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When Isabella Leungfirst started workingat Crystal Windowand Door Systems, amanufacturer in Col-

lege Point, Queens, she had toleave her house no later than 6a.m. in order to get to work by 8.She lived just 9 miles away, inOzone Park, but before she waspromoted and invested in a car,she spent years transferring frombus tobus andwatchinghelplesslyas each one crawledalong at 5 mph dur-ing the morningrush.

All across NewYork, commuteslike this have be-come all too com-mon. More andmore residents are forgoing themore traditional trip into Manhat-tan and instead are travelingacross their home boroughs orfrom one borough to another. Butdespite the fact that transit rider-ship patterns have been shifting,with more people working in theboroughs, the Metropolitan Trans-portation Authority and NewYork City Department of Trans-portation have not made the in-vestments necessary to keep up

with these trends, and the stateLegislature has not provided theresources for themto doso.

NewYork’s subwaysystemwasnever intended to facilitate thesekinds of trips. As a result, meancommute times in the boroughsare now some of the longest in thecountry. For public transit riders,they range from 52 minutes eachway in Brooklyn to 69 minuteseachway onStatenIsland.

The biggest losers in all this arethe workingpoor, whoare en-during longercommutes thanever and, inmany cases, arecut off from de-cent-paying jobopportunities be-

cause of limited transit connectivi-ty.

Behind the rise in nontradition-al commutes is a rapidly changinglocal economy. For decades, Man-hattan has been steadily losing itsshare of jobs to the other bor-oughs, but over the last severalyears this process has sped up sig-nificantly.

Since2000,Manhattanhas lost110,000 jobs. New York City as awhole has lost 41,000. But every

otherborough hasseensignificantgains, with Brooklyn leading thepack at 35,000 new jobs. Duringthe recession of 2008-2009, whenManhattan was hemorrhagingjobs, the Bronx actually saw mod-est gains — 3,647 in that one year,compared to a loss of 100,799 inManhattan.

Driving the growth in the bor-oughs are impressive gains in theeducationandhealthcare sectors.Unlike the city’s financial servicesand media industries, the vast ma-jority of the city’s hospitals, com-munity health clinics, doctor’s of-

fices, universities and technicalcolleges are located in the bor-oughs.

Even the city’s manufacturingsector, which has been shrinkingin Manhattan and along theQueens and Brooklyn water-fronts, has seen tremendousgrowth in areas like Maspeth,Hunts Point and the Brooklyn Na-vy Yard, none of which is well-connectedto thesubway.

Employers told us that alack of mass transitshrinks their labor pooland causes more turnoveras disgruntled employees

decide to leave rather than sufferthrough two-hour commutes ev-ery day. SUNY Downstate ChiefOperating Officer Ivan Lisnitzereven says that a lack of sufficienttransit could cause the hospital torethink its plans for expansion:“Kings County and SUNY Down-state Hospitals are the second andfourth largest employers in theborough,” he said, “ but we get ig-nored.”

Investments in the city’s under-performing bus system would be,by far, the quickest and most cost-effective way to alleviate longcommutes and support continued

job growth in the boroughs out-sideManhattan.

TheMTAcouldexpandcurrentefforts to allow passengers toboard through any bus door, forexample. They could add dedicat-ed lanes and extended green lightsto more bus lines in the outer bor-oughs. Perhaps easiest of all, theagency could install GPS deviceson all city buses so that time-arriv-al information could be madeavailable to waiting passengers byway of digital signs at bus stops orvia smartphoneapplications.

The MTA has started to taketentative steps toward these goals,but much more can and should bedone to improve the bus system inthe outer boroughs. While theagency needs to think biggerabout buses, it also needs muchmore support from the governorand state Legislature than eitherhaveshownin thepast.

David Giles is research associ-ate for the Center for an Urban Fu-ture and author of “Behind theCurb,” a recent report issued bythecenter about transit gaps in theboroughsoutsideofManhattan.

Be Our Guest column is an oc-casional feature that will focus onimportant issues affecting ourcommunities.

Time to improve boro commutes

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QUEENS NEWS

BE OURGUEST

David Giles

Bus travel across boroughs isa frustrating experience, a studysays. Photo by Robert Sabo/Daily News

38 Wednesday, March 16, 2011 DAILY NEWSNYDailyNews.com

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BY JI HYUN PARK

The Korean American Film Festival New York brings moviemakers from differ-ent ends of the world, but

when the fi fth edition opens tomorrow in Manhattan, three local directors will take their turn in the spotlight.

Dai Sil Kim-Gibson is featured in the festival’s fi rst retrospective, with six compel-ling documentaries about the Korean and Korean-American community.

A decade-long New Yorker, Kim-Gibson says she turns to Fort Tryon Park, her “back-yard,” for quiet moments of recollection. It’s a break from what she calls the electric pulse of creativity and diversity necessary to survive in the city.

“More than any other time, the forgotten issues in my fi lms must be revisited,” she says.

In “Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women,” she presents Korean women forced into sex-ual slavery by the Japanese in World War II. In “Motherland,” she introduces Koreans who live in Cuba and asks questions about the meaning of home.

