Your bus may be late, and now it’s easier to find out.
MTA bus arrival times are coming to LinkNYC kiosks, the city announced Wednesday.
Twenty-nine of the sidewalk kiosks, or “Links,” in Park Slope were adjusted Wednesday to feature real-time bus arrival information for nearby stops. The Park Slope updates are part of a citywide rollout over the next several weeks.
The first few kiosks were located in the district of Councilman Brad Lander, who had pushed the city to update the kiosks primarily as a means to give New Yorkers access to free Wi-Fi and phone calls.
“The … bus clocks we’ve installed in our district and across the city prove that knowing when the next bus is coming is a real quality-of-life improvement for NYC’s bus riders,” Lander said in a statement.
The kiosks, which also display subway service statuses, will offer bus arrival times for stops within walking distance — roughly a three-tenths-of-a-mile radius. While the MTA and third parties offer the same data through apps and text-based services, advocates said having the information on the kiosks helps modernize a bus service that has been steadily losing ridership in recent years.
“City buses need deep interventions before they will function adequately, and part of the path to turning around our failing bus service is to get more information into the hands of bus riders, in as many ways as possible,” said John Raskin, executive director of Riders Alliance, in a statement. “Adding bus arrival times to LinkNYC kiosks is a smart and creative way to help bus riders save time, and it will help make the bus a more modern, convenient option for New Yorkers to choose.”
Since LinkNYC launched in 2016, more than 1,700 Links have been installed across the five boroughs. More than 3.6 million gigabytes of data has been used — the equivalent of sending 36 billion emails, the city points out. LinkNYC once also offered web access, but the city pulled the plug on the feature months after the launch due to complaints that users were monopolizing kiosks to visit illicit sites.
