Next time you board an MTA bus . . . say cheese!
The agency is installing cameras and driver-safety partitions on hundreds of buses beginning next month, following a spate of violent attacks that have endangered both riders and drivers, officials said.
It’s all part of the MTA and NYPD’s ramped-up plan to combat an alarming rise in crime on mass transit that includes a high number of attacks on workers and a spike in grand larcenies on the subways.
By spring, the MTA will have increased the number of cameras on buses to 426. So far, there are only 195 in operation.
Once completed, about 9 percent of the 4,576 buses in the MTA fleet will have cameras.
Officials hope the cameras will deter criminals from striking aboard buses and will help cops identify and catch those who do.
Felony assaults against bus drivers have spiked 20 percent this year compared to 2010, a disturbing climb that union officials have blamed on the bad economy and public anger on fare hikes.
“An attack against any MTA employee is an attack against all of us, and we will do everything we can to eliminate these deplorable acts,” said MTA Executive Director Joseph Lhota.
Eventually, every single bus in the MTA’s entire fleet will come equipped with a Plexiglas partition to shield the driver.
Every new bus the MTA purchases will have the shields already in place — and hundreds of buses in the MTA’s existing fleet will be retrofitted.
Many of the buses that will be fitted for partitions leave from depots in Flatbush, Kingsbridge and Queens Village, which travel some of the highest-crime routes in the system.
By springtime, more than 500 buses will have the partitions shielding the drivers, a safety measure the Transport Workers Union has been requesting for years.
Those requests reached a fever pitch in 2008, when bus driver Edwin Thomas, a well-liked father of two who had emigrated to the US from Haiti, was killed after refusing to give a fare-beater on the B46 a free transfer.
Kisses Moreno, an MTA bus operator for eight years who has been attacked twice, called it a “great advance.”
Two years ago, she was stabbed in a leg by a passenger.
Additional reporting by Rebecca Rosenberg