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Comment by vavooom | Hacker News Reader

We are excited for Open Data users to dig into this dataset, experiment, and find insights from the “speed sample of NYC’s streets” that the MTA’s 4,900 buses collect each day. This data will be uploaded on a monthly basis, and can be found on the NYS Open Data portal.

What a great dataset and effort to allow for further research into areas of the city that could benefit from anti-congestion measures (cough cough car tax) to improve bus services!

Also - where does one even store 4,900 buses in NYC? I guess most of the fleet is out on the streets all day, but I imagine servicing all of those is quite the feat.

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I was sure it would be off the island somewhere so I looked it up. There are many depots around the boroughs and they seem to handle their servicing internally there.

There is one not far off of Times Square.

Exactly this. Lots of bus depots all around NYC. Several across Staten Island alone.

My uncle worked at the MTA for his entire career as a bus mechanic. My favorite story was when a rep from a company selling "green" buses was visiting. Rep said "These buses never break! You guys might be out of work." and then asked "So when do the buses stop running for the day?"

He was less confident in the reliability of his product when he learned the buses in NYC don't stop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_depots_of_MTA_Regional_Bus...

So this is something I had vaguely always wondered about NYC. Is there actually enough space to park all the personal cars, Or is it assumed that some percentage are always on the road. I didn't hear about serious parking congestion during covid so I now assume that yes, there do seem to be enough car spots.

Parking isn’t too much of a hassle in the outer burrows compared to Manhattan.

Also lots of cars get driven in from outside the city, so presumably there were fewer of those during Covid.

Yeah I think commuters are the biggest reason. It's fairly easy to find parking in Manhattan after 9pm. At noon though? Good luck.

There is plenty of parking space for the cars that you see on the streets of New York. It's just mostly in the outer boroughs, on Long Island, or in New Jersey.

What is "all" the cars? Less than half of NYC households own a car[1]; if 100% of households did (or owned more than one, as is common outside of NYC), the city would have nowhere near enough space for them.

(The city already has virtually no space for the 2 million cars that are owned by the city's residents, plus the millions that enter the city daily. We have laws on the books that are intended to reduce the number of unnecessary car trips in the city, but our feckless state leadership has decided that it doesn't need to follow already-passed laws.)

[1]: https://www.hunterurban.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Car-L...

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