Westchester County Executive George Latimer is rejecting criticisms a nonprofit transportation group gave of the county's Bee-Line Bus service.

A recent report from the Tri-State Transportation Campaign called the Westchester Bee Line Bus System, "infrequent, unreliable, and inaccessible."

Latimer says this assessment is flawed in ways he finds disturbing.

"There's an assertion of deficiency that this report makes that has no proof to prove its an accurate assertion. And if you're going to insert that something is deficient you have an obligation to prove it with objective data," he says.

Latimer says the report failed to provide concrete evidence of a systematic failure of the bus service. He also says it failed to mention several changes to the service that have improved the overall quality, such as switching to electric buses, making buses operate for free during the summer and making the buses safe during the COVID pandemic.

Latimer says the group also didn't reach out to the county to open up a dialogue about improving the bus system.

“They went ahead and did the report and then had a press conference without discussing it with us first. We want to work with people that want to be our partner, not people that want to sit outside the process and criticize us,” he says.

However, Renae Reynolds, of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, says Latimer’s response “doesn't address the longstanding issue, which is the service folks have been experiencing for the past several decades."

The group says the Bee-Line in Westchester is underperforming in comparison to public transport in similar sized cities.

“When we say infrequent service, we're talking about people waiting at the bus stops and not having the bus show up,” Reynolds says.