Streetsies 2025: Awards To Mark A Disappointing Year on the Streets Beat

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From the kickoff of congestion pricing on Jan. 5 to a Queens judge going rogue and demanding the city remove a bike lane in early December, it was a huge year for news ... and Streetsblog was there every step of the way.

It was a year when sustainable transport suddenly and repeatedly) turned into a "woke" piñata in Washington,

So without any ado, we present our annual roundup of the great projects, the lousy efforts, the highs, the lows, the winners and, of course, the losers (looking at you, Ingrid Lewis-Martin).

The Queen Gertrude Award for Doth Protesting Too Much: One of the great challenges faced by the city Department of Transportation is that local officials and community boards often grandstand and lie to block basic street safety projects that agency officials know — and have fully conveyed — will improve our city. But the very opposite dynamic played out all year when advocates and politicians championed the street safety design known as daylighting — which has been so successful in so many places — only to find DOT denouncing the advocacy community and supportive pols. First, DOT released a study that argued daylighting would make streets less safe (a contention that advocates, the City Council and the DOT's own staff admitted was flawed), but the study backfired on the agency because not only did it give pro-car pols a cudgel against the agency, but it helped boost support for a bill to mandate universal daylighting, which, by year's end, even had the support of of a pro-car Republican! In the end, DOT "won" because Speaker Adrienne Adams killed the daylighting bill. But what did the agency end up winning? Less-safe streets — hardly something that looks good on the legacy of outgoing Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez.

The Chamaeleonidae Award for Hiding in Plain Sight: We spent pretty much all year beating up on Fly E-Bike, the shady, corrupt moped and electric bike company that did so much to make roadways and delivery workers unsafe. We started the year with a classic Jesse Coburn investigation into how the company had skirted sold vehicles that did not meet multiple safety regulations. Then we revealed that DOT intended to work the company (which the agency quickly, and wisely, reconsidered). Later, we caught the company lying about the safety of its batteries. And, finally, our coverage encouraged the state Department of Motor Vehicles to basicallly put Fly E-Bike out of business in July. If that isn't impact journalism, we don't know what is.

The JK Simmons Award for Bureaucratic Whiplash: The saga of the 34th Street busway started out so great. In January, the Adams administration announced it would create bus priority on one of Midtown's slowest stretches. And the agency confirmed it again in March and again in May. But, alas, it was not meant to be: The mayor killed the busway in July only to resurrect it a month later as a bargaining chip for a rezoning. But, by then, somehow the Trump administration got wind of it, and killed it in October, though we ended the year wishing that the city had at least sued or something, right?

The Bud Collyer "To Tell the Truth" Award: To paraphrase the question once asked by that long-running quiz show, will the real Selvena Brooks-Powers please stand up? Yes, the Transportation Committee Chair consistently called out the Adams administration for failing to build the required number of bus and bike lanes under the Streets Master Plan. And she did pen a full-throated support of daylighting in these very pages. And she has been a strong supporter of expanding Fair Fares (though oddly didn't mention it in her recent letter to Gov. Hochul demanding more state funding to avoid a fare hike). But she also called on DOT to rip up a bike lane (albeit not a perfect one!) in her neighborhood so that drivers could park. And she was silent when Mayor Adams removed the Bedford Avenue lane. And we were very unimpressed by her line of questioning in an MTA oversight hearing late in the year. By year's end, her committee had held hearings on just 40 percent of its bills and passed just 13 percent of the proposals, many of them progressive policy changes long sought by advocates, according to Jehiah Czebotar's tracker. It's likely that Brooks-Powers will seek to hold onto her plum committee post under Speaker Julie Menin, but some street safety advocates will want her elsewhere.

The Gone But Not Forgotten Award: This year, the street safety world lost many giants, including one of the great newspaper correspondents Larry Penner, disability activist Zona Roberts, noise expert Arline Bronzaft, and parking reformer Donald Shoup. But many of the people we lost this year were unwitting martyrs to the cause of street safety, such as Natasha Saada and daughters Diana and Deborah (killed in March by a recidivist reckless driver), Kelvin Mitchell (killed in May by a driver fleeing a police chase), Maurette Lafleur (killed by a driver in May), 8-year-old Mordechai Keller (killed in August by an SUV driver), two pedestrians killed in Astoria in August, park-goer Erasmo Huerta Gonzalez (who was run over by cops inside Flushing Meadows Corona Park in August), cyclist Alexandra Huggins (killed by a hit-and-run Tesla driver in September), Citi Bike rider Cristian Vazquez (doored and killed in October), West Village pedestrian Valerie Schoeck (killed in November), and philanthropist Geoffrey Radbill (killed in December). They all deserved better than a mayor who didn't do all he could.

