Straphangers in Gotham’s most bus-reliant borough will need to learn a few new routes.

Queens’ redesigned bus map goes into effect on Sunday, with alterations to all but three of the borough’s bus routes.

“Queens is the bus borough,” MTA Chairman Janno Lieber said Thursday, standing among transit officials, Queens politicians and transportation advocates. “In Queens there are 800,000 daily bus customers.

“They need fast and frequent service, and they are going to get it with this redesign,” Lieber continued.

As previously reported by the Daily News, the massive overhaul of the bus network for the city’s geographically largest borough will give Queens 124 routes — 94 local and 30 express — with an emphasis on connecting bus riders to the rest of the city’s transit systems.

The redesign represents an investment of $35 million more per year in the sprawling borough’s buses.

The new bus system will be rolled out in phases, with most changes going into effect this Sunday. Other tweaks will take place on Aug. 31.

Six bus routes will be discontinued as of next week: the Q15A, Q20A, Q20B, Q34, Q48 and QM3. A seventh route, the Q21, will be discontinued at the end of August as part of Phase 2.

Fourteen new routes will come online at the same time, with an additional route added at the end of August.

The changes starting Sunday largely effect riders in eastern Queens and Ridgewood, while Phase 2’s end-of-summer changes will make additional changes in western Queens.

Route-by-route information can be found on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s bus-redesign map.

MTA officials say that by the time the update is fully phased in, 124,000 more people will be within a quarter mile of a bus that arrives every 10 minutes or less during daytime hours, and 68,000 more people will live within a quarter mile of a 24/7 bus route.

But the plan has been a long time coming.

Following a widely panned proposal to reroute Queens buses in 2019, the MTA went back to the drawing board in 2021, releasing a draft plan the following year that drew from months of public outreach.

A “final” version of that redesign was released in 2023, before being further tweaked in 2024.

In all, MTA officials said, they received some 20,000 public comments across 300 outreach events.

“We listen to the customers as we go about these major changes,” Lieber said.

“There will be people who do not like some aspect of this,” the transit boss acknowledged. “We are moving bus stops to make sure they serve more people. We are taking away some bus stops in the interest of having faster rides.”

“We got it to — almost — where we’re 100% happy with it,” state Sen. Leroy Comrie said.

“Queens people can never be happy with everything,” Comrie added to chuckles from gathered officials, “so there are things that need to be tinkered with in the plan.”

“But we do have a promise, once the plan is implemented,” he said, “that there’s an opportunity for tinkering to be done.”

https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/06/26/major-changes-queens-bus-routes-start-sunday/