner of Presidential Court—to reopen connections across the Presidential Plaza superblock by linking Presidential Court with Almond Street. Third, City Hall and NYSDOT should install crosswalks and traffic lights on Almond, Townsend, and State Streets where those streets intersect reestablished east-west connections.
These are the kinds of interventions Syracuse needs to reconnect neighborhoods divided by urban renewal. The City has been carved up by highways and superblocks, and people getting around on foot, by bike, or with a mobility device have too few direct, safe options for travelling between neighborhoods. A new route through the Public Safety Building property would help reconnect small safe streets like Madison, Jefferson, and Cedar and play an important part in a larger network of safe routes across the whole City.
More people rode a Centro bus in September 2023 than in any month since October 2019. That marks the first time post-pandemic monthly transit ridership in Syracuse has exceeded any pre-pandemic mark.
This is good news for Centro, but the ridership trends leading up to September tell a slightly more complicated story about the state of transit in Syracuse. We still have a ways to go just to get back to our pre-pandemic (and barely adequate) status quo, but Centro is changing its service in ways that put them on the path to providing the quality transit service Syracuse needs and deserves.
In the five years leading up to the pandemic, Centro’s monthly ridership averaged about 850,000. In the first months of lockdown, ridership dropped to about 200,000. Ridership has grown steadily—with allowances for seasonal variation—since then. Every single month since April 2021 has seen higher ridership than the same month of the previous year, and in September 2023, monthly ridership hit 857,415—higher than the pre-pandemic average, and the highest monthly total since October 2019.
However, Centro’s monthly ridership follows a pretty regular cycle, and September has always been the highest ridership month of the year (the NYS Fair and the beginning of the academic year both bring a lot of riders). In the five years before the pandemic, average September ridership was just over 1,200,000, so if we’re comparing apples-to-apples, September 2023’s ridership was 30% below the pre-pandemic norm. That’s still smaller than any other post-pandemic month’s seasonally adjusted gap (or, the percentage difference between current ridership and the average ridership for that same month in the five years preceding the pandemic), but it’s far from a full recovery.
It’s not totally fair to compare today’s absolute ridership to pre-pandemic months, though, because Centro has fewer buses on the streets than they used to. Ever since the Summer of 2021, Centro has not been able to hire enough operators to run its regular service. Revenue hours (the total amount of time Centro buses are available to riders) are consistently 1/8 to 1/5 below the pre-pandemic norm, and that decrease in service has depressed total ridership. Better to compare ridership per revenue hour (a measure of transit efficiency) to get a sense of how much the service is being used. That measure shows September 2023 at just 14% below the pre-pandemic norm.
Ridership per revenue hour has outperformed total ridership because Centro has focused its scarce resources on high-ridership routes. When the staffing crisis hit, the first service cuts came from low-ridership lines. That allowed Centro to preserve more service on higher-performing lines through populous neighborhoods. If Centro had simply cut service evenly across the board, today’s total ridership would be even lower.
The same logic should guide Centro’s approach to its network redesign: enhance service in the places where people ride the bus most to get the biggest increases in ridership.
outline of a citywide high-frequency BRT system
Centro still has a ways to go to get ridership back where is was before March of 2020. It has even farther to go to provide Syracuse with the kind of transit service we really need. But the system’s steady recovery, and Centro’s commitment to focusing resources where they’ll do the most good, gives hope that they’re on the right path.
The large apartment buildings going up around University Hill expand housing opportunity in surrounding neighborhoods, and that’s a good thing.
These buildings—505 Walnut, Theory Syracuse, The Marshall, UPoint, etc—attract a lot of scorn because they’re big, new, expensive, and primarily marketed to university students. ‘Why’ a lot of people ask ‘do we need more luxurystudent apartments when so many people in this town struggle to pay the rent?’
The short answer is that we don’t need them—students do. Students are people, and they need housing just like anybody else.
A more complicated answer is that we (anybody trying to secure housing in Syracuse) need these new apartments because students need them. To see why, it’s helpful to think about how university students differ from other tenants in the City.
First, they are often willing and able to pay more in rent than many other Syracuse tenants. Syracuse University and LeMoyne College charge students between about $900 and $1,550 per bedroom per month for on-campus housing. Student loans and/or family savings cover that cost, but those sources of income can also be used to rent off-campus housing too. Compared to the on-campus options, splitting the $4,500 rent on a 6-bedroom apartment with five other roommates is a pretty good deal—even though that’s well out of reach of any large family that might also want an apartment that size—and a lot of student tenants jump at the opportunity.
