After nearly four years of Mayor Adams shelving, delaying or playing politics with bus priority projects, Hizzoner's presumptive successor says that he'll only ask one thing when determining which bus improvements will go foward: will it serve bus riders.
"Everything has to be assessed on its merits, and the merit that we are measuring these projects by is whether or not they deliver for working class New Yorkers who are currently taking the slowest buses in the country," Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani said on Thursday as he and other pedestrians defeated the M34 bus in a foot race crosstown at rush hour. "This should not be a race; we should not even be able to conceive of beating a bus [on foot]. And yet, I don't even know where the bus is."
Told it was two light cycles behind him and the other walkers, he said, "That's an indictment in and of itself."
Bus advocates originally saw the race as a walk-the-walk-style protest against Mayor Adams's baffling decision to pause a 34th Street busway after it has made it through the community board process with full support from the Midtown civic groups and every elected official in the area.
But on Wednesday, the mayor agreed to unpause work on the busway as part of a deal to rezone a chunk of Midtown. It was an odd bargaining strategy given that Council Members Erik Bottcher and Keith Powers, who each represent a piece of the area getting upzoned, already had supported the rezoning. At a rally before the annual bus challenge, Powers credited Bottcher for insisting that the busway come along as a final piece of the deal to rezone the area.
Department of Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez declined to weigh in on what held up the busway or why it became a political chit.
"I was a Council member for years and the most important part of any project was the beginning and the end," Rodriguez said, skipping the middle piece of the 34th Street busway ... where work on it ground to a halt.
The pause and unpause on the project and the need to attach it to a somewhat related piece of politics is only the latest instance of Mayor Adams tossing overboard his promise to be the Bus Mayor. From almost the moment Adams took office, stories began to emerge about a NIMBY faction of City Hall that was empowered to slow down bus projects at the behest of opponents.
Eventually Adams's longtime ally Ingrid Lewis-Martin empowered a longtime Brooklyn Borough Hall bureaucrat to provide an extra layer of review on all bike and bus projects and essentially ground any progress on speeding up buses to a halt. Some projects that were sucked into the wormhole of endless review managed to escape, like the Northern Boulevard bus lane and the long-stalled Flatbush Avenue bus lane, but others, such as offset bus lanes on Fordham Road, were simply never done.
The Adams administration consistently falls short of the required 30 miles of dedicated bus lanes under the terms of the Streets Master Plan. In 2022 and 2023, the city at least hit double-digit mileage, but last year, it painted just 5.5 miles of new bus lanes across the entire city. Unsurprisingly, bus speeds have remained mired at about 8 miles per hour — much slower in congested parts of the city — for the entirety of Adams mayoralty.
In a more surprising moment, one of the MTA's senior leaders finally lost patience, publicly, with the way Adams has approached bus priority projects. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, New York City Transit President Demetrius Crichlow flatly said there should have been far more busway celebrations in the past few years.
"We're in the business of running buses, and it's been clear that the more busways or bus lanes you install, the better it is for the city, the better it is for our customers," Crichlow said outside an unrelated arraignment of a teenager who keeps breaking into train yards and taking the trains for joyrides. "There's no question that we need more of them. Everyone has said that there's a benefit to them, and the city has committed to doing it. So the fact that we're here celebrating that one more busway has been added, to me, is a disappointment because there should have been more.
"This is only the first step of several that should have been taken. So I'm looking forward to the city taking a more aggressive approach to adding more busways, more bus lanes, to be able to support people like they articulated and clearly said they were going to do," he added.
