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, announced that he was reversing several of Mr. Adams’s transit decisions.
During a news conference held aboard a bus in the Bronx, Mr. Mamdani said he planned to install offset bus lanes on Fordham Road, the busiest bus route in the Bronx, which is the city’s poorest and most bus-reliant borough. The decision comes years after Mr. Adams nixed an ambitious street redesign there in deference to local political interests and replaced it with a watered-down version that did little to speed up traffic.
“Too many New Yorkers have seen their precious time treated with casual disdain, as if it does not matter,” Mr. Mamdani said.
Mr. Mamdani’s plan does not create a largely car-free busway on Fordham Road, as some transit advocates had hoped for. But it will feature dedicated bus lanes set off from the curb, to reduce conflicts with parked vehicles.
“We expect the Mamdani administration to continue pursuing public excellence on Fordham Road and across the city and take every opportunity to deliver much faster buses,” said Betsy Plum, executive director of the Riders Alliance, a mass transit advocacy group.
Mr. Mamdani also said the city would install 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.
That decision became so notorious among cyclists that they came to refer to the block as “Crashland.”
Once the Ashland Place project is complete, a protected bike lane will run from Dumbo to Sunset Park, city officials 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.
But the city’s streets are also heavily contested.
Peter Madonia, the chairman of the Belmont Business Improvement District, which includes part of Fordham Road, said that local Bronx institutions — including businesses in the borough’s Little Italy along Arthur Avenue — relied heavily on regional, vehicular traffic that could be impeded by the bus plan.
“Constricting traffic the way they’re proposing it is going to create real chaos,” Mr. Madonia said.
On Friday, Mr. Mamdani said the administration’s goal was to increase bus speeds by at least 20 percent along the Fordham Road route. That would mean that the Bx12, which now moves at an average pace of about nine miles per hour, would need to run at a speed of nearly 11 m.p.h.
On average, New York City buses travel at speeds of 8 m.p.h., making them one of the slowest fleets in the United States.
“Riding a bus ought to be faster than walking,” said Janno Lieber, the chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who joined Mr. Mamdani for the announcement.
But while the authority has been supportive of adding new bus lanes, it has not endorsed the mayor’s plan to make the city’s buses free.
The M.T.A. estimates that subsidizing the buses, which carry an average of 2.6 million riders on weekdays, could cost it more than $1 billion a year in foregone fare revenue. (Mr. Mamdani has put the price tag a bit lower, at about $700 million a year.)
Some transit advocates are also unconvinced that making buses free would be the best use of limited resources.
Mr. Mamdani’s office has been pushing to implement a free-bus pilot program for five weeks this summer, when World Cup matches will be held in the New York City area.
On Friday, neither Mr. Mamdani nor Mr. Lieber addressed the pilot proposal directly, saying instead that they were focused on speed.
Mr. Mamdani is 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.
On Friday, Mr. Mamdani also announced that the city would 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, as well as along Brooklyn and Kingston Avenues, also in Brooklyn.
“The safety of New Yorkers should not be a bargaining chip for backroom deals made by the last administration,” said Mike Flynn, the city’s new transportation commissioner.
Jon Orcutt, a former policy director for the Transportation Department, said he was pleased that Mr. Mamdani was moving forward with these plans. But he expressed hope that the mayor would also take on bike lane projects that required more political capital to enact, 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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