Suffolk County officials have delayed a plan to introduce an on-demand bus service zone to replace two East Hampton-area buses, the 10B and 10C, because of a manufacturer’s recall of the buses themselves.
The change was to have been part of an overhaul of the county bus system, for which new schedules and routes are to go into effect on Sunday.
“While we do not yet have an exact date for the launch of the new zone, announcements will be made as soon as more information is available,” the county said in a statement on its website. “We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and look forward to the launch of new on-demand service soon.”
The on-demand buses are to serve East Hampton, Springs, Amagansett, and Montauk the same way they serve Sag Harbor, Noyac, and Southampton Village, with a handful of buses on the road at once. The county offers a free mobile app called Suffolk Transit On-Demand that will be activated in East Hampton when the service is ready to roll.
For the remainder of the revamped Suffolk County Transit system, buses will now be known by a route number without the familiar “S” at the beginning. They are to run every day of the year, including holidays, with evening hours extended to 10 on weekdays, 9 on Saturdays, and 8 on Sundays.
The new system “puts more than 40 percent of residents and more than 50 percent of job sites within a half-mile of a high-frequency route,” the county asserts on its website, sctbus.org.
While most routes will now operate at least once every 30 minutes, Route 92 — formerly the S92 — will still come just once per hour, with slight scheduling differences in the summer and winter, connecting commuters from Orient Point to East Hampton’s Long Island Rail Road station via Riverhead.
A new feature of the bus system is “timed transfer points,” with schedules coordinated so that commuters can more easily transfer to other buses or trains. There are seven transfer points, including the Riverhead train station, which is a stop on the new Route 92 line.
County Legislator Bridget Fleming, whose term ends Dec. 31, and who was an active member of the working group that oversaw the bus-system overhaul, said she anticipates a successful implementation — eventually — of the on-demand bus zone from East Hampton to Montauk, based on her experiences with the zone to the west.
“It’s a very good system, but the weakness would be resources. You need enough drivers and enough buses on the road to make it function well,” Ms. Fleming said by phone Tuesday. “There’s a balance that has to be struck because there’s a real cost attached to it, as there is for all public transportation.”
“It’s a lot of geography to cover,” she continued, calling the service “an interesting solution to a challenging problem, which is that we’ve got a lot of area to cover and not as many riders as you have in more densely populated areas up west. I’m pleased that the administration has undertaken this effort to solve it, and I’m hoping for the success of it.”
