ANALYSIS: With ‘State of the Agency’ Celebration, DOT Sends Its Resumé to Mamdani

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It's a 100-page, full-color, taxpayer-funded résumé.

As the curtain closes on the Adams administration, Department of Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez on Tuesday held an invitation-only “State of the Agency” valedictory address that misrepresented the agency's accomplishments, blamed lawmakers and the press for its shortcomings and released a 100-page report that he hopes will land on the next mayor's desk instead of in the circular file under it.

"The dozens of accomplishments recounted" in the report provide evidence that "as a new mayoral administration takes the helm at City Hall in 2026, the agency and its 6,000 employees are in strong position — and ready to help advance the agency’s critical mission," stated the report, Reimagining Transportation.

The vast majority of the agency's employees will indeed be retained by Mayor Mamdani after Jan. 1. But Rodriguez’s congratulatory speech — delivered to a hand-picked audience with no pesky reporters — was clearly designed as a defense of his personal legacy.

It was a sometimes weak defense. At one point in the speech, for example, Rodriguez brought up Sixth Avenue in Manhattan — where Mayor Ed Koch first built, then famously removed, a bike lane after protests from car drivers. Rodriguez seemed to be suggesting that DOT is much better than that now — except that just this year, DOT removed part of the just-installed Bedford Avenue bike lane after protests from car drivers.

Rodriguez also used the event to deflect blame from his leadership of an agency that failed to meet the legally mandated bus- and bike-lane mileage requirements in every single year of his tenure — an irony, since Rodriguez championed the so-called Streets Master Plan when he was a Council member before taking over DOT.

He blamed the City Council for that failure, not himself or his boss, Mayor Adams.

“I [said to] the Council, ‘No, the Street Master Plan is not possible to do … unless the Council is on board,” Rodriguez said. “But the Council during my four years [as commissioner] is not the same Council from when I used to chair the Committee on Transportation. The Council ... has been more pro-car culture. So now it is a challenge for DOT. ... So I have learned to focus on what I can do.”

In reality, the mayor controls the streets and has broad power to change them without Council approval. But so many times during the Adams administration business interests, community groups, and even those who delivered bribes were able to get the city to backpedal or reverse course.

And sometimes, that call was coming from inside the house. Rodriguez didn't mention it in his speech, but early in his tenure, Mayor Adams reassigned a City Hall insider to water-down or block DOT's work, as Streetsblog reported.

And the DOT itself admitted in a 2025 report (also confirmed by the Independent Budget Office) that it couldn't complete parts of its "critical mission" because it did not have the manpower.

Observers of the agency were stunned by Rodriguez's version of history.

“The city administration has omnipotent power over the streets,” said Jon Orcutt, a former DOT policy chief under the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations who now is the director of advocacy at Bike New York. "The Council has no formal role; it’s on the mayor. NIMBYism and difficult elected officials will always be with us; the variable is what the mayor does about them.”

Of course, the DOT's work under Rodriguez was frequently successful, and the agency certainly deserves to celebrate its achievements: The administration did pioneer new, wider protected bike lanes on Second and 10th avenues in Manhattan that address the popularity of e-bikes. Fatalities and crashes are down this year. And the “green wave” on Third Avenue retimed traffic lights to match the 15-mile-per-hour cyclist friendly speed, which helps to discourage running red lights and speeding by e-bike riders. 

(That said, the 10th Avenue bike lane remains perpetually blocked by federal drug agents who refuse to allow cyclists safe passage — and the DOT has done nothing to halt the lawlessness, as Streetsblog has reported repeatedly ... to the point of nausea.)

The rest of the DOT record is decidedly mixed, despite what the report or Rodriguez's speech stated:

• The report claimed that there has been a "dramatic increase" in pedestrianized space. But the increase reflects pandemic-era Open Streets and School Streets created by the previous administration. “I don’t think the programs have ever been this weak,” said Orcutt, adding that the city failed to capitalize on the predictable space dividend afforded by congestion pricing.
• The report credited the DOT for “launch[ing] the new Department of Sustainable Delivery [to] provide oversight to delivery app companies as well as foster the safe use of micromobility across the five boroughs.” But there is no real "department," nor is it clear what its role will be in overseeing the delivery industry, which is currently being enforced by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection under regulations passed by the Council — over several key Adams vetoes. 
• The report celebrates DOT’s e-bike charging accomplishments. In reality, the city has failed to set up public safe-charging stations, and private companies are in a holding pattern, unable to build new outdoor infrastructure due to impossible-to-follow FDNY regulations. 

Interestingly, the report also hypes the agency's "new and innovative" approach to communicating with the public, which includes a podcast ("Curb Enthusiasm") and a growing Instagram account.

The report claims that the agency — which has a large media production team — has garnered $1 billion in "earned media."

A good portion of that "earned media" — also known as "news coverage" — came from Streetsblog, so it's ironic given that Rodriguez took time to criticize the city's only news outlet dedicated to transportation.

“Streetsblog [is] dedicated to going after the agency," Rodriguez said.

"Going after" the agency? It's pronounced "accountability."

Editor's note: After initial publication of this story, DOT Chief Communications Officer and Deputy Commissioner Nick Benson, who heads DOT's large communication team, sought a correction on the grounds that only DOT's five- to seven-person "press" team generated the "earned media." But our coverage did not mention just the "press" team, but the larger cohort of DOT staffers who create "media" such as podcasts, Instagram content, graphics, publicly issued year-in-review reports, etc. We have asked for the current DOT org chart and will update this note if we obtain it.