Second, they are geographically constrained. A good number of students move to Syracuse for school, don’t have much information about the City, and don’t have the time or ability to chase down Craigslist leads all over town. Students tenants also often need to be able to get to their campus without a car, and that means finding housing within walking or biking distance or on a bus line that goes to campus. All of this means that student tenants are a sort of captive market for University-area landlords, and that gives those landlords the power to set their rents at prices student tenants will pay.
Third, they evict themselves. Landlords value the ability to get rid of tenants who can’t pay high rent or are loud or demand basic maintenance or need reasonable accommodations for a disability or whatever. Landlords cherish easy evictions, but tenants who want long-term housing stability have some—not enough, but some—rights that allow them to fight off eviction and stay in their homes. Student tenants, however, often voluntarily move every year and are almost guaranteed to vacate the apartment after two years, so landlords who exclusively rent to student tenants never get ‘stuck’ with someone they consider to be a ‘problem tenant.’
If you’re a tenant looking for a relatively inexpensive, long-term home, you do not want to be competing with student tenants for an apartment. Lot of landlords would prefer to rent to student tenants, and they can usually screen you out by just charging more than you can afford.
This is also a problem for prospective homebuyers. When building new housing isn’t an option, landlords looking to rent to tenants will simply buy existing housing—including 1 and 2-family homes commonly purchased by owner-occupants—and operate it as rental units. If you’re trying to buy a house for yourself, you do not want to be competing with landlords who rent to student tenants. They often have better access to financing and are often willing to pay more because the rent can cover a pretty big mortgage payment.
So it is a very good thing for most Syracuse tenants and prospective homebuyers that a few big landlords are building big new apartment buildings specifically for student tenants, and lots of student tenants are choosing to live in those buildings. Because of those big new buildings, fewer student tenants are competing with non-student tenants for apartments in the older neighborhoods around Syracuse University, and fewer landlords are competing with prospective homebuyers to purchase older housing to rent to students in those neighborhoods too.
Clearly, Syracuse’s housing problems are a lot bigger than “student tenants shape the rental market in ways that increase housing purchase and rental prices on and around University Hill,” and while big new student-targeted buildings can help solve that problem, they can’t solve every housing problem in the City.
Governor Kathy Hochul’s goal of building 800,000 new homes in New York in the next decade is good. We need new housing—a lot of it—in communities all across New York State for all kinds of different reasons, and her New York Housing Compact will help build a lot of new housing. As proposed, however, her plan might only make an impact Downstate. We need this statewide housing policy to build new homes in communities like Syracuse too,
In a place like Syracuse, we need new housing for at least three big reasons: the housing stock we have now doesn’t meet people’s modern needs, a lot of it’s in terrible shape, and certain neighborhoods don’t have enough housing for all the people who’d like to live there. The housing we’ve got now doesn’t fit the housing we need, and this mismatch is bad for affordability, it’s bad for public health , and it’s bad for racial and economic segregation.
Downstate has a lot of the same problems, but they are all conditioned by the overwhelming demand for housing down there. They need new housing for all of the reasons we do, but they also need a lot more housing in order to alleviate their sever housing shortage and make room enough to accommodate all the people who want to live there.
The Governor’s proposal is designed to address the New York City metro area’s housing shortage more than the statewide need for new housing. Its central policy is a builder’s remedy—basically a streamlined permitting process for new construction in instances where exclusionary zoning blocks new housing. It’s a policy that will definitely help Downstate, but which could also address the need for new housing in Upstate’s metropolitan communities, like Syracuse, where exclusionary zoning contributes to our housing problems.
But that builder’s remedy only goes into effect if there’s little or no new housing construction in a particular municipality. Downstate, projects can take advantage of the remedy when proposing new construction in a municipality that’s seen less than 3% growth in its total housing stock over a 3-year period. Upstate (in this instance, anywhere not served by the MTA), the builder’s remedy doesn’t go into effect unless new housing construction falls below 1% in any municipality over a 3-year period.
In Syracuse, that 1% threshold will probably work out to about 200 new housing units per year. In Salina, it’s more like 50. In DeWitt, about 40. These are tiny numbers, and they are well below what we need to build in order to actually address the problems that new construction can solve.
There’s a lot to like about the Governor’s housing proposal. The design of the policy is sound. The full plan also includes other good things like a new lead testing and remediation program and more funding for mixed-income housing Upstate.
But the plan’s core goal—to build hundreds of thousands of new units—won’t do much Upstate if the builder’s remedy only works in municipalities with New York City-sized housing shortages. We need either lower targets for new construction, or some other metric—like a shortage of affordable housing—to trigger the policy if it’s going to make a difference in a place like Syracuse.
