A war of words is erupting over the reliability and safety of New York City buses.

The union representing bus dispatchers says critical systems inside the MTA's bus command center repeatedly failed, leaving them unable to track buses or communicate directly with drivers. The MTA, however, is pushing back on those claims.

TWU Local 106 report multiple bus locator system outages

The Transport Workers Union Local 106 says essential radio- and GPS-based bus locator systems inside the MTA's $90 million bus command center repeatedly failed in recent days, including an outage that they say lasted more than 24 hours.

"On Friday morning, it went out for about an hour. It went out again later in the afternoon for about four hours," TWU Local 106 President Philip Valenti said. "It gave some problems throughout the weekend. And then on Monday morning about 7:15, the bus radio system and the GPS tracking system went out."

The union has also been especially critical of the transit agency's plan to pull dispatchers off city streets and move them into a command center they say isn't functioning.

"They can't even communicate with the bus operators right now, so the bus operators really have nobody supervising at some point on certain bus routes," Valenti said. "But of course, if there's a problem on the bus, there's a fight, there's an accident or whatever, this leads to long delays."

MTA says it is working on "some of the communication"

When asked about the union's claims, MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber said riders do not need to be concerned about their safety.

"We're still working with the contractor on some of the communication between buses and the command center," MTA Transit President Demetrius Crichlow said. "Over 440 total supervisors, 26 at this point, are being relocated and the reality is, it is to provide better service for our customers."

"GPS and other technologies enable us to see how buses are moving," Lieber said, "and so we are using technology rather than going, digging in even more deeply into the old-fashioned system of ... someone standing on a street corner and trying to manage service when they only see one bus at a time."

Valenti pushed back on what the MTA officials had to say.

"When you have the president of transit authority saying there's no problem, everything's working fine, and you got the system in complete shutdown for 44 hours, something is wrong," he said.