The MTA is seeking to considerably enhance the variety of buses in its fleet that alert drivers about would-be hazards whereas they’re behind the wheel.
With the variety of collisions between buses and bicycles this yr down 16% from the identical time interval in 2025, based on MTA knowledge, the transportation authority plans so as to add as much as 150 buses to the six outfitted with collision-avoidance programs that it started testing in 2024.
Sensors exterior the buses detect when an individual or object is just too shut, with small panels to the left and proper of the bus operator lighting up the define of a pedestrian in orange or purple lights, and sometimes beeping an added warning.
“It is a security function that we’ve piloted, it’s efficient, our operators prefer it,” Frank Farrell, head of buses on the MTA, advised The Metropolis Reporter. “They discover it efficient, so we need to transfer ahead with placing it on extra buses.”
The event is being rolled out as buses contend for house on the street with pedestrians and different types of transportation.
“You bought bicyclists, then you definately received the skate boarders and the motorcyclists and these battery-powered bikes,” stated Donald Yates, a Transport Staff Union Native 100 vp who represents Manhattan and Bronx bus drivers. “And the bus operator has to keep away from all of it.”
Up to now, the MTA has put the security units to the take a look at on simply six buses, all from the Michael J. Quill Bus Depot in Manhattan and the Far Rockaway Depot in Queens. The authority final month issued a solicitation for a five-year contract to retrofit between 100 and 150 extra buses out of a fleet of shut to six,000 by someday subsequent yr. Future bus orders might additionally come outfitted with collision-detection programs.
The contract solicitation carries an estimated vary of $1 million to $5 million and was issued after what MTA data describe because the “profitable consequence” of a trial run that bus operators signed off on after Yates stated they initially famous the sensors “didn’t decide up all the pieces” throughout early testing phases.
“It’s actually an impediment course out right here,” Yates stated, including that bus operators face a “shortening of the actual property now we have to function with” from the opposite types of transportation on the street.
In accordance with the MTA, buses and bicycles have collided 61 occasions thus far in 2026, 26 fewer than throughout the identical interval in 2025, whereas there have been 84 bodily contacts with pedestrians, one fewer than final yr.
Since 2019, transit company numbers present 275 cases of buses coming into contact with more and more standard types of micromobility.
The variety of bus and micromobility car collisions peaked at 65 in 2023, MTA numbers reveal, together with 47 with e-scooters and 18 with e-bikes. Thus far this yr, buses have collided 24 occasions with e-scooters or e-bikes, whereas there have been 39 contacts in all of 2025.
Beneath Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Metropolis Corridor has put the set up of motorbike lanes into excessive gear and micromobility has boomed, as nicely. For all of 2019, there have been simply 4 collisions involving e-scooters or e-bikes, based on MTA numbers.
“We positively welcome [a collision-avoidance system] as a result of it has all the pieces to do with security,” Yates stated. “We need to embrace something that avoids collisions, particularly pedestrian collisions.”
The transfer to increase the usage of sensors on buses additionally drew reward from Transportation Options, which advocates on behalf of cyclists and pedestrians.
“Glad to see them scaling up a confirmed security know-how,” stated Ben Furnas, the group’s govt director.
Buses on which the collision avoidance units could be put in would even be outfitted with an “Clever Pedestrian Flip Warning” system that has been in use for greater than a decade on roughly 3,000 buses.
The turn-warning system basically places a voice on buses, with pedestrians listening to a warning at intersections. However the next-generation setup is designed to be barely much less vocal.
“It is a bit smarter the place it solely alerts when there’s somebody within the space,” Farrell stated. “If there’s no one or any object or something on the market that might doubtlessly come into contact, the bus won’t put out that audible.”
Greater than 4,000 bus operators are additionally educated yearly on simulators which are designed to imitate the situations and challenges of New York Metropolis streets.
“Any motion we are able to take to offer safer service and protected operation of our buses, we all the time search for,” Farrell stated.
