Paint the town red (and green).
Mayor Zohran Mamdani's preliminary budget includes an additional $5 million per year for bus- and bike-lane projects over the next four years, filling a budget gap identified by fiscal watchdogs as a key roadblock to the city’s expansion of street redesigns under former Mayor Eric Adams.
The proposed funding would begin to dig the city Department of Transportation out of Adams's failure to meet the benchmarks established under the Streets Master Plan law. A 2025 report from the Independent Budget Office accused the former mayor of denying DOT the funds that agency officials said they needed to build the 150 new miles of bus lanes and 250 miles of new bike lanes over the five years of the plan.
Adams consistently failed to meet those requirements, but Mayor Mamdani and his administration have expressed, including as recently as last Friday, a desire to get the Streets Plan back on track.
"It is by no means the limit," a senior Mamdani administration official said of the $5 million allotment. "I don't think we are saying that is the extent of where we want to invest."
One advocate expressed relief that the $1-billion, 6,000-person DOT would get a "promising down payment" for critical bus and bike lane projects.
"We're looking forward to seeing a fully funded and staffed DOT that’s able to use this funding to meet the ambitions of the Streets Plan," Transportation Alternatives Executive Director Ben Furnas said in a statement. "This is a breath of fresh air after an administration that was antagonistic towards bus and bike projects and froze critical safety projects and funding."
A political football
From the moment the Streets Master Plan was a glimmer in former City Counciil Speaker Corey Johnson's eye, DOT said it would need more than just political will from City Hall to get the plan done — it would also need cold hard cash.
In 2019, then-DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg told the City Council that the DOT would need "significant additional funding from the city budget, which we estimate to be several billion dollars, new head count, new facilities, and equipment."
The Council and then-Mayor Bill de Blasio did agree on a bill, codifying into law a requirement that the DOT install 250 miles of bike lanes, 150 miles of bus lanes and more to redirect street space away from cars. Adams began his mayoralty by announcing $904 million in funding to carry out the 2022-2026 Streets Master Plan, but by the end of 2022, DOT was blaming staff shortages for its failure to meet the targets.
The 2025 IBO report showed that the Adams administration never addressed those staff shortages. In fact, DOT had lost dozens of employees in key bus-planning units between 2019 and 2024, in part due to a hiring freeze imposed by Adams.
Mamdani's budget goes some of the way towards staffing up DOT, with a planned increase of 20 positions specifically devoted to bus and bike projects by June 30, 2027. New DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn specifically mentioned capacity challenges and a "need to staff up" as challenges he was initially facing when he spoke to Streetsblog on Inauguration Day in January.
Putting more money and personnel into building bus and bike lanes is a way to get more out of DOT's existing skillset, one advocate said.
"The mayor's increased investment in fairer, safer streets leans into New York's superpower as a transit, biking and walking city," said Riders Alliance Director of Policy and Communication Danny Pearlstein. "With his commitment to speeding up buses by 20 percent, this new baseline funding will help deliver much faster service and save riders a lot of time."
Thus far in his mayoralty, Mamdani has focused on announcing plans to revive or finish projects that Adams left for dead or canceled, which still leaves the DOT with a hefty amount of work to do — including bus lanes on Madison Avenue and Fordham Road, and neighborhood bike networks in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, East Flatbush, Midwood and Greenpoint.
"We are bringing the Streets Master Plan back to life," Mamdani said at an announcement last Friday of four of those projects. "These projects are just the beginning of our work to deliver safe streets to the people of New York."
