The Adams administration continued its annual tradition of failing miserably to install the legally required miles of bus lanes, and also came in well below minimums for protected bike paths, making a mockery of the 2019 Streets Plan legislation that sought to roll out the infrastructure on a mass scale.
The city refused to reveal how many miles it installed this year, but estimates by Streetsblog and advocates indicate that the Department of Transportation could come in as low as five-plus miles of protected bus lanes and around 22 miles of protected bike lanes — just fractions of the law's minimum of 30 miles and 50 miles respectively.
If those numbers hold, the Adams DOT hit just 17.6 percent of the bus lane requirement and 44 percent of its bike lane requirement. As such, advocates were outraged.
"This pattern of neglect is not just a failure of leadership; it's a failure of the mayor's responsibility to the people of New York City," Philip Miatkowski, Interim Deputy Executive Director of Transportation Alternatives, told Streetsblog in a statement. "The Streets Plan isn't a suggestion — it's the law, and every day the administration falls behind, it puts lives at risk. No more excuses. No more delays. Mayor Adams must stop neglecting his legal obligations, get the Streets Plan back on track, and deliver the safe, protected infrastructure that our communities need to stay safe and get around."
This year marks the third straight year of underwhelming bus lane growth, cementing the failure of this City Hall to meaningfully improving commutes for the city's more than one million daily bus riders, who by and large are among the poorest commuters in the city.
The numbers speak for themselves: In January 2022, when Eric Adams took the oath of office, weekday bus speeds averaged 8.3 miles per hour, according to the MTA's tracker. By November 2024, those speeds had dropped to 7.9 miles per hour. That's a decline of nearly 5 percent.
Weekday bus speeds in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan average below 7 miles per hour. And consider the M50 bus, which runs along the congested route between the United Nations and the western end of 42nd Street. When Mayor Adams took office, the weekday average speed of that route was an already slow 5.7 miles per hour. Last month, it had dropped to 4.8 miles per hour, a nearly 16-percent snailification.
"The mayor still operates the slowest buses in the country and that’s to his great shame," said Danny Pearlstein, the director of Policy and Communications Director at Riders Alliance.
Streetsblog recently confronted DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez with the abysmal tally. His response? He said his agency was doing a "great job."
The agency finished new bus lanes on Second Avenue, 96th Street and Pike Street, totaling 5.3 miles for all of 2024, a pace at which it would take 28 years to install the 150 miles Mayor Adams promised on the campaign trail for his first four-year term. He also pledged to build 300 miles of protected bike lanes during that time and roll out so-called bike "superhighways." The former would be nearly impossible, while the latter has not even been proposed, despite the mayor being in office since Jan. 1, 2022.
DOT can reach its bus lane requirements by either building new red-painted paths protected physically or by camera enforcement, or by adding those safeguards to existing bus lanes.
The city punted a planned Tremont Avenue busway in the Bronx to next year, and other projects on the horizon include busway on 34th Street in Manhattan, some sort of bus lane on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, and an undefined bus priority project on Hillside Avenue in Queens.
The mayor also abandoned much-needed upgrades for the Fordham Road bus lanes by bowing to pro-car business interests.
Hizzoner's poor performance on buses has become a campaign issue for the challengers lining up to unseat him in the June primary (which follows his April corruption trial as well as the Jan. 20 inauguration of his ally, Donald Trump).
On protected bike lanes, the city did better, but still way below what the Streets Plan demands.
A project tracker by Transportation Alternatives logged around 17 miles of completed cycling infrastructure this year, as of the beginning of this month. That could rise to around 22 miles once it includes all projects that are being wrapped up, said Brandon Chamberlin, a lawyer and bike lane tracker who has personally inspected many of the paths.
The agency said in a year-end press release last week that it was "on pace to install a substantial number of protected bike lane miles" [emphasis added], indicating that DOT will complete fewer than the 32 miles it managed last year. Those 32 miles were a record for the city, but still just 64 percent of the 50-mile minimum.
A spokesperson for department said the numbers in this story were "not DOT estimates," but the agency declined to provide other figures, saying officials were still counting.
"We are always working towards the goals of the Streets Plan, with a record-high number of protected bike lanes and pedestrian space created, in addition to new and improved bus lanes, which have made commutes faster and more reliable for 680,000 daily riders," said Anna Correa in a statement. "In addition to new bus lanes we’re installing this year, we’re also adding camera enforcement to existing corridors across the city to speed up commutes and help us reach our goals."
The department "expects to far exceed Streetsblog’s estimate" of 5.3 miles of protected bus lanes, spokesperson Vincent Barone said in a follow-up exchange.
Since 2022, government spokespeople have tried to call Streetsblog's reporting into question about bike and bus lane mileage — or have simply not responded — rather than provide data on request, only to admit months later that they didn't reach the numbers, which end up being revealed in annual reports due in February of each year.
A bill in the City Council would require the agency to set up a tracker with monthly updates for the public to keep better tabs on the Streets Plan's progress. Speaker Adrienne Adams announced this proposal during her annual address at the beginning of the year, saying the street safety requirements were a "prime example," of how laws were "only as good as their implementation."
Another similar piece of pending legislation would make the DOT keep a tracker for its capital projects, just as the Parks Department already does.
Speaker Adams once said she'd consider suing the city over its repeated failures, but has not followed through on that threat.
Council spokesperson Mara Davis said in a statement that the Speaker takes the benchmarks of the Streets Plan as "critical for street safety in New York City" and called out the Department of Transportation for "consistently fall[ing] short of complying with the law."
Davis added that "the Council will continue to hold DOT accountable to the requirements of the law," though she offered no concrete examples.
Correction: An earlier version of this story slightly overstated the failure of the Adams administration's bus lane mileage. The administration built 13.3 bus lane miles out of a required 30 in 2023.
