It's de Blasio ... with the promise of steroids.
Mayor Mamdani chose the third full day of his tenure to announce that he will complete the full safety redesign of deadly McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint — a project that was created under Mayor Bill de Blasio, but watered down by Mayor Adams in a corruption scandal.
By reviving the originally proposed DOT plan, Mamdani said McGuinness Boulevard would be narrowed to one travel lane in each direction between the Pulaski Bridge and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to accommodate a parking-protected bike lane. Currently, only the southern portion of the stretch enjoys the benefits of a road diet; north of Calyer Street, the Adams administration maintained two car lanes in either direction of the dangerous stretch.
"The city committed to a redesign of McGuinness Boulevard ... to deliver the safety and improvements that residents had been asking for until the prior administration bowed to big money interests, leaving the project incomplete and Greenpointers still at risk. Today, however, there is a new mayor in City Hall," he said, evoking the "ax" swung by Robert Moses to widen a then-residential street into the McGuinness Boulevard highway we know today.
"The consequences of Moses's acts have been measured in the human toll that this four-lane highway has incurred, and in so many other unseen but deeply insidious ways," the mayor said, name-checking several victims, including Jimmy Battaglia, a boy who was killed by a driver in 1956, shortly after Moses's grim work. "It is felt when parents don't feel safe letting their children out of the house to play. It is felt when cyclists go on long detours because McGuinness is simply too dangerous to take the risk. It is felt when people dread going to the grocery store or getting a cup of coffee or just going on an afternoon walk because they fear that they will have to cross the street."
Mamdani did not merely return to the same spot where, in March 2025, he signed a pledge to complete the road diet, he basked in the support of the advocates and local pols who fought for decades to make the roadway safer.
"Greenpoint, we freaking did it!" screamed Council Member Lincoln Restler, who, with Assembly Member Emily Gallagher started the latest round of activism in 2021 after the hit-and-run death of local teacher Matthew Jenson. That death led to a $40-million commitment by the de Blasio administration to make McGuinness safe — but the Adams administration scaled back the full redesign as part of corruption scandal that included top aide Ingrid Lewis-Martin blocking the road diet in exchange for an appearance on "The Godfather of Harlem," court papers say.
"[Under Adams], McGuinness Boulevard had become synonymous with a city hall that put politics over people, that put corporate donors over our community, that put Hulu guest appearances over our damn safety," Restler added. "But Greenpoint, we organized like hell."
Streetsblog reminded Mamdani that, during the mayoral campaign, one media outlet dismissed Mamdani as merely "de Blasio on steroids" — yet the announcement he was making on Saturday was merely the de Blasio part, while "steroids" such as protected bike lanes on Nassau and Driggs avenues to and from the Kosciuszko Bridge, as well as low-traffic neighborhood strategies to eliminate rat-running through the residential community remain only dreams.
Mamdani had an answer for that:
"Today is not, and will not be, the extent of the work that we will do to make this city safe," he said. "We will make it safe for pedestrians, for cyclists, for drivers, for New Yorkers across the five boroughs. ... And I'm excited, frankly, in having our [DOT] Commissioner [Mike Flynn] here alongside me, because when I was interviewing him, we did not simply ask him about fulfilling that which has already been put forward. We asked him, 'What will it take to make this city the envy of the world when it comes to our streetscape and our public transit?' These are the questions that we are asking, and soon we will have the answers to those questions to deliver on that. Thank you to Streetsblog."
The McGuinness saga
Mamdani's announcement that work will begin as soon as the weather warms could be the final chapter in the long-running safety debacle of McGuinness Boulevard.
The movement to redesign the street dates back more than a decade and was galvanized in 2021 by the hit-and-run killing of Jensen, whose cousin, John Ogren, was on hand on Saturday. After Jensen's death, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged $40 million to overhaul the street, and DOT set about crafting a redesign.
Following a lengthy community engagement process, the agency presented a plan that would reduce the street's four vehicle travel lanes to two, add bike lanes protected by parked cars and build out pedestrian infrastructure, including new painted medians and crosswalks.
Such projects have led to significant reductions in serious injuries and deaths, including among pedestrians and motor vehicle occupants, according to a 2022 DOT study of years of street safety improvements.
But, according to the indictment of Lewis-Martin, the city kept all four travel lanes intact on the northern stretch of McGuinness after Lewis-Martin intervened on behalf of the Argento family, owners of Broadway Stages, a theatrical and movie production company that led a campaign to kill the road diet.
Even after the bribery charges were revealed, Mayor Adams declined to go back to the original plan for McGuinness, even calling the scaled-back "a win," while heaping praise on Lewis-Martin and her alleged co-conspirators.
The announcement of the McGuinness Boulevard road diet comes shortly after the Department of Transportation announced that road fatalities dropped last year to their lowest since records started being kept in 1910 at the dawn of the Automobile Age. Crashes were also down about 7 percent, and injuries down about 8 percent, last year versus the previous year.
The DOT announcement attributed the decline to the implementation of Vision Zero in 2014 as one of the first acts of the de Blasio administration. Since then, traffic deaths are down 31 percent.
And the new administration used the end-of-year stats as a chance to do more of the kind of work that Mamdani announced on Saturday in Greenpoint.
“No New Yorker should lose their life while walking, driving, or biking in our city,” Deputy Mayor of Operations Julia Kerson said in the statement. “Vision Zero has shown that the choices we make — how we design our streets and how we enforce traffic laws — save lives. ... But one life lost is one too many. That’s why the Mamdani administration will double down on street redesigns, protected bike lanes, and protected bus lanes that make our streets safer and better for everyone.”
A master class
In addition to making his announcement, Mamdani made sure to put victims of road violence front and center at his press conferences. The names of many of these members of Families for Safe Streets are well known to Streetsblog readers, though not a single one of them wants to be.
Mamdani said that the presence of the victims' families showed that street safety is not just some random, utopian concept. In doing so, he suggested that de Blasio's Vision Zero is, indeed, on steroids now.
"I want to make clear to New Yorkers that we are not speaking in the abstract, we are speaking about New Yorkers whose lives have been torn apart by inaction for far too long," he said, surrounded by victims holding pictures of their lost loved ones. "And the New Yorkers you see alongside me are those who have lost the very people that they built their lives around."
Mamdani brandished a picture that had just been given to him by Families for Safe Streets co-founded Mary Beth Kelly featuring a young Mamdani and Kelly's son when they were both high school soccer players. Kelly's husband, Carl Nacht, was killed by a reckless driver at W. 38th Street.
"And sometimes you may not even know those in your life have been affected by this," Mamdani said, showing the picture. "This is a photo I was just given of me in high school standing alongside a friend and a leader of our then soccer team, Asher Kelly Nacht. ... I did not know then, what I know now, which is that Asher's father was killed while riding a bicycle by a reckless driver. And I say this because too often in our city, in our politics, we lose sight of what this actually means in people's lives, we start to understand these stories as if they are purely statistics. We start to think of traffic violence as something that can be measured in numbers year after year. We forget that this inaction has forced the very New Yorkers who have felt the brunt of this violence to traumatize themselves day after day, telling elected officials about the worst moment in their life.
"And today, we are here not just to announce that we will complete this redesign, but to announce that those days have to come to an end," he said. "What we must do now is build for a new future, one that understands safety as something that is paramount, not as something that has to be negotiated, one that understands the worth of its people, the worth of this place it all."
