Advocates worry which street safety project Mayor Adams will abandon next

During his campaign for City Hall two years ago, Mayor Eric Adams promised to be a “bike mayor” who would “build out a state-of-the-art bus transit system.”

But now, as Adams approaches the halfway mark of his first term, street safety and transit advocates worry about which major street safety project will be next on the chopping block – and say they feel betrayed by the mayor.

Their concerns come after the city Department of Transportation this year drastically scaled back two long-planned street redesigns: One that would add bike lanes and reduce traffic lanes on McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and another to give buses priority on Fordham Road in the Bronx.

The administration drastically reduced the ambition of both projects. Fordham Road was envisioned as a “busway” where most passenger cars would be banned. Now the administration says it will just boost enforcement against cars illegally parked in the bus lane. McGuinness Boulevard began as a project to reduce the street’s traffic lanes and add a protected bike lane stretching to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The Adams administration halved the length of the bike lane at the last minute and reconfigured the design to save overnight parking spaces.

The projects faced last-minute opposition from coalitions of business groups that included the Bronx Zoo, the New York Botanical Garden and the Broadway Stages production company. Opponents argued the street safety changes would cause gridlock and reduce parking, harming their bottom lines.

The Adams administration walked back a plan to create a dedicated bus lane on Fordham Road.

“I think the thing that’s most jarring is that Eric Adams poses himself as the public safety mayor, and we’re not seeing any real action on street safety,” said Jon Orcutt of the advocacy group Bike New York.

One high-profile project that appears to have slowed dramatically is a priority bus lane on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. The dedicated lane would speed up the commutes of approximately 118,000 daily bus riders between Downtown Brooklyn and Kings Plaza, according to transportation department estimates.

The DOT hasn’t issued an update on its plans for the Flatbush project since January. At that time, the agency said it planned to implement the project sometime in 2023.

But that deadline won’t be met: transportation department officials now say the agency is still working on designs.

J.P. Patafio, vice president of Brooklyn buses for Transport Workers Union Local 100, said he felt betrayed by Adams’ lack of progress on new bus lanes. Local 100 endorsed Adams during his campaign.

“It's another failed or broken promise. And I don't understand it because it's easy to do,” Patafio said of giving buses priority on city streets. “It's unfortunate because this is basic infrastructure to improve public transit that predominantly serves working class New Yorkers. And I just don't see a commitment there.”

Nick Benson, a spokesperson for the city's transportation department, defended the mayor’s record and pointed to data showing that the city is on track to record the fewest pedestrian deaths in a calendar year in 2023.

While the Adams administration has had success reducing pedestrian fatalities, there have been 26 cycling deaths so far this year, the highest since 2014, when former Mayor Bill de Blasio launched his Vision Zero program with the goal of eliminating traffic deaths.

“DOT is breaking records for miles of new protected bike lanes, with nearly 100 street improvement projects recently completed or underway in addition to innovative work hardening and widening existing bike lanes,” Benson wrote in a statement.

The mayor's annual management report noted 26 miles of protected bike lanes were installed in the last fiscal year, 24 short of the City Council’s requirement of 50 miles of protected bike lanes.

“Things have been moving in the wrong direction. They're not getting better,” said City Councilmember Lincoln Restler. “I have no expectations that bold, big projects that can make our streets safer, that can save lives, that can get more people safely cycling to work, to school, et cetera, are going to be happening in this administration."

Restler said he’s learned the transportation department was directed to “no longer pursue big bike lane projects, big bus lane projects, even big city bike expansions because the political support is no longer there at City Hall.”

Spokespeople for the department and the mayor’s office did not respond directly to Restler’s assertions, or questions about how opposition from business groups affected two major street projects.

Gib Veconi, chair of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council, worried a section of Vanderbilt Avenue would lose its status as an open street, where cars are banned during most of the weekends through the end of this month.

Businesses on nearby Washington Avenue say that street has become prone to traffic jams as a result of the Vanderbilt Avenue closure.

Veconi feared that the open street could go the same way as McGuinness Boulevard and Fordham Road.

“Instead of worrying about whether somebody who wants parking spaces back might have a way of torpedoing this, we'd really like to be instead hearing from the administration about how the future is going to work and where we go with this,“ Veconi said of the volunteer-run open street, which has proven popular among both residents and businesses on Vanderbilt Avenue.

Adams administration officials said that since Adams took office, the city has installed bus lanes that affect 275,000 daily riders, including new lanes in the Bronx, on Third Avenue in Manhattan, in Downtown Brooklyn and on Northern Boulevard in Queens.

Adams recently said he didn’t want street safety projects to “steamroll communities.”

Orcutt, who served as policy director at the city transportation department under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said he fears the agency’s engineers and planners will be reluctant to move forward with ambitious plans.

“I think one of the biggest problems there is that for the next two years – there's going to be a chilling effect on what kind of designs DOT is going to come out with because they know they can be undermined at any moment by the bosses at City Hall,” Orcutt said. “The buck stops with Eric Adams.”