New York City has failed to meet legally required benchmarks for redesign streets for bikes, buses and pedestrians due to to a lack of resources and political interference, according to a new report from the city Department of Transportation that leaves a trail of breadcrumbs leading directly to Mayor Adams.
Released on Thursday, DOT's annual Council-required update on the agency's adherence to the 2019 Streets Master Plan law makes a stunning, if not explicit, admission: DOT last year fell short of hitting the mandates for new protected bike lanes (29.3 miles out of 50) and bus lanes (17.9 miles out of 30) — the third straight year that the agency did not meet the requirements.
Thursday's report marked the first time DOT candidly addressed the real challenges it faces in implementing the plan: a lack of support from Mayor Adams's City Hall has hamstrung the agency — exactly as Streetsblog has reported throughout Adams's mayoral tenure.
In the press release announcing the report, the agency even quoted the prior mayor's DOT commissioner, Polly Trottenberg, who warned the City Council in 2019 that the plan's goals could not be achieved unless DOT had way more resources and overhauled its approach to community engagement, which often slows down its redesign work.
"The bill’s vast new operational requirements would necessitate significant additional funding from the city budget, which we estimate to be several billion dollars, new head count, new facilities, and equipment," Trottenberg said at the time. "Furthermore, the magnitude of the changes proposed would require a new re-envisioned public engagement model, perhaps with fewer mandated requirements for work with the city’s 59 community boards."
Streetsblog reported on this exact issue in 2023 and asked multiple DOT representatives about it. The agency did not even bother to respond.
But on Thursday, the agency finally acknowledged that officials struggled with staff shortages at DOT's Division of Transportation Planning and Management. DOT could have simply read last month's report by the Independent Budget Office, which noted that every key division inside the DOT for creating new bus lanes had shrunk since 2019.
Every. Key. Division.
But DOT did finally admit how little progress it has made on adding new bus lane mileage in 2024. The agency painted just 5.5 miles of new bus lanes in 2024, as Streetsblog reported in December. Last year Streetsblog also noted that the Adams administration only proposed seven miles of new bus lanes for the entire year.
Fortunately for the agency, the Streets Master Plan law allows the city to give itself credit for bus routes that get Automated Camera Enforcement — which allowed the agency to say it completed 17.9 miles of protected bus lanes total — 12.4 miles of which got the camera treatment.
Who's to blame?
The DOT report also includes an absolute howler in a passage about the political challenges faced by the agency when it proposes new projects: "The Fordham Road busway project, which would have sped up trips for 85,000 riders on the second busiest route in the entire city, was abandoned after local elected and stakeholder pushback" [emphasis added].
It is true that there was pushback from local institutions such as the Botanical Garden and Fordham University, but that sentence suggests that the tens of thousands of bus riders are not also stakeholders.
Worse, the call to ditch the Fordham Road plan came from inside the house, City Hall — pushback, if you will, by a "local elected," in this case the mayor.
And that from a candidate who initially vowed to build 150 miles of bus lanes in four years and instead let multiple efforts get delayed or killed by the political knifefighting wing of his administration.
Advocates were stunned that the DOT would so clearly admit to shortcomings inside City Hall.
"Because it appeared in the report, which presumably the commissioner read, .... that's throwing the mayor under the bus where he belongs," said Riders Alliance Director of Policy and Communications Danny Pearlstein. "What's striking about it to me, is not that they would admit it, but they would admit in this way. You have to be a little bit in the know, but they're connecting the dots to City Hall."
One government veteran also said he was surprised to see the relatively blunt assessment from the DOT that a lack of resources and political will kept the plan from getting done, given the way it reflected on the person in charge of the city.
"It's one thing to say, 'We didn't hit the target so we're gonna just put out a laundry list of things we've done.' That's pretty standard," said Jon Orcutt, a former DOT policy director under mayors Bloomberg and de Blasio. "But that other part? Not at all. It is pretty unusual for the agency just to say six years after the fact that this legislation calls for more than they can do."
Of course this can just as easily be seen as a delayed reaction from the agency whose goals Adams has spent years dismissing himself. In 2023, after almost two years of political interference in DOT projects, Adams visited the agency headquarters not to assure the employees there he was supporting their work, but to compare them to drowning rats, and to announce that he would define his legacy not by the legal requirement for bus and bike lanes projects, but rather how well he listened to communities that objected to those projects.
Adams doubled down on that idea last year, when he suggested to reporters that bus lanes were for gentrifiers.
Pearlstein said that the mayor has spent four years coming up with various reasons not to do one project after another when he should have been supporting his agency in the face of expected opposition. As a result, it's difficult to give Hizzoner a pass for falling short.
"It's as if they're beating the bushes for reasons not to do stuff," he said.
