Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out about the city’s plan to go ahead with a redesign of 34th Street as a “busway,” a project the Trump administration blocked last year. We’ll get details on two Knicks fans who’ll be cheering tonight — one from San Antonio, the other from outside Madison Square Garden.
New York thinks fast. It spends money fast. But it doesn’t always move fast.
Consider 34th Street. The world knows 34th Street for a certain Thanksgiving Day parade and a movie with “miracle” in the title. But New Yorkers know 34th Street for slowness.
Buses on 34th Street move at about five miles per hour, and when traffic is going nowhere, the wasted time adds up. The city figures that congestion-related delays on 34th Street take up more than 750 hours of bus riders’ time every day.
Now the city is moving forward with a redesign of 34th Street that will include a dedicated “busway” — lanes where only buses, emergency vehicles and trucks could go during peak times.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s announcement on Tuesday was the second time the busway plan had been floated. Last year the city’s transportation department, under Mayor Eric Adams, presented the plan, only to scrap it after the Trump administration raised objections.
Mamdani is walking a delicate line with the Trump administration. Last year the federal Department of Transportation threatened to withhold funding for some city projects if the busway went forward.
Nothing about the redesign of 34th Street appears to be different from what was on the drawing board under Adams. But now the Trump administration appears willing to let the project proceed. It’s not clear what changed the minds of officials in the administration, other than that City Hall agreed to add the redesign to a list of state projects that the federal government reviews.
So another hiccup might come later.
Melissa Braid, a spokeswoman for the Federal Highway Administration, did not respond to questions from my colleague Stefanos Chen about the agency’s discussions with the city, but confirmed that it had been in touch about the busway. She said in a statement on Monday that her agency was “reviewing” a letter from the city outlining the plans for 34th Street.
The headway on the 34th Street project could mean that similar road redesign projects that also faced the threat of federal intervention will advance too. Transit advocates had worried that a busway proposal for Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, the city’s most bus-dependent borough, would end up being shelved.
For now, Mamdani is trying to make good on his campaign promise to bring “fast and free” buses to the city.
The plan does not call for making the buses on 34th Street free, and how much faster it would make them remains to be seen. The city says they could go as much as 15 percent faster once the busway is completed.
Percentages sound impressive. Actual speeds don’t when you consider that a five-m.p.h. bus would gain less than one m.p.h. on the speedometer. But my colleague Stefanos notes that similar redesigns suggest that even bigger improvements are possible. On the 14th Street busway, which opened in 2019, bus speeds increased by up to 24 percent. On 34th Street, that would boost the average speed to 6.2 miles an hour.
“I’m less concerned about the speed of the buses than the number of people on the buses,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University and a former director of the Rudin Center for Transportation. He predicts that “there’ll be many more people on the buses” as people find that they could be a good way to get to places that are outside the one-mile stretch of the redesign.
The busway will run only from Third Avenue to Ninth Avenue. But Moss said that people bound for the Javits Center on 11th Avenue or the NYU-Langone medical complex on First Avenue could easily become bus passengers. “The problem is the cars aren’t moving” now, he said. “At least we’ll have one mode moving well.”
Critics have argued that a busway could push more traffic onto neighboring streets. But the city’s Transportation Department has countered that the redesign will reduce bottlenecks and open curb space for deliveries. The agency expects to complete construction in the fall.
Weather
Expect a sunny day with a high around 81. Look for clear skies tonight as temperatures drop near 63.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until June 19 (Juneteenth).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“As mayor, you’re forced to make many difficult decisions. This was not one of them. Go Knicks.” — Mayor Zohran Mamdani, after signing a tongue-in-cheek executive order repealing children’s bedtimes during the Knicks’ run in the N.B.A. finals, which begin tonight.
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A cash infusion to fight AIPAC: American Priorities, a super PAC created to challenge pro-Israel advocacy groups, has pledged to spend $2 million to support three House candidates in New York who have been critics of Israel’s wars and military actions across the region.
Knicks fans take their places
Would Spike Lee, the consummate Knicks fan and the perennial courtside personality, go to San Antonio to watch the Knicks play the same team they played the last time they were in the N.B.A. finals? (That was in 1999, by the way.)
Lee answered with a question — “Is James, Brown? Is Al, Green? Is Barry, White?” — before confirming the expected. Yes, he’s going, with other superfans who will fill two private jets. They plan to leave this morning, he said.
He declined to say who was among his party. “These are the road dogs,” he said. “But we are not the only ones. It is going to be an invasion.” Then, shouting: “We are bringing orange and blue skies to San Antonio!”
Lee said he had a healthy respect for the Spurs. He said he was good friends with Gregg Popovich, the president of basketball operations for the Spurs, and has a game-worn jersey signed by Victor Wembanyama, the Spurs’ 7-foot-5-inch superstar.
But courtside in Texas, Lee will wear the head-to-toe orange-and-blue get-up he wears for every Knicks game, “for luck.”
Back in New York, the Baklava Guy plans to be outside the Garden tonight. In Instagram reels that collectively racked up more than five million views, he was seen giving away baklava there on the night the Knicks clinched their spot in the finals.
My colleague Pete Wells writes that the Baklava Guy is a 30-year-old man known in legal records as Jacob Komarow, although he now uses the name Roy Donk. He and eight freelance pastry slingers can unload 500 wedges of baklava on a busy day, driving from park to park between Greenpoint and Fort Greene in Brooklyn.
Why baklava? The short version is that in 2021 he decided to follow the band Phish around the country. One consequence of this was that his employer, a company making licensed Phish apparel, fired him. Outside the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, Calif., he realized that his bank account would be empty before the tour ended. He decided to find something that he could sell — something that would stand out amid the vendors selling bottled water and grilled cheese sandwiches.
He walked into a nearby store and spotted a display of baklava. That eventually led to his current supply chain: He tells customers that the baklava is layered and frozen in Turkey and baked “in the kingdom of New Jersey.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Under the hood
Dear Diary:
I was returning from a free ear-acupuncture clinic on a balmy spring day a few years ago, leisurely walking along Fifth Street on my way to the East Village.
I was feeling relaxed, so relaxed that I when I passed a man in his 60s who had his tools spread out on the sidewalk and was working on a car that had definitely seen better days, I did something out of character: I stopped to talk to him.
We chatted for a little while about the repair he was making to the car’s engine, and I peeked in under the hood.
“But,” he said with a straight face, “you should see the body in the trunk.”
There was a moment of silence, and then we both laughed and I walked away.
— Bonnie Rosenstock
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Sarah Maslin Nir, Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post Fixing the 34th Street Bottleneck appeared first on New York Times.
