When Eric Adams was mayor of New York, he repeatedly undermined his Transportation Department’s efforts to improve commutes for cyclists and bus riders in the city.
On Friday, his successor, Zohran Mamdani, is expected to announce that he is reversing two of Mr. Adams’s transit decisions, a spokeswoman for City Hall confirmed to The New York Times.
Mr. Mamdani is expected to announce the installation of offset bus lanes on Fordham Road, the busiest bus route in the Bronx — the city’s poorest and most bus-reliant borough — years after Mr. Adams nixed an ambitious street redesign in deference to local political interests and replaced it with a watered-down version that did little to speed up traffic.
Mr. Mamdani’s plan does not appear to create a largely car-free busway, as some transit advocates had hoped. But it will feature dedicated bus lanes set off from the curb, to reduce conflicts with parked vehicles.
Mr. Mamdani is also expected to announce the installation of a two-way, protected bike lane on Ashland Place in Brooklyn, nearly three years after Mr. Adams’s top aide pulled the project, also in deference to local power brokers.
The latter decision became so notorious among cyclists, that they came to refer to the block as “Crashland.”
Once the Ashland Place project is complete, a single protected bike lane will run from Dumbo to Sunset Park, the city said.
The new mayor, who is just six weeks into his tenure, ran for office on a platform of making New York City’s buses fast and free. Buses, which require comparatively little infrastructure and funding, are widely regarded as low-hanging fruit in any effort to broaden the city’s transit networks.
Mr. Mamdani is also a cyclist, and has made a point of prioritizing bike lane projects. On his third day in office, he resurrected a contested redesign of a major boulevard in Brooklyn that would make it more cyclist- and pedestrian-friendly, after the street figured prominently in a corruption indictment of Mr. Adams’s former top aide, Ingrid Lewis-Martin. On his sixth day in office, Mr. Mamdani personally helped remove a pit in a bike lane at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge.
Mr. Mamdani is also expected to announce that the city will build a bike lane network through the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Midwood, Flatbush and East Flatbush, and add protected lanes to Dorchester and Cortelyou Roads in Ditmas Park, and along Brooklyn and Kingston Avenues, also in Brooklyn.
“These projects will improve the quality of life for so many New Yorkers — but until today many were stalled because of politics,” said Mike Flynn, the city’s new transportation commissioner, in a statement. “This is just the beginning.”
Jon Orcutt, a former policy director for the Transportation Department, said he was pleased that Mr. Mamdani was moving forward with these plans, but expressed hope that the mayor would also take on bike lane projects that required more political capital, like a contested bike lane that Mr. Adams removed from an Orthodox Jewish section of Brooklyn.
“They’ll endure some grief for putting them back, but it’s an essential safety project,” Mr. Orcutt said.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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