Wednesday’s Headlines: Eric Adams Under the Bus Edition

Was this a ground-breaking or a reputation-breaking?

The big news on Tuesday was the formal beginning of construction on the Department of Transportation’s transformative bus rapid transit (lite!) project on Flatbush Avenue. All the giants were there: Lieber! Flynn! Kerson! Restler! Hanif! Plum! Sidney Meyer! Streetsblog!

But what started out as a lovefest for transit that will improve the lives of tens of thousands of New York’s long-suffering bus riders quickly became a very public display of disaffection for former Mayor Eric Adams — who famously promised he’d be a “Bus Mayor,” then turned out to be the very opposite.

Mayor Mamdani’s DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn, who hailed the MTA as his agency’s “partner,” but said the feeling is mutual.

“We stand shoulder to shoulder with you,” Flynn said. “You’ve always prioritized the needs of bus riders, and now you have a partner at the city level who does as well.”

Me-ow! But MTA CEO Janno Lieber also had his claws out for Adams and the way he ran DOT.

“It wasn’t long ago that we were with this DOT team and the mayor in the Bronx, kicking off the belated, bus lane installation on Fordham Road,” Lieber said, referring to an event with Mayor Mamdani “I said it then, and I’ll say it again: it’s fabulous to have partners who in government who are ready to do what’s necessary to make the streets really, really receptive to buses. It’s a long overdue commitment to build bus lanes and busways and to install more [enforcement] cameras, more traffic signal prioritization and everything that’s going to make buses faster.”

And in case anyone missed what Lieber was saying, he doubled-down: “We haven’t always had this partnership. It’s not a secret. And that obviously made MTA mission to speed up service very, very difficult. After all, buses can only move as fast as the traffic and the street configuration allows.”

So how much faster will buses move through Flatbush Avenue? Well, on this one, DOT wasn’t talking. An original presentation to local community boards mentioned that perhaps bus speeds might improve by 20 percent, and the DOT press release pointed out that prior projects have been successful, citing a 43-percent increase in bus speeds on 161st Street in the Bronx.

But on Tuesday, Flynn and others declined to answer Streetsblog’s simple question: “Care to make a prediction for Flatbush?”

But Lieber promised that the plan — which, for now, includes protected bus lanes and boarding islands, plus lots of pedestrian space — will be a bus revolution for Brooklyn.

“You can’t beat the impact of dedicated bus lanes,” he said. “This is a happy day for the 130,000 plus riders who travel this corridor every day.”

The project will be built in four phases, but will be done this year.

And for all of you who love a good ceremonial groundbreaking photo, here’s your moment of zen:

In other news:

• With Gov. Hochul failing to convince lawmakers about her efforts to lower auto insurance premiums by depriving some crash victims of their ability to be compensated for their life-altering injuries, now she looks like she may want to lower auto insurance premiums by preventing the insurance companies from raising them whenever they want. (Gothamist)
• Speaking of insurance, money really opens doors in Washington, doesn’t it?

• Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie can’t seem to support basic technology to keep our roads safe from recidivist speeders, but President Trump seems to like the idea. (Road & Track)
• Speaking of Speaker Heastie, street safety advocates and their allies in government will rally to demand Heastie’s support for the Stop Super Speeders bill at 10 a.m. at City Hall.
• Will Staten Island ever get a restored North Shore railroad? (Advance)
• Don’t walk to the World Cup! (WPIX)
• Everyone is upset that Caputo’s Bake Shop on Court Street has closed. But, as Crain’s reports, the owner did not blame the bike lane!
• What’s next for Citi Bike? Dockless?! (Zag Daily)
• Cars! They do the damndest things! (Like turn over all by themselves!) (News12)
• Finally, as we previewed yesterday, Greenpoint lawmakers are upset at the upcoming weekend outages of the G train, as the Post reported. Council Member Lincoln Restler had a presser at Nassau Avenue with Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who said the World Cup summer “should be a boon for the local economy, but that’s impossible if North Brooklyn and Greenpoint are cut off from the rest of the city.” But we asked MTA CEO Janno Lieber about it at the aforementioned Flatbush presser and he was downright pissed at Restler. “Councilman Restler had to leave the celebratory press conference here to go beat up on the MTA,” he started. “But this is the reality of the generations of neglect of the MTA’s core infrastructure: It turns out that tunnel under Newtown Creek between Greenpoint and Long Island City needs a lot more work than was originally thought. So that is why we are having to do extra weekend shutdowns and get the work done. … We’ve got to give them better service, even though it is inconvenient to ride a bus instead of the subway.” DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn declined to discuss whether the shuttle bus service during the outage will be sufficient or just stuck in traffic. (The Daily News, amNY and Gothamist also covered.)