Following screenings Sat-

urday of “Sa-I-Gu” and “Wet Sand: Voices From L.A. 10 Years Later,” Kim-Gibson will lead a discussion with Jung Hui Lee, who lost her son during the Los Angeles riots.

On a Las Vegas trip with a friend in 2002, Maria Yoon got married twice — to a showgirl dressed

as Diana Ross and to a waiter at a fi ve-star restaurant — “just go through the motions and see what happens,” she says.

“That was the beginning of it,” Yoon, 39, says. Filled with questions about what the per-fect wedding means, she set out for answers in all 50 states, marrying “brides and grooms and even things” while wear-ing a hanbok, the traditional Korean dress.

“Maria the Korean Bride” is a 15-minute look at her wed-dings. She proposes to random strangers and gets married on a horse in Wyoming and to

a 700-pound Black Angus bull in Nebraska. “At the end of the day,” Yoon says, “it’s me collecting stories in every state and what people had to say about love and marriage.”

The Cooper Union alum has worked for 15 years as a private tour guide at the Metro-politan Museum of Art.

“As an artist, I think you have to live here,” she says. “New York City is its own utopia.”

Iris Shim met Andrew Suh in 2001, when she was a fresh-man at the University of Chi-cago. Her good friend was

his pen pal, and she wanted Shim at their fi rst meeting — at the Pontiac Correctional Center in Illinois, where he was serving an 80-year sentence for killing his sister’s fi ance.

Suh was a 19-year-old student at Providence College when his sister Catherine asked him to shoot her boy-friend for his $250,000 life insurance. Catherine Suh, dubbed the “Black Widow” at the time, skipped out before a court appearance and was arrested in Hawaii.

Still, he refused to testify against his sister. “I did it,” he says in Shim’s fi lm “House of Suh,” “because I thought that it was the right thing to do.”

Shim, now a Columbia University fi lm student, says she simply set out to tell Suh’s story and the story of his family. In the year since the fi lm wrapped, it has won fi lm-festival awards

Shim says she hopes to use the fi lm to break down commu-nication blocks between fi rst- and second-generation family members in Asian immigrant households.

“I would love to continue making stories where there’s just an Asian-American pres-ence, but you don’t have to re-ally acknowledge it,” she says. “They’re just there.”

soaked cask to produce a succulent fruitiness,” says Egan “ or a certain kind of oak to get those toasted notes of vanilla or caramel.”

While purists drink their whisk y undiluted, or “neat,” Egan has no problem if people want to add ginger ale or Coke. “I don’t like to have too many rules,” he says. “I just want people to enjoy themselves.”

Egan comes to the city tomorrow to ring the closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange, which could be quite a tintin nabulation after a day of St. Patrick’s Day festivities.

Actually, Egan is a model of restraint, even on the job. “I taste whisk y every day, but I still have to drive home,” to the tiny coastal village of Bal-lycastle in Northern Ireland, he sa ys with a laugh.

The 41-year-old won’t say which Bushmills blend is his favorite. “Would you ask a

mother,” he says, “which of her fi ve kids is her favorite?”

Bushmills will bottle the win-ners’ blends, but would it make the production line?

“You never know,” says the master craftsman. “If it’s a real classic, questions will be asked of my ability.”

Colum Egan’s Original Irish Whisk y Sauce4 tablespoons butter, softened½ cup sugar1 egg, beaten2 tablespoons Irish whisk y

Cream butter and sugar to-gether; blend in the beaten egg. Put mixture in top of a double boiler over gently boiling water and stir until thickened. Remove from heat and stir in the whisk y.

Pictures of diversityKorean-American

fi lm fest puts focus on 3 N.Y. directors

The Korean American Film Festival New York runs

from tomorrow to Sunday at the Chelsea Clearview Cinemas, White Box and

Big Screen Project in Man-hattan. Info: kaffny.com.

YOU SHOULD KNOW

N.Y. fi lmmaker Dai Sil Kim-Gibson is honored with a retrospective.

Maria Yoon’s “Maria the Korean Bride” fi lm is wedded to a con-cept: getting married all over U.S.

prove community relations.“The good part about this

project is that we are able to introduce neighbors who have never known each other exist,” says RIMX. “Hopefully, this will create a connection within the community that will form stron-ger bonds and maybe help solve some of the issues created by lack of communication.”

Even if 16 murals and a poem

don’t solve all of what bothers Bushwick, they’ll surely brighten the lives of a few neighbors.

“When I saw my mural for the fi rst time, I was so excited,” says Cherry. “I’m only 25 and I already have a painting of me up on the streets of New York. That’s a big deal. It just shows that you don’t have to be famous or dead to be honored on the streets of Brooklyn.”

A gallery showing of “16 Barras” is set for

March 26 at the Space on White studios (81 White St .,

Tribeca, SpaceonWhite.com). Check out videos of

RIMX painting murals at DonRIMX.blogspot.com.

YOU SHOULD KNOW

Krystal Cherry loves the mural of her, above: “Art rarely goes wrong.”

DAILY NEWSNYDailyNews.com Wednesday, March 16, 2011 43