Friday’s Headlines: Mayor’s Mismanagement Report Edition

We were going to give Mayor Adams a pass after the city issued its annual Mayor's Management Report for fiscal year 2025 (also known as July 2024 through June 2025).

We felt we didn't need to pile on because we've already reported so many measures of how badly Mayor Adams is building bike lanes, how slowly he's building bus lanes, how he decides on safety measures based on vibes, and how corruptly he is overseeing the public process of making the city safer.

But advocates at Transportation Alternatives on Thursday pored over the 534-page document and found lots more failures of the Adams administration, such as:

• Fewer bike lanes: This is the second-worst year for bike lane construction since 2015 — with the worst being 2023 (guess who was mayor). 
• Very few bus lanes: Adams built only 5.5 miles in the last fiscal year, which is down 65 percent from the previous year. He's nowhere close to meeting the 30 miles of dedicated bus lane mandated by the Streets Plan law.
• Not much bike parking: The Adams administration built half as many bike parking spaces last year as it did the year before. It's the fewest number of new spaces built since 2020.
• Fewer bumps in the road: Speed hump installation was also halved. 
• More city vehicles: The vehicle fleet size is increasing and collisions in city vehicles are up. OK, both are up by a minuscule amount, but it's still going in the wrong direction, especially since civil settlements for crashes caused by city workers in city cars and trucks is a major expense, as we've previously reported.

All of the above has one caveat: Total crashes were down this fiscal year versus the one before it. In FY2025, there were 87,136 reported crashes in the city, injuring 51,068 people. In the previous July-to-June cycle, there were 94,678 reported crashes, injuring 54,998 people. That's an 8-percent drop in crashes and a 7-percent drop in injuries. (No one has fully analyzed why crashes are dropping, but many claim it is due to the traffic reductions caused by the new congestion pricing toll that started midway through FY2025.)

Riders Alliance spokesman Danny Pearlstein focused on Mayor Adams's bus lane failure.

"Mayor Adams's record not only violates the law, it breaks his own promise to complete 150 lane miles in four years," he said. "Delayed riders don't need a mayor's management report to know '[f]urther work is needed to increase bus lane production,'" (which was on page 39, by the way).

Ben Furnas, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, said his group was pleased that crashes are down, but pointed out, "New York City still has more traffic fatalities per capita than our peer cities, and we’re never going to end traffic deaths if City Hall doesn’t focus on building the streets that make that future possible."

Hell Gate also covered the broader topics of the Mayor's Management Report with the priceless headline, "NYC Is Finally Healing After 3 Years of Eric Adams."

In other news from a relatively slow day on the streets beat (guess I picked the right day to come back from Tulsa with Covid):

• The biggest threats to children's safety are cars, guns and illness. But, sure, let's pretend that a bike lane is the most pressing danger. (PIX11)
• This summer's NJT breakdowns were NJT's fault. (NJ Monitor)
• A blind woman on Staten Island calls for the passage of Council Member Julie Won's universal daylighting bill. (SI Advance)
• Some Red Hook news:
  • A massive redevelopment of the waterfront has advanced, thanks to some tweaks. (The City)
  • A massive fire burned down artist studios and small businesses in the old coffee warehouse at the end of Van Brunt Street. (Brooklyn Paper, NYDN)
• Former Democrat Mayor Adams is certainly going out his way. (NY Times, Gay City News)
• Lyft accused of spreading misinformation? Impossible! (Gothamist)
• Streetsblog readers who live in Bay Ridge have a clear choice in the upcoming Council election. We're guessing they'll be scratching their heads over this guy (who can't even correctly name the local park where he's standing):

Editor's note: After initial publication of this story, the Department of Transportation emailed me to demand a correction to our reporting that its creation of bike parking spaces in FY2025 was half of what it was in FY2024.

But the reporting is not inaccurate so it will not be corrected. The DOT's creation of bike parking spaces in FY2025 — 3,414 spaces — was indeed half of what it was in the previous year, when the agency built 6,928 spaces.

As such, there is no correction to issue.

For context, however, we will provide fuller information that was beyond the scope of this story, which was specifically on the current Mayor's Management Report. The current Mayor's Management Report showed a backtrack on bike parking and that's what we reported.

But for context, here are the number of bike parking spaces that have been built in the last four fiscal years (most of which corresponds to the Adams administration):

FY25: 3,414
FY24: 6,928
FY23: 3,734
FY22: 7,442

That adds up to 21,518 bike parking spaces since June 2021. And it is more than what was accomplished in two previous corresponding four-year periods (18,764 spots between FY14 and FY17 and 10,492 spots between FY18 and FY21).

But at the same time, according to the Department of Transportation's own statistics, the number of bike trips has soared to 226 million per year, which suggests that the city needs far more bike parking than any mayor has built. Mayor Adams has also completely reneged on his promise to build 500 secure bike-parking spots. (DOT did not respond to a question about that.)

The agency also has a backlog of requests from businesses to install bike parking in front of the location. The agency declined to tell Streetsblog how long the waiting list is right now.

Instead, it demanded a correction — reminder: none is forthcoming — and sent over the following statement, which we are happy to print in this context:

"This administration has installed more bike parking in the last four fiscal years than any other recent administration — and last year’s total is above average when looking back pre-pandemic. The change in numbers in recent FYs reflects a massive bike parking boom this administration undertook and our current bike parking installation goals, which the agency has established to allow it to install a high number of bike parking spaces while simultaneously ramping up sidewalk bench installations."

Reminder: Our story above contained no inaccuracies.