Queens bus riders get two more lines of enforcement starting Friday. The MTA will begin fining drivers who block the Q17 and Q27 beginning April 17, extending its Automated Camera Enforcement program to two of eastern Queens’ busiest surface transit corridors.
The Q17 runs between Flushing and Jamaica. The Q27 connects Flushing to Cambria Heights. With those additions, the ACE program now covers 60 lines citywide, with cameras mounted on more than 1,700 buses rolling across 560 miles of routes. On a typical weekday, those routes carry more than one million riders.
The fine structure isn’t complicated. First offense, $50. Get caught again blocking a bus lane, sitting in a bus stop, or double-parking in front of a bus, and it’s $250. Cameras on the buses capture footage, images, and plate data, which gets routed to the city Departments of Transportation and Finance for review before a summons goes out.
The program launched in June 2024. Since then, the MTA has pushed deployment hard, and it’s not hard to see why the numbers make the case. On routes with ACE cameras combined with bus lanes and other street fixes, speeds have gone up as much as 30% on certain segments. That’s against a citywide average bus speed of eight miles per hour, which is, to put it plainly, terrible. Crashes on ACE routes are down 20%. Emissions on those corridors have dropped 5% to 10%. Buses are getting blocked at stops 40% less often.
“Speeding up buses makes them more reliable for the riders who depend on them,” said an MTA spokesperson, noting that the agency’s data from routes already under ACE shows consistent improvements across safety and service metrics.
For the Q17 and Q27, those gains matter more than they might on a Manhattan crosstown. Eastern Queens is bus country. The neighborhoods along both corridors are dense, working-class, and don’t have subway lines threading through them. Many commuters don’t have subway access and count on surface transit to reach the 7 train at Flushing’s Main Street terminal or the Jamaica hub, where they can connect to the Long Island Rail Road and the A and E lines.
A blocked stop doesn’t just mean one delayed rider. It’s a cascade. The bus slows. The bus behind it slows. Headways collapse, and instead of buses arriving every 7 or 10 minutes, passengers are standing on the curb watching two or three pull up at once, which helps nobody. That bunching problem is what the MTA says ACE is designed to attack at the source.
The city’s Department of Transportation has its own reasons to keep the ACE rollout moving. Under the Streets Plan mandate, DOT is required to hit specific targets for protected bus lane mileage. The agency counts corridors where cameras are operating as part of that protected lane total, which gives DOT a way to log progress without always building out physical concrete infrastructure. It’s a useful flexibility, though critics of the approach have argued it lets the city count camera enforcement as a substitute for real lane protection.
The program’s limits aren’t lost on the MTA’s own leadership. At a City Council budget hearing last month, the agency’s chair and CEO told members directly that cameras can document violations and generate fines, but they can’t move a car. On blocks without coverage, a bus driver who hits a blocked lane has no recourse. A cop could clear it. But the MTA chief said the agency needs the city to assign more officers to bus lane enforcement in corridors where ACE cameras haven’t yet been installed.
The gap matters because the program is still expanding. There are routes, particularly in the outer boroughs, where many commuters don’t have subway access and ride frequency already runs low. Adding cameras helps. It doesn’t solve everything.
The Q17 and Q27 cameras go live Friday. Drivers on those corridors should expect the fines to be real. The MTA’s posture since June 2024 has been aggressive on enforcement, and there’s no sign that’s changing as the agency pushes toward 60 lines and beyond.