Mamdani Is Falling Short of New York City’s Greenway Dream
One hundreds days into his tenure, Mayor Mamdani has so far failed to clean up the complex and disorganized bureaucracy governing the city’s bike and pedestrian greenways — to the chagrin of advocates who hoped he’d quickly adopt a slate of simple policies to improve how the city creates and maintains green infrastructure.
In January, the New York City Greenways Coalition called on Mamdani to fast-track at least one signature project and disentangle the city’s siloed greenway management, but the mayor has yet to follow any of its recommendations.
“Safe walking, running, cycling – those are the most affordable ways to get around the city,” Hunter Armstrong, executive director of the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative and co-chair of the coalition, told Streetsblog. “There are multiple things this administration wants to achieve that they can do by greenways.”
The city’s greenways serve as essential corridors for cyclists and pedestrians. But successive mayoral administrations have treated them as an afterthought and taken ages to fix crumbling sections, from the nation’s first bicycle path on Ocean Parkway to more recent additions on the Hudson River Greenway uptown.
When the city does find the will and money to renovate the paths, they send cyclists onto dangerous bypasses for months on end, rather than repurposing excess car lanes for safe passage. Meanwhile, new sections require years to build out and regularly carry eye-watering price tags.
The Department of Transportation recently unveiled an upcoming section of greenway on Commercial Street in Greenpoint. The project dates to the early 2010s, but won’t be done until 2030s. Locals slammed the department’s proposal for a narrow two-way bike lane as too small-minded.
The agency also unveiled plans to encircle Prospect Park with protected cycling paths, an idea the city should bring to park perimeters citywide.
“Greenways are some of New York City’s most-cherished spaces — safe, affordable routes that connect people to nature, neighborhoods, and the waterfront,” said DOT spokesperson Scott Gastel. “We’re delivering an historic expansion across all five boroughs and working with our sister agencies to raise the bar on maintenance and create the next generation of world-class greenways.”
The greenway coalition’s checklist offered a set of relatively straightforward fixes for the new mayor to accomplish by last Friday. Advocates hoped the fixes would set the right tone for an administration willing to move on from the dysfunctional status quo.
“Having monitored this for a while, time can slip away pretty quickly,” Armstrong said. “So we just wanted to start this new administration [by] clearly communicating what we saw as important progress.”
The group called on Hizzoner to establish an office for greenway management within City Hall. Mamdani recently created a simlar “Office of Curb Management” at DOT, answering years of calls from livable streets boosters.
Next, the mayor should clean up the byzantine governance and maintenance structure of the city’s greenway network. Depending on the path, responsibility for greenways is siloed off across multiple city agencies, like the chronically underfunded Parks Department, DOT and the Economic Development Corporation.
The mayor should fix that scrambled system to quickly deliver reliable greenway infrastructure. New Yorkers care more about the finished project than which agency created it, Armstrong said.
“They just want a safe, well-marked, enjoyable connected system,” he said.
The new administration should also rewrite the zoning code to allow bikes along redeveloped waterfront esplanades, which currently only require pedestrian access.
Lastly, the city ought to fast-track at least one high-priority project, such as the Harlem River Greenway in the Bronx, or allowing bikes on park paths in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.
The scorecard included bigger benchmarks for Mamdani’s first year and first term in office, including borough-specific priorities, like a continuous shore path in Queens and an actual greenway along the Harlem River in the Bronx, not upland on-street bike lanes.
Former Mayor Eric Adams made some progress on greenway planning, but did not address the underlying causes of rampant delays and poor maintenance.
In August, city officials released a Council-mandated greenway master plan, nicely teeing up a set of priority projects for a more ambitious City Hall. The Adams administration also secured a $7.25-million federal RAISE grant in 2022 to plan greenway expansions.
Adams announced 40 new miles of greenways, including along the Harlem River in the Bronx, the northern Queens waterfront, and central Brooklyn, but did not set a deadline or price for those projects.
Given Mamdani’s penchant for riding bikes, deploying city workers to fill more than 100,000 potholes, and his larger goal of making the city’s streets “the envy of the world,” Armstrong was hopeful that the mayor would quickly up the ante on greenways.
“[Potholes are] important, that’s just basic functioning of municipal government. We would like to see some more forward-facing visions soon,” Armstrong said.
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