A group of transit advocates has launched a new campaign to push for speeding up New York City's bus system, the nation's slowest, and making it more affordable, by utilizing tactics commonly found in labor union and tenant organizing drives.

The organization, Riders Alliance, kicked off the campaign, dubbed "Fix The Bus," on Monday. The effort is designed to better organize bus riders to more effectively fight for fast, free, and "funded" service, leaders with the group said during a virtual Oct. 29 news conference.

Danny Pearlstein, Riders Alliance's policy and communications director, said the campaign is seeking a " bus that we can all be proud of, t hat's worth riding, t hat's worth even paying for, but we shouldn't have to."

Pearlstein said the campaign is looking to address a clear imbalance in which a majority of New Yorkers are transit riders, but those who take the bus are often an "afterthought." Bus riders are largely low-income, Black and brown, and live in the outer boroughs — meaning it takes more organizing to push for improved bus service than it does for glossy projects in Manhattan, he added.

"Bus riders are largely invisible about the decisions made on our streets, and for too long have been put last," Pearlstein said. "Buses are of particular importance in outer borough communities, Black and brown communities, low-income and working class communities, and so there needs to be more organizing, more energy of activation, so to speak, than to fix something high profile, like for example, Penn Station."

To that end, campaign lead Divya Sundaram said they want to bring bus riders together into a political constituency that's loud enough to have city and state elected officials paying attention. She said they will do so by borrowing heavily from the organizing methods employed by labor unions and tenants' groups.

"T enants identify as tenants, and there's a strong identity behind that, and there's a lot of organizing force behind that, and same with like organizing in your workplace," Sundaram said. " I think that connection between being a bus rider, what power we can wield as bus riders, isn't something that feels very strong yet. … T his campaign is trying to build on Riders Alliance's past work and just expand the scale and efforts of that organizing."

Riders Alliance plans to begin growing support for its campaign by conducting on-the-ground outreach across the neighborhoods in which Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul are advancing rapid bus corridor projects . Those particular undertakings — introduced by the city and state in their fast bus plan released over the summer — involve reconfiguring streets around cordoned-off center-running bus-only lanes adorned with bus stations.

Pearlstein said the campaign has a "unique opportunity" to seize on Mamdani's and Hochul's interest in making buses faster, while also pushing them to follow through with and improve upon the proposal for boosting bus speeds.

" We need to make sure that we achieve the plan to the utmost because we've seen plans before, and we need to in some places improve upon that and go on to deliver what we believe riders can deliver as an organized force," he said.

Although Mamdani popularized the idea of making buses fast and free in his mayoral campaign last year, he has thus far only worked on the commitment to make them fast, leaving the push for eliminating bus fares on the back burner.

The corridors include Brooklyn's Flatbush, Utica, and Church Avenues; Queens' Northern Boulevard; and the Bronx's Tremont Avenue and Fordham Road.

Since releasing the plan, Mamdani's Department of Transportation has already made significant headway on transforming Flatbush Avenue between Livingston Street and Grand Army Plaza into a rapid bus corridor. It also completed adding a busway to Tremont Avenue and is still in the midst of adding bus lanes to Fordham Road .

Sundaram said Riders Alliance is starting its campaign by hosting a meeting for all of its members on Nov. 2. It will then hold rider "assembly" events to engage with straphangers in each of the three boroughs where the campaign will operate over the next two months.

"It really is an opportunity to create spaces for bus riders to come and share their frustrations, their pain points, but also for how to take action and how we actually fix the bus," she said.