Centro’s recent Bus Rapid Transitannouncements are fantastic news for Syracuse. We need better bus service to better connect people and neighborhoods, and BRT is the best way to make that happen.
The actual content of these announcements confirms a lot of what we’ve known for a long time. Centro’s first two BRT lines will run on the routes identified in the SMART1 study, they will run faster by stopping less, riders will board at stations rather than just a pole in the ground. This is all good.
But the announcements also contained two new pieces of information worth highlighting: a timeline for the service to start, and Centro’s intention to pair BRT with a network redesign.
A timeline
While it’s always seemed inevitable that Centro would do something like BRT sometime, there’s never been an actual timeline on it. Ever since SMTC published its SMART1 study, Centro has been dealing with a series of crises (a funding gap, Covid, hiring problems, etc), and designing and implementing a new service has never been the top priority. It was always a part of the long range plan, and Centro was always working on it, but the service was never imminent.
Now we know these buses will be on the streets by 2026. It is a big deal for Centro to say this publicly because they wouldn’t commit to a timeline if they weren’t confident they could keep it. Now that Centro’s made that promise, it is clear for the very first time when we can expect to actually board a BRT bus.
Network redesign
But BRT isn’t all they’re promising. Centro’s doing that and “the most comprehensive review of our Syracuse route system in more than 20 years.” This is also very good.
Centro’s bus routes follow lines laid out for the streetcars back in the 1800’s. They’ve been extended and stretched and kinked to try and keep up with changes in the community since then, and the results have not always been pretty. Buses slowly zig and zag across neighborhoods, they make detours, they run at irregular infrequent intervals. The whole system is so complicated and so fragile that people rarely try to understand how to use it to go more than one or two specific places.
A network redesign will allow Centro to look at the whole system and rework it to be faster, more frequent, more reliable, and more understandable.
Taken together, both these pieces of new information are great news for Syracuse and Central New York. We need better public transit, and that need is only more urgent since the Micron announcement. Centro has a real vision of the transit system this community needs and deserves, and they are ready to build it.
Of all the lies, half-truths, and obfuscations being peddled by the most recent iteration of the Save81 crowd, the biggest whopper might be their contention that I81 is good for the environment and that making it bigger will decrease greenhouse gas emissions. This is laughably wrong, but it’s helpful to have the opportunity to explain exactly how tearing down the viaduct and building the Community Grid will help in the fight against climate change, and to expose how bankrupt Save81’s version of “environmentalism” is.
Save81’s basic argument is this: the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cars (America’s #1 source of climate pollution) is to let them drive as fast as possible while making sure they have to brake as little as possible because cars get better gas-mileage on uncongested freeways than they do on local streets. Therefore, they claim, building a newer bigger viaduct is the environmentally friendly option because it will let cars drive faster.
This is wrong-headed for so many reasons (induced demand congests highways after they’re widened, eliminating any emissions “savings” per trip, for instance), but the main issue is that Save81 fails to account for how tearing down the viaduct and building the Community Grid will give people more and better options when they choose where to live, and those choices will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by taking cars off the highway and eliminating many car trips entirely.
Highways cause more driving by destroying the centers of communities and spurring suburban sprawl. Transportation is America’s #1 source of climate pollution because our interstate highway system has demolished walkable, bikeable, transit-oriented neighborhoods and replaced them with car-dependent sprawl in metropolitan areas across the county.
A neighborhood paved over
Tear down I81, and Syracuse will become a more environmentally sustainable community by giving more people the option of living in neighborhoods with more sustainable—and more freeing—transportation options. The viaduct takes up so much space—and blights so much more—in the very center of town where thousands of people used to live, and where thousands more want to live now. This spot is smack dab in the middle of the region’s biggest, densest job center. It’s an area served by decent public transportation, an area where it is very possible to get around without firing up an internal combustion engine (and even if someone did drive from McBride Street to Harrison Street for work everyday, they’d still emit less carbon than if they started their trip in Manlius).
Tear down the highway, rebuild those thousands of homes, and a lot of people who might otherwise have had to find housing on the sprawling, car-dependent, farm-killing exurban fringe will instead be able to make a life in the walkable, bikeable, transit-oriented city center. That’s how the Community Grid will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change.
At root, Save81’s faux-environmentalist argument is built on the cynical belief that we can’t make things better. They say that a once-in-a-generation infrastructure project to shift the geography of transportation and housing in Onondaga County won’t really change anybody’s behavior. They reject the notion that our community has the power to remake itself into a better, more equitable, more sustainable place. Nobody who calls themselves an environmentalist—who’s really committed to combating climate change—should give this kind of environmental nihilism a minute’s thought.
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