Zellnor Myrie has come to an important realization.
“I need to get a bike,” he said on multiple occasions during a bike ride with me through some of the streets of his district.
“I miss this, Julia,” he said, later in the ride, to his staffer on the ride with us.
Myrie, a state Senator who’s represented Crown Heights and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens since 2019, knows how to ride a bike and said he used to as a kid as a way to put the most distance possible between him and his parents, as one does when they're young.
But these days he doesn’t ride as much, and as we weave in and out of the painted Empire Boulevard bike lane thanks to the cars, trucks and school buses parked in it, Myrie explains that age has given him a little more hesitance for physical risk.
"I mean, we've had to, I've had to swerve in and out of the bike lane no less than five times in the span of maybe two blocks, and I can only imagine if you are someone that's younger, or someone that's not as agile, or if we were at the height of traffic, it doesn't feel terribly safe," he told me.
"I think there is a real sense from people that don't bike, but that would like to bike that there's some real danger associated with it. And if you've been off the bike, getting out there outside of a protected setting seems, or can be, perilous. and certainly at a time where we're seeing deaths and injuries up in this space. I think we should be making this as easy as possible and as safe as possible for as many people as possible."
Myrie has good reasons for trepidation. Since he took office, cycling injuries have risen citywide from 4,986 in 2019 to 5,147 in 2024, and while pedestrian injuries are lower than they were in 2019, they also increased from 7,502 in 2021 to 9,610 in 2024.
At the same time, city has added little traffic calming or protected bike infrastructure in the eastern part of Myrie's district. The one project the DOT proposed in the area, a trio of protected bike lanes on Brooklyn Avenue, Winthrop Street and Kingston Avenue, has been mothballed for a year after a single, somewhat contentious community board meeting. Change is hard, Myrie tells me, echoing what he told Streetsblog in 2019 when then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s "Green Wave" and the Streets Master Plan were supposed to bring more street safety changes to more of the city.
"I think it is in some ways similar to the conversation we have around housing. When we talk housing, everyone is for lower cost of living until it impacts them locally. When we talk about street safety, there's similar dynamics at play. The fear of change, to me, shouldn't be the motivation to not doing something that actually keeps people safe on our streets," he said.
Elected officials saying "Well, we just need to not fear change and not fear the backlash" is a well-worn canard at this point, one you can hear at any rally or any candidate forum related to street safety. But biking down a still-unprotected stretch of Brooklyn Avenue, Myrie insists he's seen an evolution in his district.
"There is a tendency to project onto these types of projects people's larger frustration with government and not being paid attention to," he said.
"If you don't feel like government has made your life more affordable and you don't feel safe, something that you're unfamiliar with is often presented to folks as a problem. You're gonna let that frustration out. But what I have seen, even in my own district, where there had been opposition to the placement of Citi Bike, once people started seeing that the docks were empty and that they were really being utilized, I have spoken to constituents who have come around ... and said, 'Oh, wait, people actually use this, and this wasn't all some government conspiracy to make my quality of life worse.'"
As we talked at the corner of Empire Boulevard and Utica Avenue — pondering the constantly blocked curbside bus lane and the way that the street was still nothing by a car sewer — Myrie said he's the right messenger and leader to convince longtime residents that changing the transportation equation didn't have to mean subtracting them from the picture.
"Here we have a predominantly Caribbean community that in many ways feels like the forces of gentrification haven't quite pushed everybody out, but it's pushing. And because of that affordability challenge, when people hear about any redesign, whether it is better bike lanes, whether it is the bus lane, whether it's rapid bus transit or the moonshot of an extended train, the first thing that they hear is not this is 'This is better for my life and my family,'" he said.
"What they hear is that this newness is going to attract forces that are going to push me out. I think it takes someone that has experienced and felt that real pressure and dynamic to come to come to the community, with some humility and credibility to say, 'I get that's what this feels like. Let me talk to you about why we're going to be doing some other things to ensure that that's not the case.'"
Though Myrie doesn't have a huge track record on city-level street safety, he has been a champion for congestion pricing, and specifically noted his colleague state Senator Andrew Gounardes' Stop Super Speeders bill as legislation he was proud to support. And he pointed to the way that he's worked as a legislator, going from being at the vanguard of protecting rent stabilized housing at the beginning of his time in Albany to focusing on the supply side of the housing issue now.
"I view, the street safety space in the same way that having now passed congestion pricing, having now seen a climate crisis that was already bad in 2019 be getting worse, having now seen traffic violence, unfortunately, not go down, but go up, this has to be a focus of ours," said Myrie.
To that end, Myrie also said that he was committed to making sure that there were fewer cars in the city at the end of a Mayor Myrie term, compared to when he starts.
"I frankly don't think that that is a controversial thing to say. The premise of preserving so-called car culture has been that there are places in the city where New Yorkers have no other option, or that a car is the best option. I don't disagree with that, when made in good faith, that there are places in our city where that is true. But if that is true, then my administration should be doing two things. One, ensuring that we are making it a more accessible city that has better public transit and better bike lanes and connectivity, and two that the number of cars should remain static in those places and that we shouldn't be adding more," he said.
The rest of Myrie's answer here got cut off in my recording, because someone in an SUV started yelling at me about riding slightly outside the bike lane. I would like to say I was mature and levelheaded while I rode a bike with a mayoral candidate next to me, but instead I shouted back at the woman that I had places to be, too. The candidate, at least, understood where I was coming from — even if he wouldn't have done the same thing.
"She was yelling at you to stay in the bike lane while the bike lane was obstructed. It captures the entire dynamic," he said.
Myrie is not a driver, and as we walked to a Citi Bike dock so he could get a bike for the ride, multiple constituents said hello to him and wished him luck. It's the kind of experience you don't get if you spend most of a campaign in a car, but one that people still aren't that conditioned to, since Myrie said on multiple occasions people have done double takes seeing him on the train.
The senator himself was a somewhat tentative rider, especially on the Empire Boulevard segment of the ride through his district. But he seemed to regain confidence along the way, and saw safe cycling infrastructure as a natural piece of his vision for the city.
"People like to be on bikes, man. Families enjoy this. This is a beautiful thing to be able to do, and you shouldn't have to take your family's life your own hands to do something that is good for your health and good for the for the environment and livability," he said.
"Wanting to be in a city where you can have protected and connected bike lanes, where you can have robust and clean parks, where you can afford a place to stay. That's all about raising your family, and that's what I'm about these days."
