Most NYC buses earn D and F grades on reliability, speed — with pedestrians even out-walking some: damning new report

Most of the city’s buses that ferry more than a million daily riders earn D and F ratings when it comes to reliability and speed — with pedestrians even out-walking some of them, a dismal new report shows.

About 56% of the Big Apple’s bus routes are running at speeds “significantly below” where they should be, causing them to lag behind schedule more than half of the time, City Comptroller Brad Lander said in his office’s “Life in the Fast Lane: A Report Card for NYC’s Buses” report released last week.

A measly 8% of routes, or only 27 lines, rate a B grade or higher — with just seven lines in the entire city receiving an A, the report said.

“It’s so unreliable,” sighed a 39-year-old nurse from Richmond Hills while waiting for the notoriously spotty Q8 in Queens on Monday.

The comptroller’s study noted that some pedestrians can even out-walk buses such as the M34 in Midtown, which creeps along as slowly as 5.4 mph on average.

The analysis — which used real-time MTA data from June 2024 to June 2025 to calculate on-time reliability and average speed — found that only 144 out of the city’s 332 public-bus routes used received a passing grade.

“From Brooklyn seniors waiting over 20 minutes for bunched buses to Manhattan commuters crawling at slow 5 mph speeds, the impact of the City and MTA’s failures is unmistakable and felt daily for thousands,” Lander said in a statement.

“Our office’s report card offers a clear roadmap to pinpoint the most necessary interventions to improve bus service for all.”

All five of the worst-performing bus routes in the city are listed as “express” between boroughs: the QM5 (35.5% on-time percentage), the BM1 (36.2%), BM5 (37.1%), BM2 (38.2%) and QM6 (38.5%). They average speeds of between 10.2 and 13.1 mph.

The worst local routes are largely in the outer boroughs.

The B74 was cited as the most frequent offender (40%), followed by the B32 (48.4%), BX20 (48.4%), BX32 (48.8%), Q8 (50.5%) and Q24 (50.7%).

“Especially in the winter, it’s hard to stand here waiting, and it just keeps delaying and delaying,” said a Q8 straphanger named Lisa M. outside the Sutphin Boulevard and Archer Avenue bus stop Monday. “I’ve taken taxis a couple times.”

Another frustrated rider, a 66-year-old named Jerry, said he had to wait at least 25 minutes for his morning bus.

“Let’s go back to the days where you boycotted for better service,” he said.

The best lines in the city were identified as the Q35, M60 SBS, BX29, B31, SIM26, B84 and S89.

The city’s “Select Bus Service” lines — or routes with fewer stops and other measures to try to speed them up — were found to perform slightly better and faster overall, with 16% of them receiving A or B grades compared to the 8% of the Apple’s regular routes.

Frank Farrell, acting senior vice president of the New York City Transit Department of Buses, told The Post that the overseeing MTA is working on redesigns aimed at “significantly improving speeds.

“The fact remains that dedicated bus lanes are needed to make a material impact on bus speed citywide,” he said.

The comptroller’s office blamed “bunching” — when buses fail to keep spacing along routes — for the slow speeds and unreliable arrivals. Of the 14 bus routes with bunching frequency rates of 20% or more, seven are in Brooklyn, the report reads.

Manhattan routes, some of which crawled between 4.9 and 5.4 mph, are further plagued by unrelenting traffic, Lander said.

Congestion pricing has sped up bus routes in the congestion zone: Between Jan. 1 and June 1, 2025, reliability for buses in the tolling zone improved by 9.2%. But more than 70% of Manhattan buses still had grades D or F elsewhere.

“Buses operating outside the congestion zone did not see effects at the same scale,” the report said.

Gotham’s mayoral candidates have largely vowed to improve bus service in the boroughs, from incumbent Mayor Eric Adams’ support of expanding Select Bus Service and dedicated bus lanes to Republican mayoral nominee Curtis Sliwa’s vow to increase express bus service “at all hours,” expand discount access and implement a congestion crackdown.

Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has proposed free buses for all and to make them faster by “rapidly building priority lanes … [and expanding] dedicated loading zones to keep double parkers out of the way.”

Mayoral candidate and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has eyed a similar plan to expand a fare-free bus pilot program. He’s also proposed mayoral control of the MTA, calling the transit authority “bureaucracy on top of bureaucracy.“