He can do this the easy way and the hard way.
Streetsblog previously offered incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani a list of the livable streets movement's low-hanging fruit that he could quickly accomplish on Day 1 to make the city a better place.
Now it's time for the mayor-elect, who earned his move to Gracie Mansion partly on his promise to improve the city's affordability and its transportation, to seize this once-in-a-generation chance to do the hard work long sought by livable streets advocates and government veterans: reduce the dominance of cars.
And not just on the roadways — where car and truck drivers kill and maim tens of thousands of New Yorkers every year — but across the entire public realm.
Starting on Jan. 1, Mamdani will have a huge opportunity to reshape the city's streetscape where Mayor Adams fell short. And his first chance to illustrate that broad vision will come at the end of his first year, when he's required to issue the next Streets Master Plan, a de Blasio-era requirement that binds all mayors to implement a network of protected bike and bus lanes.
The Adams administration failed to meet the requirements of the current Streets Plan for new bus and bike lane mileage every year, prioritizing vague notions of community input over street safety and allowing corruption to fester.
Mamdani has already pledged to finish the laundry list of stalled street safety projects, but he must go beyond being not corrupt to turn the page on the domination of the automobile and return the Big Apple's streets to its people.
"We tried being a car-centric city under Robert Moses and it didn’t work at all," said Danny Pearlstein, the policy and communications director for Riders Alliance.
Mamdani provided Streetsblog with many of his stances on transportation issues over the summer after he clinched the Democratic primary, but here are the large-scale policy changes he must consider if he hopes of being remembered with history's great bike- and bus-friendly mayors ... whose names elude us right now.
Curb the car
In New York City, there are simply too many cars and trucks, whose drivers annually cause around 250 deaths and 50,000-plus injuries – or about 150 reported injuries per day. Motorists pollute our air, hog this dense city's limited streetscape, and atomize New Yorkers from one another in metal boxes.
The next administration must seriously reduce driving, or to use the experts' preferred term, vehicle miles traveled. Motor vehicle trips have continued to rise in recent years following a car boom during the pandemic.
A model many advocates cite is Paris, where Mayor Anne Hidalgo was able to reduced pollution, road violence and all the other car harms by taking on the status quo. Hidalgo implemented a raft of measures to discourage driving, including repurposing large amounts of streetscape from private vehicles to bikes and mass transit, and raising the price of driving SUVs.
"That’s what we could have," said Sara Lind, co-executive director at the advocacy group Open Plans (which shares a parent company with Streetsblog). "Fundamentally we believe the city can reduce driving if it tries."
Mamdani can also take notes from London, where low-traffic neighborhoods reduce cut-through traffic and prioritize residents. The British capital has rolled them out on a large scale.
To make that case. Mamdani must show New Yorkers the benefit conferred by reducing space for cars, Lind argued.
“You have to see it to believe it," said Lind. "You don’t need people treating your residential streets like highways."
In the meantime, check out how it worked out in The Big Smoke.
There are many prime candidates for low traffic neighborhoods in pedestrian-dense districts like SoHo, Little Italy and DUMBO, which is ostensibly one big cul-de-sac anyway.
And Mamdani has fellow travelers; in the Financial District, Council Member Chris Marte endorsed more pedestrianized streets. And leadership in Times Square is also open to it — which explains why Mamdani has said he would focus in both those areas.
Car-free open streets serve as a blueprint as well, and the city should focus on quality over quantity by implementing those where they work best, such as the "gold standard" 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights, according to Pearlstein.
“It was such a vibrant community missing one thing: a park. Now it has a park," he said. "Some of [the open streets] didn’t take off, but when they did, they really did."
Another top candidate for eliminating car traffic is the streets outside schools.
These streets tend to be more dangerous, and suffer from chaotic conditions as parents drive their kids to school and teachers park outside thanks to parking placards.
School streets have expanded under the Open Streets, program, but some parents have pushed to go further and follow Paris's model.
