Three months after Mayor Zohran Mamdani said a long-delayed street redesign in Midtown Manhattan was moving forward, there are no signs of progress, raising concerns that the project has hit another snag.
Mr. Mamdani, who has promised to fix New York’s stubbornly slow bus service, announced in June that major changes to a one-mile stretch of 34th Street, one of the city’s most clogged arteries for bus and commercial traffic, would be completed this fall. The Transportation Department said this week that work would begin soon, but did not provide further details.
The project would create a dedicated “busway” — lanes reserved for buses, emergency vehicles and trucks during peak travel times — between Third and Ninth Avenues, with the goal of speeding up service for more than 28,000 daily riders.
The announcement came seven months after the Trump administration ordered the city not to proceed with the work, citing concerns about access for trucks and emergency vehicles. A spokesman for the mayor said in June that the city had “been in active communications with the federal government” to restart the project.
Now, some commuters worry that it has stalled, said Jason Froimowitz, the transportation committee chair of Manhattan Community Board 6, whose district includes part of 34th Street. The board sent a letter on Thursday to city officials requesting an update.
“Absolutely nothing has happened,” Mr. Froimowitz said, noting that the city had expected to install signage and make other physical changes to the street during the summer, and wrap up construction by the end of fall.
Vincent Barone, a spokesman for the Transportation Department, declined to say why the work appeared to be delayed, or to provide a new timeline for the project.
“The Mamdani administration has been working to deliver bus lane and busway projects across the five boroughs,” Mr. Barone said in a statement, adding, “We will be starting work on 34th Street in the coming weeks.”
Mr. Mamdani made buses a crucial part of his agenda, campaigning on a promise to make them both fast and free for all riders.
The “free” part has proved difficult to deliver. The bus network is controlled by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency that has not supported eliminating fares, largely because such a subsidy could cost more than $1 billion per year in forgone revenue.
Instead, the mayor and Gov. Kathy Hochul released a plan in July to improve bus speeds by up to 20 percent on at least 50 major corridors in the city. The bus fleet serves 2.6 million riders each weekday but is among the slowest in the nation.
The 34th Street busway is one of those routes, and it is expected to run along a crowded stretch that includes the Macy’s flagship store at Herald Square. The lanes would be active every day from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. During off-peak hours, other vehicles would be allowed to travel in them.
Buses on 34th Street move at about five miles per hour on average — slower than some people run, and well below the city’s average of eight m.p.h.
Other mayors have tried and failed to carry out versions of this project.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg first proposed a redesign in 2008, but opponents repeatedly sidelined it, citing, among other reasons, concerns about curb access for trucks and businesses.
Last year, Mayor Eric Adams was poised to advance the project, but the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal funding for unnamed transportation projects if the busway was installed on the corridor, which is part of the federal highway system.
The Trump administration has sought to use such threats to block other transportation projects in the New York area, including the congestion pricing toll in Manhattan.
The busway plan is supported by the Trucking Association of New York, a major freight industry group, which has said the plan would improve delivery access.
And similar street redesigns have had promising results. After a busway opened on 14th Street in 2019, bus speeds increased by up to 24 percent and crashes along the stretch were reduced by 42 percent, according to the city’s Transportation Department.
The U.S. Department of Transportation said it had last communicated with the city shortly after Mr. Mamdani’s June announcement, when the federal agency requested administrative changes to the proposal so that it could be incorporated into federal transportation planning. The agency declined to comment on what, exactly, was holding up the project.
City Councilman Shaun Abreu, who leads the Council’s transportation committee, said the apparent lack of progress on 34th Street was concerning.
“The 28,000 bus riders who use it each day are tired of watching transit improvements get stuck in limbo,” he said. “If there’s a holdup, the city owes New Yorkers a straight answer.”
In the nearly two decades since the busway was first proposed, the plan has become increasingly popular with residents and businesses, said Danny Pearlstein, the policy director for Riders Alliance, a transportation advocacy group. He added that there was no reason to delay it further.
“An on-again, off-again busway doesn’t do anything for riders,” Mr. Pearlstein said.
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