Why the Bx36 Still Matters After All These Years
The Bx36 runs along 161st Street through three borough-adjacent communities — Morrisania, Concourse Village, and Soundview — and it has been the backbone of north-south transit in that corridor since the 1940s. Before the subway was extended or before people could drive without hitting traffic on the Bruckner, this route was essentially the only way to get from Melrose up to the IRT White Plains Road line and back down to East 138th Street. It still does that job today, just with different buses and a slightly altered routing. Then, the route looked very different. Originally operated by the Third Avenue Railway Company and later absorbed into NYC Transit, the early Bx36 used gas-powered GM RTS buses that were far less reliable than the modern fleet. The southern terminus was anchored at East 138th Street and Third Avenue, near the subway station, and it climbed north on 161st Street past the old Morrisania Market area, the Concourse Play Center, and the dense residential blocks near the NYCHA developments. Riders included factory workers heading to jobs in the nearby industrial zones, students going to DeWitt Clinton and Morris High Schools, and elderly residents who simply never learned to use the subway system. The ride from southern terminus to the northern end took roughly 35 to 45 minutes depending on traffic and time of day. Now, the route has been restructured a few times over the last decade. The southern section between East 138th and East 161st was shifted slightly to improve headway, and the northern extension now reaches further into Soundview near Castle Hill. The buses are the 40-foot Nova LFs with hybrid-electric powertrains, which means less exhaust on those narrow streets but also longer maintenance cycles and occasional electrical gremlins. Service runs every 12 to 18 minutes during peak hours and roughly every 20 to 30 minutes off-peak. The ride itself is still about 35 minutes top to bottom, though rush hour can stretch that to 50 if there is an accident on the Bruckner or a stalled vehicle on 161st.
I have ridden this route daily for about nine years, and the one problem nobody talks about is the southbound afternoon congestion between East 155th and East 161st. The bus lane ends right at that intersection, and during the 4:30 to 5:30 PM window the vehicle gets stuck behind parked cars, delivery trucks, and turns onto Third Avenue only to find the bus bay blocked. My workaround is simple: get off one stop early at 155th and walk south to 149th, which saves about eight minutes. Alternatively, you can catch the Bx12 southbound from nearby and transfer, but that adds a full stop and another wait. Common mistakes riders make: People assume the Bx36 runs the full length of 161st Street continuously. It does not. The route is broken into segments depending on the direction, and some of the mid-section stops were eliminated during the 2018 service adjustment. If you are trying to catch it near Westchester Avenue, you need to walk to 161st and Third at minimum, or the nearest stop is at Melrose Avenue. Another issue is the summer schedule reduction — between July and September the frequency drops to roughly every 25 minutes because summer school schedules affect the driver allocation. I learned this the hard way once when I waited 40 minutes for a bus that had been replaced by a layover gap nobody had flagged.
The fare structure has also changed. It is the standard $2.90 OMNY or MetroCard fare now, same as every other local bus in the city. There is no transfer discount beyond the free connection to subways and other buses within two hours, which is standard. What people miss is that the Bx36 connects directly to the 2, 5, and 6 trains at 149th Street–Grand Concourse, which makes it a much more viable alternative to driving if you work in Midtown or Lower Manhattan. The trip takes about 35 minutes on the train after you transfer, which is faster than most car commutes during rush hour. From a planning perspective, the Bx36 is interesting because it sits on a corridor that has been essentially frozen in place while the neighborhoods around it changed dramatically. The housing stock along 161st has been densified, the retail landscape shifted from grocery stores and bodegas to fast-casual chains and payday lenders, and yet the bus route has maintained roughly the same alignment. That stability is actually its biggest strength. When routes get reshuffled too often, like what happened to the BxM1 in the late 2010s, riders lose trust in the schedule. The Bx36 has not been aggressively restructured, so most long-term riders know exactly what to expect. If you are looking at using the Bx36 regularly, here is what I would tell you. Check the MTA Bus Time app before you leave, but understand that the real-time predictions are only accurate within about five minutes. During heavy rain or snow, those predictions drift further out. Carry exact change or set up OMNY before you board — there are rarely any spare quarters on this route, and the fare box is older in some of the vehicles, which means the machine sometimes rejects cards that work fine elsewhere.
Get the Full Details
The historical documentation of the Bx36 is not well preserved online. The NYC Transit archives have some route history sheets, but they are scattered across PDFs on the MTA's old website. The Bronx County Historical Society has a small collection of photographs from the 1970s showing the original 1940s-era buses on 161st, and if you want to see what the southern terminus looked like before the 138th Street station was renovated, those images are worth finding. There is also a YouTube video from 1993 showing a full run of the route in winter conditions, which gives you a sense of how difficult this corridor was even twenty years ago. One counter-intuitive thing about this route: the northbound direction is often faster than southbound during rush hour, which feels backwards. The reason is that southbound buses hit the intersection at 155th Street and Third Avenue, where a dedicated left-turn lane onto Third Avenue creates a bottleneck for both cars and buses. Northbound buses avoid that turn entirely and stay on 161st the whole way. So if you have a choice of direction based on your destination, consider that trade-off. The Bx36 is not the most exciting bus route in the Bronx, and it is certainly not the fastest. But it connects neighborhoods that the subway leaves underserved, and for the people who rely on it — which is most of the residents in that corridor — it is the only thing that works reliably. The route has survived budget cuts, restructuring proposals, and the usual decay of aging infrastructure, and it continues to operate on a schedule that has not changed fundamentally in thirty years. That is not impressive in a dramatic way, but it is practical, and in public transit that is usually enough.
