Bklyn Biz Group Asks Mamdani to Extend Flatbush Ave. Bus Lane South

Go south, young Mam.

Central Brooklyn businesses hope Mayor Mamdani will make it his business to extend Flatbush Avenue’s new bus lanes south of Prospect Park.

“When you have long, slow rides, it discourages folks from popping into a store, that’s lost money for our businesses,” Casey Martinez, a representative of the Church-Flatbush Community Alliance, a central Brooklyn business improvement district, said at a rally with transit advocates and union members on Wednesday. “We are here, as the Church-Flatbush BID, with our fellow riders to say to Mayor Mamdani, ‘Please extend the bus lane now, make Flatbush Avenue “fast and free.” ‘ “

Martinez, who works for real estate firm and BID member United American Land, made her comments alongside members of Riders Alliance, NYPIRG and LIUNA Local 1010 at the bustling commercial intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Nostrand Avenue.

The local BID’s support contrasts with other business groups that have sunk other bus projects, most recently on Fordham Road in the Bronx, which the Belmont BID successfully held off for years during the Adams administration. (Mamdani, who ran on a platform of “fast and free” buses, pledged this year to advance the project.)

But where Belmont BID leader Peter Madonia and Bronx institutional interests like Fordham University insisted their business depended on car drivers, Martinez pointed to a 2024 Pratt Center survey that found 70 percent of people who go to Flatbush for shopping, eating or entertainment destinations use the bus.

That makes a bus lane all the way down Flatbush Avenue a no-brainer, Martinez said.

“We want more shoppers. We want more people to spend money, not drive through,” Martinez said.

The Department of Transportation broke ground last month on an bus lane redesign of Flatbush Avenue north of Grand Army Plaza to Livingston Street.

Rider advocates hope Mamdani won’t wait to continue the red painted lanes south into Flatbush proper.

“Poor bus service wastes my time and causes stress,” said Riders Alliance member Lynette Lewis. “The B41 has made me late for work, prolongs my commutes and sometimes forces me to talk to my therapist on a crowded bus, because a B41 showed up 25 minutes late. No one wants to be talking about their trauma in front of a bunch of strangers because the bus took longer than it should have to show up.”

The B41 is the primary bus line on Flatbush Avenue, but the B9, B103, Q35 and BM2 also run on the street.

DOT has always suggested that it wants to bring bus priority to all of Flatbush Avenue, going back to when it began outreach on the idea early in Mayor Adams’s term.

Buses run the slowest on the stretch of Flatbush Avenue north of Grand Army Plaza, but double parking and traffic congestion keep buses mired at speeds of less than 7 miles per hour on large stretches to the south, DOT said at the time.

Ultimately, after years of delays, DOT under Adams proposed the bus lane project for the northern segment of Flatbush Avenue at the very end of his tenure. Mamdani’s DOT is already exploring ways to improve the bus riding experience in Flatbush.

“We’ve started looking at potential ideas for the rest of Flatbush,” DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn said at the groundbreaking for the project last month. “Those are important conversations we want to have with our partners and the communities along the rest of Flatbush. We’re really excited about the idea of continuing to move buses faster all the way down Flatbush and that’s something we’ll definitely want to look at in the coming months.”