Lind suggested an opt-out school streets program, where all educational automatically have one unless they choose not to keep their kids safe.
Lastly, the city needs to reimplement a real cap on the city's more than 100,000 rideshare app cars — rather than opening loopholes by exempting electric and accessible cars.
The city also needs to keep a serious check on the incoming autonomous vehicle companies like Waymo, said "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz, who served as traffic commissioner in the 1980s.
The self-driving cars will have triple the impact of the likes of Uber and Lyft, Schwartz estimated, because they don't rely on humans.
"Waymo doesn’t take lunch breaks, it can respond quickly anywhere and it works at nights as well," said Schwartz.
Parking enforcement
Relatedly, the city must get serious about illegal parking and placard abuse, which plays the proverbial role of money: the root of all evil.
The current approach to personal car storage is largely lawless, with members of the placard élite stashing their vehicles illegally with impunity, and the city's ticketing and towing operation fractured and ineffective.
"We have huge amounts of illegal parking and no strategy for addressing that," said Jon Orcutt, a former director of policy at DOT in the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations.
DOT can roll out any bus and bike lanes it wants, but those will remain ineffective if officials don't take parking enforcement seriously, Orcutt said.
"We’re always going to half-ass the bike network and the idea of bus priority if we go through all the hell of getting these lanes in the street and we let anyone who wants to park in them," he said. "That’s the real difference between here and Europe."
The city should move traffic enforcement back into the DOT, undoing the Giuliani-era breakup of the agency, which shifted that responsibility to the NYPD, said Schwartz.
And experts urged Mamdani to appoint a traffic commissioner who will stop the endless passing of bucks when it comes to managing the streets. And that starts with cracking down on its own government placards and on phony license plates.
"Hire some son of a bitch who’s tough on placards and ghost plates," Schwartz said. "[It's] so easily solvable if somebody has a backbone."
Each placard application should go through a review by the mayor's office, NYPD, and DOT, Schwartz said.
Loading zones also need to enforced properly, rather than just setting up signs "and hoping for the best," according to Orcutt.
"In my neighborhood, the trucks just stop in the main travel lane," Orcutt said. "We need to get unloading vehicles out of the traffic flow."
The city must also better deal with the onslaught of delivery companies profiting off the public realm, and formalize regulations like microhubs on a larger scale.
“They’re able to keep their goods cheap because they’re basically able to do their business in the public right of way cheaply and dangerously," said Orcutt. "They’re doing business on our property, as the public."
A true 'bus mayor'
Mamdani centered buses in his run for office unlike any candidate in recent memory (though Adams claimed without evidence that he was "the bus mayor"), pledging to make the people movers "fast and free" as one of his key planks for a more affordable city.
The success of the 14th Street busway, which restricts thru-traffic to speed up transit, needs to be greatly expanded so that surface transit can become true Bus Rapid Transit in the style of Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg and other world-class cities.
For BRT, Mamdani must prioritize areas of the city that aren't well connected with the subway network, such as crosstown routes in the Bronx, swaths of eastern Queens and southern Brooklyn.
Experts have mapped it out, but it will take a mayor with guts to do it.
The city will need to work with the state, which controls bus service, to actually implement the change. Officials already tried a pared-back version with Select Bus Service, and both levels of government will have to navigate less funding coming from a hostile federal government.
"There are some real issues there," said Orcutt. "[The SBS was] a quick and dirty workaround for the stuff we can do, and know how to do, with the buses that are in the depot today."
And how about a 'bike mayor'?
Mamdani is a regular cyclist in the city riding around on a Citi Bike during the campaign, which has already earned him national headlines as New York City's "first Citi Bike mayor."
But any politician can bike, as Adams did for photo ops early on in his tenure.
The next mayor can create great cycling infrastructure by speeding up capital construction for bike lanes and going beyond paint and plastic.
Mamdani could build on some limited successes of the Adams DOT, such as the two-way path on the formerly chaotic Schermerhorn Street, double-wide paths in Manhattan that allow for different speeds and social cycling, bike boulevards, and the "complete street" on Third Avenue, which turned a lane each over to bikes and buses.
Parks should get two-way protected bike paths on the streets around them, since those are usually dead ends for cars, and many city bridges (looking at you, Harlem River bridges) are just begging to get safe cycling and pedestrian paths, advocates said.
Or how about building a completely new bridge for bikes and pedestrians only over the East River or the Hudson, said Schwartz, noting that there hasn't been a new span connecting below 59th Street since 1909!
The city should also consolidate the construction of bike and pedestrian greenways, which are currently splintered into DOT, the chronically underfunded Parks Department, and other more obscure arms of government like the Department of Design and Construction and the Economic Development Corporation.
DDC in particular has a poor track record of quickly delivering buildouts of public plazas and bike lanes – defeating its entire purpose of making the city's capital construction projects more efficient, as its the Giuliani administration marketed the at the time new agency in 1996.
And speaking of Citi Bike, the incoming mayor should subsidize the Western Hemisphere's most-popular bike share system, given that it carries more than 200,000 New Yorkers a day – comparable to the PATH train system.
The bike share system has been one of the biggest shifts of the city's transportation landscape in the last decade, and has brought thousands of people to city biking. But Mayor Adams barely grew its coverage area, with the last full expansion dating back to 2019!
Government that cares
Mamdani must appoint a centralized head of the public realm with real power either on a deputy mayor level or high up at DOT to counter an exodus of city staffers, properly staff agencies, encourage young talent and grab the public space bull by the horns, experts said.
Agencies should indeed "get stuff done," not get bogged down in bureaucratic process, said one senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
"Can government be held accountable to outcomes," the city official said. "Is every single park going to have a working water fountain and restroom or not?"
Agencies can tap back into their can-do spirit during the early years of the pandemic, the city source said.
During those days, DOT repurposed acres of street for outdoor dining, open streets and parklets, though the latter didn't really take off.
"The pandemic was a time where government showed us that it can flex its muscle that it never uses," the person said. "But why are we all re-entrenched into process?"
There are also more granular changes that Mamdani should take on, like having the city maintain sidewalks in the same way it does the road bed, rather than pawning off responsibility to individual property owners, said Christine Berthet, co-founder of the pedestrian advocacy group CHEKPEDS.
"There’s no reason as a pedestrian you pay taxes for the street to be maintained, but your part of the street is not," Berthet said.
Officials should also ensure pedestrian space is preserved by standardizing the clear path, which currently varies by neighborhood, and make sure the Department of Sanitation's snow clearing doesn't push the white stuff into foot paths and bus stops.
What about those highways?
In his first year, Mamdani will be under pressure to fix the crumbling Brooklyn-Queens Expressway's triple cantilever section, which is deteriorating at a pace where it will become unsafe for trucks within a few years.
But he'd improve the lives of far more New Yorkers with bolder action than patching up Robert Moses's greatest mistake. For instance, he should also raze the FDR Drive's underused section south of the Brooklyn Bridge by the South Street Seaport, Schwartz said.
There are plenty of examples at home and abroad for removing highway infrastructure.
The state removed the Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx and turned it into a boulevard in 2019, and plans to tear down the elevated portion of Interstate 81 through downtown Syracuse.
In 2019, Seattle, Wa., demolished its Alaskan Way Viaduct that once carried 90,000 vehicles a day, but the "cars just disappeared," traffic analysts told local media.
And officials in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and in Seoul, South Korea, have turned highways into waterways, helping mitigate flooding, air pollution and heat.
City officials frequently cite the need for those highways to carry trucks, but on the BQE, only about 10 percent of traffic is heavy haulers, and the city should instead dip into its abundant waterways to move more freight by boat.
There are some early, slow-moving proposals for so-called blue highways, which a new mayor could champion and scale up.
What else should the next mayor do? Please leave your suggestions in the comments below.
