The journey to "envy of the world" begins with a small step.
Mayor Mamdani will reduce speed limits on streets in front of 800 public school buildings by the end of the year — bringing the citywide total to 1,300 15-mile-per-hour school streets, he said on Monday. But the announcement fell short of what advocates dreamed when the state legislature granted the city the power to reduce speed limits under "Sammy's Law."
By the end of 2029, the 15-mile-per-hour speed limit will be implemented at all 2,300 school locations, the mayor said.
Nonetheless, Streetsblog asked Mamdani at his press conference in Queens why he was not moving more quickly to reduce the speed limit from 25 to 20 across the board, and is, instead, limiting himself to school streets for now.
“I appreciate the question and also the emphasis on the urgency," he said. "Today is a significant step forward in us ensuring that we are extending this safety to far more school children across our city and that we will extend it to every single eligible school zone by the end of 2029."
He added that he would love to do more, but insisted that "to change the citywide speed limit in one fell swoop ... requires a local administrative change to the city administrative code [by the City Council], and that is a change that I would support.
"I will continue to hold firm to our vision of making our streetscape the envy of the world," he added, "and the way that we start doing that is by first catching up to the rest of the world."
He declined to discuss his negotiations with Council Speaker Julie Menin about passing such a bill.
"It is a goal of our administration to reduce the speed limit to 20 miles per hour on all city streets," he said. "But that is something that can only be done with a local law change, and we do support that."
A spokesperson for Menin confirmed that there is no bill to lower the speed limit citywide.
"Street safety is a priority for Speaker Menin and the Council," said the spokesperson, Julia Agos, reiterating that the Council's belief is that DOT "already has the authority to lower the speed limit in specific locations."
In the previous Council, Menin co-sponsored the home rule resolution calling on the state to pass Sammy's Law in the first place.
It is unclear exactly what streets will get the lower school speed limits. City Hall's press release said that the 15-mile-per-hour regulations will go into effect at "school locations," but a press release from Transportation Alternatives said the Mamdani administration would be "implementing Sammy’s Law on the blocks directly in front of city schools" [emphasis added]. The city's school zone speed cameras cover a much wider area than just the street in front of a school building.
(A Department of Transportation spokesperson said each school location would be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. But it is unclear if multiple streets would be affected at each building. A school building such as PS 107 in Brooklyn faces 25-mile-per-hour Eighth Avenue, but it is unclear if that high-speed roadway would be affected or whether DOT will merely do the already slower side street.)
One former DOT official said the school slowdown is a good first step, but a small one given that the city already has a small car-free school street program that could be expanded, as the mayor promised on the campaign trail.
“It’s good the city is doing this, but it would be nice if they accompanied it with at least a few showcase car-free school streets, which candidate Mamdani promised for every school,” said Jon Orcutt, who worked in the Bloomberg-era DOT.
The implementation of Sammy's Law has been a slow rollout ever since the state legislature and Gov. Hochul gave the city the power to reduce its speed limits from 25 to 20 in 2024.
Then-Mayor Eric Adams did use the law to reduce the speed limit on roughly 100 short street segments around the city, as well as five small "neighborhood slow zones," one in each borough. But he never got to his promise of 250 street segments, and he also "disgracefully" — in the words of one activist — used Sammy's Law to lower the speed limit for e-bikes.
Neither Mayor Adams nor then-Council Speaker Adrienne Adams moved towards implementing Sammy's Law citywide. As a result, community boards around town are slowly demanding that their district get reduced speed limits, as Streetsblog has reported (map above).
It is worth noting that the Mamdani administration announcement on Monday of its plans under Sammy's Law would not have saved the life of the boy for whom the bill is named. Sammy Cohen Eckstein was killed in 2013 on Prospect Park West as he chased a ball that had gotten away from him.
That stretch of roadway did have its speed limit reduced to 20 miles per hour under Mayor Adams, but because that block is not near a school, it will remain at that speed for now.
Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal was on hand at the Queens presser because he was the state Senator who, along with Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal sponsored Sammy's Law and got it passed:
