By Megan James

Many Riverdale and Kingsbridge commuters, whether traveling on the bus or subway, are finding themselves stuck in an increasingly narrow bottleneck at West 231st Street and Broadway during rush hours.

Commuters complain that the northbound No. 1 train slows to a crawl between the West 231st and 242nd street stops because of the backup of trains at the end of the line at Van Cortlandt Park.

The buses in the area are no better. “The wait and the overcrowding there are unacceptable,” said Tony Cassino, Community Board 8’s traffic and transportation chairman, who makes the commute to and from Manhattan every day.

In an effort to alleviate the problem, Mr. Cassino wrote to the Metropolitan Transit Authority late last month, requesting an evaluation of the area.

Recent innovations introduced by the MTA seem to be helping in other parts of the Bronx, like the select bus service on Bx12 that allows people to buy their tickets at a machine before boarding the bus, so they don’t have to wait in line to swipe their cards.

According to MTA spokeswoman Deirdre Parker, the agency received Mr. Cassino’s letter and plans to send people from its operations planning and road operations departments to check out the situation at 231st Street.

Mr. Cassino is all too familiar with the problem. He has been commuting from Riverdale to Manhattan every day for a decade, connecting to the bus between the 242nd Street subway and his North Riverdale home.

“Somebody’s got to manage that job better,” he said. “It’s laughable.”

Often, rather than sitting through the slow stops at the end of the subway line, he switches to the Bx7 bus at West 231st Street. But the overcrowding at the bus stop is even worse, he said.

“If you commute into our area, other than on the Metro- North, you come to this bottleneck,” he said.

Mr. Cassino acknowledged that the congestion could simply be the nature of the end of the subway line. “But if it is, then why can’t we solve that? If they’re switching crews, they’ve got to figure out how to do that.”