DE-ADAMSIZATION: Mamdani Restores Multiple Street Redesigns Killed By Eric Adams

Mayor Mamdani’s Department of Transportation will install a package of street redesigns buried by his predecessor Eric Adams, the former said on Friday during an extremely cramped press conference near Fordham Road, where Adams denied bus service improvements at the behest of well-connected businesses.

"For too long, the health of our bus and bike lanes has been neglected," said Mamdani. "As we would say on the day before Valentine's Day, they haven't gotten the love that they deserve. The consequences of this negligence, of this lack of love, have been measured in daily pain and inconveniences. For too long, our transit decisions of this city have been made off of well-placed phone calls rather than the needs of working people."

The "love" that Mamdani said the DOT will show to the bus riders and cyclists around the city is an almost full de-Adamsization of the DOT — a substantial revival of multiple redesigns that bit the dust under the previous administration, including projects explicitly opposed by local power brokers who endorsed Mamdani in 2025's general election.

As first reported by the New York Times on Thursday, the revived projects include:

• Installing offset bus lanes on Fordham Road. U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat and City Council Member Oswald Feliz lobbied against the lanes, and later endorsed Mamdani's mayoral campaign in last year's general election.
• Filling in the notorious "Crashland," the southernmost block of Ashland Place in Brooklyn, where Adams killed a planned protected bike lane after interference from his since-indicted advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin and opposition from the powerful real estate developer Two Trees.
• Laying down a neighborhood network of painted bike lanes in Midwood, Flatbush and East Flatbush, and a pair of crosstown protected bike lanes in Ditmas Park. The network received pushback from Assembly Member Rodneyse Bichotte, another Mamdani general election supporter, and Council Member Inna Vernikov, a pal of Lewis-Martin's who publicly bragged about killing the project.
• Implementing planned protected bike lanes on Brooklyn and Kingston avenues in the Wingate section of East Flatbuch — the first protected bike lanes ever installed in that part of Brooklyn.

The centerpiece of Friday's announcement was the decision to finally move forward with a bus lane redesign of Fordham Road, which began at the tail-end of former Mayor Bill de Blasio's tenure and continued under Adams, who threw it into a nearby dumpster.

Fordham Road used to be a crown jewel of the city's bus network. It was the first place in the city where ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg's DOT instituted Select Bus Service, which allowed for off-board fare collection, spaced stops out farther than on traditional bus routes and gave buses an exclusive lane free of private cars.

Bus speeds spiked to 9 miles per hour on Fordham Road after the SBS launch in 2009, but those gains have since receded to the point where buses move under 4 mph on some stretches, leaving 130,000 daily riders stuck in traffic.

De Blasio's DOT began analyzing ways to redesign Fordham Road near the end of his term, and in early 2022, the Adams administration suggested buses could be sped up by either a car-free busway or "offset" bus lanes running down the middle of the street rather than against the curb.

By June 2023, however, Adams's DOT ruled out a busway due to what the administration described as "community concerns." Despite the fact that 70 percent of bus riders themselves supported a busway, Adams deferred to a collection of wealthy interests on and around Fordham Road — including the New York Botanic Garden, Fordham University and the Belmont Business Improvement District (which doesn't even serve the corridor) — and scaled back the effort.

Even then, DOT still planned to upgrade Fordham Road with offset bus lanes, which would have taken the bus lanes off the easily-blocked curb and put them in the middle of the street. But the continued caterwauling from business interests, and behind the scenes lobbying from Rep. Adriano Espaillat, prevented the city from advancing even this compromise position.

In late September 2023, Adams announced that the DOT would merely repaint the curbside bus lanes and assign NYPD to step up enforcement against drivers who block them. The administration promised to revisit the corridor in the summer of 2024, but never bothered.

A year late, Streetsblog found that buses still crawled on the corridor. With the exception of a couple of months of ticket blitzes, increased NYPD enforcement against drivers blocking the bus lane did never materialized.

DOT didn't touch the cross-Bronx thoroughfare for the remainder of Adams's term — even after former MTA New York City Transit President Rich Davey, and his successor current NYCT President Demetrius Crichlow, wrote to then-DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez to call for more action on the strip.

Mamdani, who began his run for mayor by talking to voters on Fordham Road about why they didn't support Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, explicitly campaigned on reviving the bus priority project on Fordham.

On Friday, the mayor and DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn said that would aim for at least a 20 percent increase in bus speeds along the corridor.

"Let me be very clear," said Flynn. "We'll closely monitor the results of these projects and will not hesitate to make additional upgrades as needed."

The transit advocacy group Riders Alliance, which had hoped for a full-fledged busway on Fordham Road and sat out the mayor's press conference, took credit for the mayor's 20-percent pledge. Asked why he shied away his campaign pledge to build a busway, Mamdani said he was focused on improving speeds for bus riders.

"New Yorkers don't care what you call it or what you are actually implementing. What they care about is if you've actually delivered," he said. "20 percent is going to be our north star through these next few months of planning, through the process of installation, through the process of implementation. We are always going to be coming back to what is the best way to actually get to that 20 percent."

The bike projects

Mamdani on Friday also announced the revival of a slew of bike projects in the former mayor's home turn of Brooklyn.

On Ashland Place, the DOT will deliver on a plan that would have connected the Fourth Avenue protected bike lane to the Sands Street protected bike lane, creating a fully protected ride from Sunset Park to the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. Two Trees executives lobbied mayoral advisor and future bribery indictee Lewis-Martin to intervene on their behalf and kill the section between Hanson Place and Lafayette Avenue, creating a ludicrous — and dangerous — gap in the network that critics dubbed "Crashland."

"I’m thrilled the city is finally making Ashland Place safe, closing a critical gap in Brooklyn’s protected bike lane network," said Andrew Matsuoka, a volunteer with Transportation Alternatives in Brooklyn. "The community has been fighting for this for a long time, and I’m looking forward to seeing the trash bags come off the bike signal lights they put up back in 2023."

The other revived projects were either ignored or abandoned by the Adams administration, who in each case chose political expediency over street safety. Mamdani's decision to advance them clears out a major backlog of work the Adams administration left in its wake. 

“We’re heartened that the Mamdani administration is committing to unsticking stalled projects across New York City,” Transportation Alternatives Executive Director Ben Furnas said in a statement. "The work doesn’t end here, and we’ll keep partnering with City Hall and DOT to build the city that New Yorkers deserve."