So much for the public safety mayor.
More than 150 injuries from traffic crashes could have been avoided and nearly a quarter-million New York City bus riders have had faster commutes had the Adams administration not stymied several street redesigns at the behest of powerful interests — in at least one case for alleged bribes — according to a Streetsblog analysis.
Since taking office in 2022, Adams and his aides intervened in at least seven key Department of Transportation safety projects that could have reduced crashes by more than 50 percent and sped up bus trips by 24 percent, based on agency studies of similar overhauls elsewhere.
"Safety should never be for sale," said Transportation Alternatives Executive Director Ben Furnas. "It's City Hall's job to protect New Yorkers — not to sell them out to special interests. It’s a scandal that so many street safety projects are stuck in limbo, and that more New Yorkers are being hurt in crashes because of the Adams administration's inaction and lack of leadership."
The sabotaged projects include "road diets" on McGuinness Boulevard, Third Avenue and Ashland Place, and a stretch of the protected bike lane on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, along with busways on Fifth Avenue in Midtown and the Bronx's Fordham Road and Tremont Avenue.
Delays in to the implementation of an earlier de Blasio-era busway on Manhattan's 14th Street cost riders an estimated 8,000 hours in just over a month, according to an analysis from the time based on DOT data. Commuters on the nation's slowest bus system likely lost even more time to traffic as a result of Adams's efforts to scuttle bus lane and busway projects.
"Busways prevent death and serious injuries. They save lives and time," Riders Alliance's Policy and Communications Director Danny Pearlstein told Streetsblog. "[Adams's approach is] to pretend that the status and convenience of driving is as important as life and limb of New York families."
The extra injuries and commute times are the direct consequence of Adams's doctrine of conveying vague notions of "community input" while kowtowing to a political ally or campaign donor. In one case, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg alleged that Adams's former top adviser Ingrid Lewis-Martin accepted cash, free catering and a TV cameo to scale back safety elements of DOT's redesign of McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint.
Mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani has vowed prioritize safety and faster buses over moneyed interests. Mamdani on Monday pledged to finish the raft of projects Adams has scuttled as mayor.
Adams, who was not charged in Bragg's indictment, last week insisted he would not go back and finish the McGuinness Boulevard as DOT originally proposed, despite the scathing corruption charges.
The mayor insisted his watered-down plan was a "win," but the city's own stats show the road diet elements Adams kiboshed could've prevented more crashes than the design he forced DOT to implement instead.
Adams's refusal to make streets safer extends beyond McGuinness, as Lewis-Martin and other City Hall functionaries have worked to halt or diminish several other projects that clawed back space from cars to increase safety.
The data
Road diets reduce overall crash injuries by 16.6 percent on average, and by nearly one-third for pedestrians killed or seriously injured, according to a citywide 2022 review of DOT projects spanning 2005-2018. Another study of individual projects from 2016 found road diets decreasing crash injuries by as much as 52 percent in the case where the city removed a lane on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan and installed a protected bike lane.
Protected bike lanes typically cut total injuries by 14.8 percent, and serious pedestrian injuries or deaths by 29.2 percent, the 2022 study found.
Busways – street restrictions on a stretch of road that generally bar through-traffic for private motor vehicles in order to boost buses – increased surface transit speeds by 24 percent and cut crashes by 42 percent, DOT found on 14th Street, where officials installed a much-lauded busway during the de Blasio administration.
DOT experts and leaders repeatedly tout these statistics in reports, public presentations and statements.
"These new protected bike lanes enhance safety for everyone — including pedestrians and drivers," DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said in a press release about a set of protected bike lanes installed in Long Island City in late 2023.
The agency even took a victory lap earlier this year to celebrate across-the-board injury reductions in crashes and injuries on Third Avenue in Manhattan that outperformed the agency's own average projections for the safety benefits of protected bike lanes and road diets.
Injuries and lost time
Streetsblog reviewed the reported crash histories for each of the seven corridors since the city either paused or altered DOT's redesign, or since the changes were originally supposed to be installed, and applied the agency's average projected declines in injuries.
