Monday’s Headlines: A Predictable Tragedy Edition
Earlier this summer, Mayor Mamdani’s Department of Transportation delayed its redesign of Canal Street approaching the Manhattan Bridge to 2027. On Thursday, a truck driver coming off the bridge killed a 77-year-old man at that very intersection.
NYPD hit the driver with criminal summonses for civil infractions related to driving with low and leaking break fluid and busted brake lights, police told the Daily News. The department’s Collisions Investigation Squad is investigating, which could result in more charges.
Post-crash accountability is fine, but Ting Jun Ye’s death was also a predictable tragedy: Last year, after a driver killed a cyclist and a pedestrian at the foot of the bridge, the DOT under then-Mayor Eric Adams implemented small mitigations — concrete barriers and speed limit changes — and teased a plan for wider sidewalks it said it would install in 2026.
Unfortunately, under Mayor Mamdani, the DOT opted to split the Canal Street project in half — delaying its redesign of the more dangerous eastern half by the bridge until next year (at the earliest), after the agency first redesigns Canal Street west of Broadway.
As Chinatown Partnership Executive Director Wellington Chen tells it, DOT is afraid of a high-profile fight over the presence of illegal sidewalk vendors on the corridor.
“I guess it’s because the people were making a ruckus on the eastern side of Canal,” Chen told Streetsblog in July.
On the campaign trail for mayor in 2025, then-Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani pledged that, “No longer will we wait for a New Yorker to get hurt before we take action.” As mayor, he committed to make the city’s streets “the envy of the world.”
More recently, Mamdani’s DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn said that community input “can’t be used as something that just derails good ideas, or if it’s a venue only for the loudest voices to be heard.”
The administration’s decision to delay its redesign of Canal Street east of Broadway runs completely counter to the spirit of those statements. “Canal Street East” is far more dangerous, statistically, than the western portion of the corridor. Yet DOT actually told the east side Manhattan Community Board 3 District Mamanger Susan Stetzer that it was taking its time to collect, in her words, a “vast amount of feedback.”
It’s hard not to conclude Mamdani’s DOT chose political ease over safety when it kicked Canal Street East to 2027.
It’s not too soon to course-correct.
In other news:
- The Times is getting impatient about the mayor’s 34th Street busway, while DOT insists it plans to start the redesign “in the coming weeks.”
- Tesla is testing (human-operated) AVs on city streets. (Gothamist)
- Meet “the last NIMBY in town,” Andrew Berman. (Curbed)
- Mayor Mamdani should invest in greenway construction for safer streets. (amNY)
- The view from the north: Toronto cyclists rallied against Premier Doug Ford’s plans to rip bike city bike lanes. (City News via YouTube)
- Frank’s Bike Shop, whose owner Frank Arroyo died in January, is officially saying goodbye. (Christopher Robbins via X)
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