The Edward Scissorhands Award for Corner Cutting: We spent most of the year using Mayor Adams's poor bus lane mileage as a cudgel. But there were so many other failures worth noting: In June 2024, the DOT said it would reduce the speed limits on 250 streets by the end of 2025. Last week, the agency confirmed to us that it did 104 — not even close to half. And DOT never got even painted bike lanes completed in Southern Brooklyn or on Third Avenue in Brooklyn. And it killed the busway on Tremont Avenue. Oh, and the agency's performance on daylighting was especially poor, given that the mayor and DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez made a pledge to daylight 1,000 intersections per year after an NYPD tow truck driver mowed down 7-year-old Kamari Hughes at a Fort Greene corner with poor sight lines. The agency failed in 2024 — and with 2025 almost over, DOT says it will daylight just 700 locations (not intersections, mind you, but locations). Maybe the agency shouldn't have been spending so much time and energy fighting a bill for universal daylighting this year?

The Nattering Nabobs of Niceties Award: OK, but for all the shit accountability journalism we threw at Mayor Adams during his term, there are some legacy achievements that are worthy of note that occurred in 2025. Let's start with getting trash bags off the sidewalk and into rat-proof containers. And let's salute NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch for keeping her promise (to Streetsblog!) to reduce high-speed police chases (though they still occur, with disastrous results). Adams's DOT deserved credit for a great redesign of Third Avenue in Manhattan (but not as we mentioned above, the one in Brooklyn) and on 31st Street in Queens (though that one was torn up by a judge). And Adams's DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez's full-throated support for speed cameras played a role in getting speed cameras reauthorized in Albany for five more years!

The annual If You Can't Say Anything Nice ... Let's Hear It! Award: The winner here is, obviously Streetsblog for its mayoral election coverage. Basically from March until November, we played our part (and staunchly defended our 501c3 status!) by sticking to the issues so that readers could know what candidates were good and which were bad. For instance, we told you:

• how bad Andrew Cuomo was (over and over), how he was a recidivist speeder, and took money from the app industry and never put out a transportation plan!
• how bad Adrienne Adams was generally on street safety, plus how she messed up on outdoor dining and daylighting all year long.
• how bad Eric Adams was (over and over and over), how he defending his police commissioner's wrongheaded bike crackdown, how he didn't know the difference between ebikes and mopeds, how he cut a bus and bike lane from the Fifth Avenue plan, and how he vetoed delivery bills — all before he dropped out of the race anyway.
• how Zohran Mamdani had the right idea on buses and daylighting.
• how Brad Lander biked with Dave Colon, and got the StreetsPAC endorsement.
• how Zellnor Myrie also bike with Dave Colon.

The "Hamlet on the Hudson" award for Albany Ineptitude: There were so many nominees here, as Albany bureau chief Austin C. Jefferson showed in his legislative roundup from the state Capitol. But the degree to which Albany lawmakers went in order to protect reckless drivers from accountability was as painful to watch as it is to be hit at 60 miles per hour by a speeding driver who should have been kept from driving. The prime example was how state Sen. Andrew Gounardes's "Stop Super Speeders" bill was gutted and then left to die in the Assembly. Instead of requiring drivers with six or more speed-camera or red-light camera tickets in any 12-month period to install a speed-limiting device in their cars, the amended bill knock down the requirement to 16 or more tickets — but only speed-camera tickets rather than a combination. Which brings us to the next award:

The John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award: If you can keep your head about you when all of your legislative colleagues are craven apologists for bad drivers then you are ... Andrew Gounardes, the winner of this year's award. Gounardes spent weeks lining up support for the Stop Super Speeders bill, yet maintained his collegiality and professionalism even as it was gutted (see above). To him, the arc of accountability for killer drivers is long, but it bends towards justice. “It’s just like over the last decade we’ve grown the speed camera program and the red-light camera program,” he told us over the summer. “I don't want this program to fail by requiring [speed governors] on several hundred thousand cars right away. … We want to stand it up to test and then continue to build on it." He was able to maintain his equanimity even after Assembly Member Michaell Novakhov (R-Midwood) famously said that six speeding and red-light tickets in a single year was too low a threshold, for example. “Any driver can get much more than six," Novakhov told Streetsblog. "It's the regular constituents, just people like me and you are getting those tickets." This from the man who lost three constituents to a driver who had gotten many more than just six ... yet was still speeding because people like Novakhov opposed the Stop Super Speeders bill.