Adding all those together results, we estimated 163 preventable traffic injuries from just seven street redesigns that Mayor Adams curtailed.
The approach is admittedly a broad brush. We applied the same projections for very different types of streets and, in the case of busways, based our estimates off of a small sample size (in part because Adams has installed so few of those street treatments).
Researchers do use crash prediction models to estimate the number of collisions that would have occurred with or without a redesign, according to Michael King, DOT's former director of traffic calming who now runs the consultancy TrafficCalmer.
"Your methodology of comparing these projects to other projects in New York City is sound," King told Streetsblog in an email. "Statisticians would argue there are not enough samples, but using similar, recent, nearby projects makes sense journalistically."
The numbers are likely an undercount, since many of the redesigns would have included more than just one treatment and thus more benefits, such as a road diet and a protected bike lane, along with intersection parking bans for better visibility.
"You’re not gonna get these things [injury decreases] if you don’t change the street," said Jon Orcutt, a former policy director at DOT under the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations, who is now the Director of Advocacy at Bike New York. "Obviously that number [of injuries] gets bigger as the time goes on since the cancellation."
For example, Third Avenue, between Prospect Avenue and 62nd Street, has logged 204 injuries and two deaths since a road diet was supposed to be installed last fall. Following trends of other road diets, those could have been cut by 16.6 percent, or 34 injuries, using averages DOT found in 2022.
But big businesses along the corridor, led by the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, lobbied against the project and Adams punted the project until next year, going back on past promises to prioritize the dangerous Sunset Park strip.
On Fordham Road, between Webster Avenue and Jerome Avenue, there have been 212 reported crashes injuring 152 people since June 2023, when Streetsblog uncovered Adams's efforts to nix a busway after opposition by local institutions like Fordham University and the Bronx Zoo.
Since DOT's stats for busways measured 42-percent reductions in crashes rather than injuries, Streetsblog calculated the rate of injury per crash on each bus corridor and applied that to the reduced collisions, yielding an estimated reduction of 63 injuries on Fordham Road, had the city gone ahead with traffic restrictions there as originally planned.
For more detailed information on the source material for this data, see the full spreadsheet here.
Stuck in traffic
Adams's interventions on Fordham Road and Tremont Avenue, as well as the long-stalled plans for a busway on Fifth Avenue in Midtown, have cost a combined 237,000 daily riders to miss out on the 24-percent speed bump that commuters got on the 14th Street busway downtown.
That adds up to about one-in-six of the city's 1.42 million daily bus riders forced to endure slower bus speeds due to mayoral meddling.
Even delaying these projects by a few weeks can cost riders thousands of hours, past studies by advocates have found: When opponents of the 14th Street busway sued to stop the project in 2019, M14 riders lost about 8,654 hours sitting in traffic during just the first five weeks of delays amid a court order, according to an analysis of DOT data that the groups Riders Alliance and Transportation Alternatives filed in an amicus brief [PDF] at the time.
"Riders stuck on slow buses have lost something we will never regain... with countless minutes, countless hours of our lives that the mayor took from us by denying us the benefits of these critical projects," Pearlstein told Streetsblog.
A mayoral spokesperson disputed the analysis and accused Streetsblog of using traffic deaths "as political pawns," despite our focus on injuries, not fatalities.
The rep did not provide a clear explanation for why Streetsblog's review — which relied on city projections — was inaccurate, noting only that it was "not a comprehensive study done officially by DOT."
"While it has always been clear that Streetsblog is an advocacy group operating under the guise of journalism, this latest attempt to use the deaths of New Yorkers as political pawns is despicable and depraved," the spokesperson, Sophia Askari, said in a statement. "The 16-line excel spreadsheet sent to us by Streetsblog does not in any way prove that these tragedies could have been prevented, and it is deeply disturbing that they would try to claim otherwise.
"The truth is, the Adams administration remains committed to enhancing safety and accessibility throughout the city so that all New Yorkers — whether they’re walking, biking, or driving — can move through their neighborhoods safely."
