For Staten Islanders lined up for MTA buses outside the St. George Terminal on a recent evening, the occasional announcements during their waits sounded familiar.

“There will be no S40 for this boat,” a voice said over a loudspeaker.

A few minutes later, the voice piped up again, instructing riders, “Do not wait for the [S]81, it will not show for this boat.”

Commuters on the island’s local bus routes, which last month carried close to 100,000 riders on weekdays, said they have grudgingly grown accustomed to such unwelcome service alerts. 

“It’s bad, you’re tired, you want to get home,” said Roberto Velez, 60, who was on line for a bus  to Bull’s Head after taking the subway from his job in Kips Bay, Manhattan, to the Staten Island Ferry. “And you have to stand here, which is especially bad in the wintertime.”

The scenes at the ferry terminal illustrate what riders describe as long-running frustrations with Staten Island’s 19 local bus routes, which last year delivered on 90.6% of peak-hours trips, according to MTA numbers, compared to 95.9% in the other boroughs.

“The service out here is very unpredictable, it’s unreliable,” True Brunner, 33, told THE CITY as he waited for a bus ride home to New Brighton at the ferry terminal. “There are times where I have to require myself to be up twice as early just to make sure that I’m going to get a ride on one of these buses to the ferry.”

THE CITY’s analysis of MTA data also shows that Staten Island local bus riders’ excess wait times — which measure how long riders are at a stop beyond the scheduled wait time — were nearly double the citywide average in 2024.

On Staten Island, the excess wait time averaged 4.1 minutes, compared with 2.2 minutes elsewhere in the city.

The spotty local service has led to protests from Borough President Vito Fossella and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 726, which represents New York City Transit bus operators on Staten Island, over what they say is a shortage of buses that are in working order. 

“The end result is the commuter is stranded, waiting longer than they need to be and taking more time to get from work to home or vice versa,” Fossella told THE CITY last week.

The MTA’s Customers Count Survey last fall showed that customer satisfaction among local bus riders declined in each borough except The Bronx from the spring. On Staten Island, 44% of local bus riders reported being “satisfied” with the service, a 7% drop and the lowest among the five boroughs.

“We feel abandoned,” said Filippa Grisafi, a rider advocate who commutes between Staten Island and Manhattan.

At MTA board meetings in recent months, students from the College of Staten Island as well as a priest from an Episcopal church in Rosebank have spoken out, saying that unreliable bus service is keeping students and churchgoers from arriving on time for class and services.

The Rev. Hank Tuell, rector of Saint John’s Episcopal Church, declined to comment for this story, but he told MTA board in December that his concerns over bus service have “gone largely unaddressed.”

“I am losing church because they cannot get to church,” he said at the time. “They cannot wait for an hour or more for buses that simply don’t show up.”

MTA officials pointed out that Staten Island’s local buses averaged 12.4 miles per hour in February, up from a citywide average of 7.8 mph and that service delivery on local routes ticked up to 92.9% between January and March, an increase credited, in part, to the hiring of 2,000 new bus operators last year.

Additionally, the MTA has plans to tweak schedules on the S46/96 routes between St. George and the West Shore Plaza shopping center in Travis, as well as on the S79 Select Bus Service that links the Staten Island Mall with Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. 

The agency is also planning to enhance service on four Staten Island express bus routes that run to and from Manhattan. An MTA spokesperson said the changes grew out of the January launch of congestion pricing, which put new tolls on motorists entering Manhattan south of 60th Street.

“With the implementation of congestion pricing, the MTA identified opportunities to further improve service on key local and express routes on Staten Island that will roll out in the spring and summer,” MTA spokesperson Kayla Shults said in a statement. “We remain committed to delivering fast and reliable service to all Staten Island bus riders.”

Brunner — whose daily commute between New Brighton and the Brooklyn Navy Yard involves local buses, the Staten Island Ferry and the subway — said the uncertainty of local bus service has repeatedly put him and other commuters in a bind.

“You really do have to stay 10 steps ahead and make sure you can have contingency plans or call an audible so you can be able to be where you need to be,” he said.