The annual award for Most Egregious Misappropriation goes, of course, to Eric Adams. It's one thing for Adams to ignore the legal requirements of the Streets Plan. And it was bad for him to halt street safety projects because wealthy donors complained. But after Albany approved legislation to allow the city to lower its speed limits for car drivers from 25 to 20 — also known as "Sammy's Law," Adams lowered the speed limit for bikes from 25 to 15. No one was all that troubled by reducing the speed limit for the fastest bikes, of course — until Adams justified it by citing "Sammy's Law." In a stirring Streetsblog op-ed Amy Cohen — the mother of the Sammy who was killed by a speeding car driver — rightly called Adams's priorities "unjustifiable and outrageous."

The Cucurbita Maxima Lowest-Hanging Fruit Award: This one also goes to Eric Adams for failing to build a recharging and comfort station for delivery workers. And this was a full-year collapse. By August, the Adams administration said that construction had begun, but this was not true. And by year's end, the hub remained just a dream. The saga began in 2022, when Adams and Sen. Chuck Schumer announced funding for two delivery hubs, one at City Hall and another on the Upper West Side. A year later, nothing had been done. Another year later, the Upper West Side rejected such a hub. And then it turned out that the City Hall hub would not have battery charging capability ... not that it matters because Adams never got it built anyway.

The annual Streetsblog Gets Action award goes to ... Streetsblog's own Dave Colon. Sure, Streetsblog dominated so much of the news coverage this year, and making sure mistakes weren't made by our public officials. But the single greatest example of our central role in the Fifth Estate came when Colon's coverage led state officials to change their boondoggle plans for the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which was nothing short of a highway expansion. (Honorable mention: That time when Andrew Cuomo's Dodge Charger — pronounced char-ZHAY! — wrote a column for us about how bad a candidate Leadfoot Andrew was. Also honorable: Our coverage of how the N.J. Turnpike widening can break your heart led to a late-in-the-year decision by Gov. Phil Murphy to erase part of the plan.

The Finding Dory Award for Short-Term Memory goes to the city Department of Transportation. After building a great double-width bike lane on 10th Avenue in Manhattan, the agency apparently couldn't remember its fine work and allowed the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to seize the bike lane, rendering it impassible. But don't worry, Streetsblog was on the case. In order to satirize the vital work of the DEA, first we smoked pot in the blocked bike lane. Then we snorted powder that may or may not have been cocaine. Then we did ayahuasca, vomiting our guts out in the blocked bike lane. Next month, we will set up a meth lab in the bike lane if these drug enforcement agents aren't gone.

The "Stars — They're Just Like Us!" Award: Every year, more and more celebrities embrace the livable streets movement, none more so this year than singer Lorde, who rode a bike in her "What Was That" video; Met pitcher Sean Manaea, who rides the subway to most home games; and French President Emmanuel Macron, who wanted to walk to a meeting in Midtown during the UN General Assembly only to find himself stuck in a holding pen while cops let President Trump's motorcade ruin New York. That said, celebrities can still be complete revanchist assholes about the need for more bike infrastructure and car-reduction strategies, as comic John Mulaney showed on his talk show this year.

There are so many nominees for the King Lear Award for Worst Decision of the Year. One: In April, Streetsblog reported that the Parks Department was no longer taking requests for street trees. Two: More or less by fiat, Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro demanded that Citi Bike lower the top speed of its e-bikes from 18 to 15, but did not also require it to lower its price now trips would take so much longer. Three: Ingrid Lewis-Martin decided — allegedly! — to kill a bike lane in exchange for a bribe from the Argento family. Four: Also more or less by fiat (and certainly without telling DOT), NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, decided to ignore her agency's own data and begin a criminal crackdown on cyclists. Our subsequent coverage later revealed that cops were enforcing the new rules haphazardly, sometimes violently, and definitely not because there was any data to suggest a need to criminal charge bike riders. The winner is obviously Jessica Tisch's wrongheaded crackdown.

And the "Whatever Happened To..." Award goes to "Breaking Bread, Building Bonds"! Very few of you will remember this — and, indeed, it hasn't been mentioned in any other outlets' year-in-review pieces yet, but early in his term, Mayor Adams solicited everyday New Yorkers to sign up to host a meal for eight to 10 fellow residents "to learn about each other, share cultures and traditions, and break down the silos between our communities." It was a great idea for which the mayor got virtually no credit ... so he promptly abandoned it ... and also took credit for it last week in an interview with Marcia Kramer, who obviously didn't know what he was talking about. (I know about this failed program because I signed up in March 2023, underwent a training session, was approved as a host ... and never heard a thing after May 2023. I emailed the special host address — breakingbread@cityhall.nyc.gov — for comment last week and didn't hear back, for reasons you can see below):

All our end-of-year Streetsies coverage is archived here.