She's shifting gears.
New City Council Speaker Julie Menin set a new tone for transportation policy by picking Council Member Shaun Abreu to lead the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee — while also excluding Republicans from the panel entirely.
Menin tapped Abreu, who she also named the Council's new majority leader, to take over the committee from Council Member Selvena Brooks-Powers, a close ally of former Speaker Adrienne Adams.
Abreu, who represents a district spanning the Upper West Side to Washington Heights since 2021 and previously led the Council's Sanitation Committee, will be familiar to Streetsblog readers for his strong support of the effort to get trash off of sidewalks and into curbside containers.
The city's trash containerization efforts actually began in Abreu's district, and on Thursday he specifically highlighted that initiative as an example of the kind of governance he wants to pursue in his new role.
"Four years ago, my district wasn't always a nice place to walk around. Trash bags piled up from the sidewalks and we had the smells to match," Abreu said at a press conference on Thursday. "Today, families can walk down the block without dodging rats and garbage, without holding their breath, and we can take pride in our neighborhoods. The sidewalks are for people again.
"I'm going to bring the same people first approach to our streetscapes, a part of our city that impacts everyone, every day," added Abreu
The new committee chair has also supported protected bike infrastructure. On Wednesday, he approvingly shared on social media Streetsblog's article on cycling activity on Bedford Avenue and said he wanted to bring more protected bike lanes to his own district.
"The data shows it: protected bike lanes work. When you make it safer to ride, more New Yorkers choose to cycle. Let’s build more! West 155th Street is a great place to start," he posted.
Menin's move to boost someone so outwardly supportive of pro-pedestrian and pro-cycling efforts marked a sea change from the way the Council approached transportation issues under Speaker Adams.
Under Chair Brooks-Powers, the committee showed little ambition when it came to finding ways to make the streets work better for people who don't drive — and repeatedly amplified the concerns of the Council's pro-car Republican minority. The panel rarely advanced legislation, and when it did bring bills up for votes, Brooks-Powers often advanced laws to slow down efforts to redesign city streets to prioritize mass transit, cycling and walking.
One of Brooks-Powers's last hurrahs as committee chair, an oversight hearing on bus service in November, featured no concrete discussions on how to actually make bus service better — but did include the introduction of a bill to bar bus-mounted enforcement cameras from ticketing drivers more than once per hour, regardless of how long they spent parked in a bus lane.
And that committee featured plenty of pro-car voices, such as Republicans David Carr, Joann Ariola and Ari Kagan, as well as conservative Kalman Yeger. Adams and Brooks-Powers also oversaw a massive reduction of the city's outdoor dining program, preferring the pandemic bright spot shrink to a seasonal program that restaurants struggle to work with. Universal daylighting never made it out of the last City Council despite support from a wide swathe of advocates and Council members, but a bill from Ariola that forces DOT to talk to every firehouse in the path of a bike lane did become a law.
In contrast, the new committee has no Republicans and a number of transit, bike and pedestrian-friendly voices, including Julie Won, Pierina Sanchez, Shekhar Krishnan, Chris Marte and Shahana Hanif. (Council members Farah Louis, Justin Sanchez and Phil Wong round out the committee's membership.)
In fact, as Transportation Alternatives noted, in total 60.8 percent of the constituents represented on the committee are in car-free households.
A spokesman for Riders Alliance, the city's premiere advocate for public transit riders, praised Abreu as an "excellent choice."
"Chair Abreu keenly understands the great value of public space, as a steadfast leader in getting trash off of our sidewalks and into curbside containers," said Danny Pearlstein, the organization's spokesman. "Riders are eager to work alongside both new chairs to win much faster buses and free and reduced fare transit service for many more New Yorkers."
Advocates for safe streets should be buoyed by the fact that one of Menin's early boosters and top lieutenants now sets Council transportation policy.
"It's very helpful that [Abreu's] seemingly so close to Julie, and hopefully there is a give and take when it comes to the things that he wants to get done for the committee," said Russell Murphy, a former top staffer for Ydanis Rodriguez when he led the committee (Murphy now works on government relations for Lime). "Certainly she has her own agenda around transportation, but she'll be able to lean on him for ideas as somebody who can keep their finger of the pulse of what the advocacy community is looking for."
While ex-Speaker Adams showed little interest in getting then-Mayor Adams meet the requirements of the Council-mandated "Streets Master Plan," and Brooks-Powers used her bully pulpit to ask DOT to rip up bike lanes in her district, Abreu's leadership presents an opportunity to wring as much good policy as possible out of the Mamdani administration, Murphy said.
"This a good moment for a reset in the entire dynamic," said Murphy, who now works as communications director for bike-share company Lime. "I'm as appreciative of Shaun and his potential to sort of reset the conversation on the Council side, as much as I'm very excited for Mike Flynn and a DOT that is going to have the full backing of [the mayor] in a way that it seemed the last DOT commissioner did not."
Abreu's record is not spotless. The Council member was a sponsor of a bill from a previous session that would require the DOT to create a licensing and registration system for all e-bikes, a move that the agency opposes and that street safety advocates say will lead to a decrease in ridership of sustainable e-bikes and not make streets safer anyway.
Over the summer, the West Side Rag asked Abreu about, vaguely, "electric vehicles," and he said this, which went in multiple directions:
In terms of the e-bike situation, I don’t support criminal enforcement. We don’t criminalize cars for going through a red light, we ticket them. I think most definitely we need to ramp up enforcement of electric bikes and scooters through civil penalties. I also support the licensing and registering of e-bikes. And another way to go after the reckless e-bikes is by going after the [delivery] apps. The apps have access to when employees are flouting traffic laws, so we can go after the apps for when the deliveristas flout the law. Every option needs to be on the table here because I do understand that my constituents care about this issue, and we need to be laser focused on it.
