Mayor Zohran Mamdani was standing center stage with Gov. Kathy Hochul at a recent event to celebrate the anniversary of the congestion pricing tolling program.
Then the mayor turned to thank his new commissioner of the Department of Transportation, Mike Flynn, who stood so far from the lectern that he wasn’t on camera.
To those who know him, that was so Mike.
Mr. Flynn, 46, who was a behind-the-scenes transportation planner for most of his career, has been thrust into the spotlight since Mr. Mamdani introduced him as the department’s new chief on New Year’s Day at a V.I.P. inauguration event.
Now, he will lead 6,000 employees and be expected to help fulfill Mr. Mamdani’s promise to make the nation’s slowest buses fast and free. Other top priorities include the redesign of hundreds of miles of streets for pedestrians, cyclists and bus riders, amid opposition from some drivers, and the repair of a crumbling highway in Brooklyn.
That doesn’t include the daily logistics of maintaining 315,000 streetlights, 15,000 parking meters, 6,300 miles of streets, highways and plazas and over 800 bridges. Not to mention 10 Staten Island Ferry boats.
“The mayor has challenged us to be bold and ambitious,” Mr. Flynn said in an interview from his new Lower Manhattan office, cross legged on a sofa, beside a framed map of the city’s bike paths. “I’m all for it, but that means we’re going to have our work cut out for us.”
Mr. Flynn started as a summer intern at the Transportation Department in 2004. He was hired the next year to manage bike and pedestrian projects and went on to develop the city’s influential Street Design Manual. By the time he left the agency in 2014, he was overseeing a $2 billion street improvement capital plan.
His appointment represents a shift from recent picks. His predecessor, Ydanis Rodríguez, under former Mayor Eric Adams, was a city councilman. Hank Gutman, who served in Bill de Blasio’s administration, was a prominent lawyer.
But Mr. Flynn, a self-described computer-nerd-turned-planning-consultant, is the first commissioner in decades to have worked inside the department, said Samuel Schwartz, the chairman of the transportation program at Hunter College.
“I don’t think there’s anyone, that I could say, knows modern urban street design better than Mike,” said Mr. Schwartz, who was Mr. Flynn’s boss at a transportation consulting firm now called TYLin City Solutions.
Still, expectations are high, and ambitious plans have often stalled when confronted by politics.
One of Mr. Mamdani’s core campaign promises, to make New York’s buses fast and free, requires cooperation with the governor and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that operates the city’s mass transit system.
The revenue lost by subsidizing buses could exceed $1 billion a year. The likeliest way to pay for such a shortfall is through higher taxes, which Ms. Hochul has not committed to raising.
Making the service faster is more firmly in the Transportation Department’s power, but its street redesigns have often been hobbled by local opposition.
A law passed during the de Blasio administration required the city to create 150 miles of bus lanes with barriers or camera enforcement and 250 miles of protected bike lanes over five years. While a final tally has not yet been published, the Adams administration fell short, completing about 28 miles of bus lanes and 95 miles of protected bike lanes.
In his first two weeks, Mr. Flynn has ordered the completion of a stalled pedestrian-focused project in Brooklyn that was entangled in a corruption case involving a member of Mr. Adams’s inner circle; committed to finishing a contested bike lane project in Astoria, Queens; and moved to extend a bus lane project in Midtown Manhattan, where buses crawl at under five miles per hour.
But in a city where the loudest voices often prevail, Mr. Flynn’s is often described as soft-spoken and unassuming. His supporters have said that he succeeds because he builds an effective team around him rather than just putting himself out front.
“You never felt like Mike was too big,” said Kelly McGuinness, his former employee at a consulting firm and the director of the transportation program at Hunter College. He was a low-key operator, she said, preferring to elevate his team — like when he would hand out prepaid gift cards to unsuspecting staffers.
Mr. Flynn was born on Staten Island and grew up in Glen Rock, N.J. His grandfather had been a train dispatcher at the Queensboro Plaza station, and his father, a business man who commuted to Manhattan, once drove a yellow taxi.
Mr. Flynn wanted to be a train operator when he was young. “I would beg my dad, when we would go visit him at his office, to go take me on the subway,” he said.
He studied computer science and philosophy at the University of Vermont in Burlington, and was a campus coordinator for the Green Party.
He worked at the Transportation Department at a pivotal time. Under one commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, the agency pushed for transformative projects, like the pedestrianization of Times Square and a growing network of bike lanes and walkable plazas.
“It was a time when the agency went from a sleepy operating outfit that paved the streets and filled potholes and did some work on traffic safety, to one that was really driven to bring the streets system into the 21st century,” said John Orcutt, a former policy director at the department, where he worked with Mr. Flynn.
By night, Mr. Flynn earned a master’s degree in city and regional planning and even wrote his thesis on the public perception of congestion pricing, interviewing his future boss, Mr. Schwartz, in the process.
There was no such connection with Mr. Mamdani. Like 70,000 other applicants seeking to work for the mayor, Mr. Flynn said that he had simply applied online. “I wouldn’t say I’m the most politically connected person,” he said. “But I’m definitely passionate and I think pretty competent in my field and really excited in wanting to have a positive impact on my city.”
Mr. Flynn and his wife, Emily, a textile designer, live with their two children in Brooklyn. He keeps a running list of how the city could work better, emailing himself each new idea before he forgets. “I wake up at 3 a.m. and I’m just brainstorming,” he said.
In his new job, he will have to take on one of the city’s biggest infrastructure headaches, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which two previous administrations tried, and failed, to fix. “The B.Q.E. is a real priority,” he said, but also acknowledged the plan for it was “still very much in flux.”
Mr. Flynn has earned a reputation for being forward-thinking and knowing how to get things done in this city, whether it’s coordinating with multiple agencies or addressing various community concerns, said Mike Lydon, a planner who has worked closely with him.
Mr. Flynn also has close ties with many transit advocates. Until becoming commissioner, he was a member of the Riders Alliance, an influential transit policy nonprofit, where he was part of an “informal kitchen cabinet of advisers” and regularly attended its annual galas and made donations, said Betsy Plum, its executive director.
“The commissioner that we need right now is not someone with ego and main-character syndrome,” she said. “We need someone who is diligent, humble, hard-working, and that is absolutely Mike Flynn.”
Dad jokes help, too, his friends said. Former co-workers said they’ve watched him diffuse difficult situations with well-timed, self-deprecating humor.
Mr. Flynn has been known to tell an eye-roller or two, but he declined to share one in person. Days later, his team wrote back:
What do you get when you cross a caterpillar with a parrot?
A walkie-talkie.
Stefanos Chen is a Times reporter covering New York City’s transit system.
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