‘Sweeping The City’: Millions Of New Yorkers Are Crying Out For Mayor Mamdani To Slow Down Drivers

Speed up the slowdown!

Representatives of more than one-quarter of the city, plus more than 60 state- and city officials, are demanding that the Mamdani administration designate their neighborhoods as “Slow Zones,” by taking advantage of a state law that allows the mayor to reduce car speeds to 20 mph.

As of this week, 17 community boards around the city, representing more than two million residents in the densest neighborhoods, have passed resolutions seeking the implemention of the so-called “Sammy’s Law,” which passed the state legislature in 2024, but has only been implemented in one neighborhood, beyond speed-limit reductions on a handful of street segments.

The most recent board to pass such a resolution was on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on Tuesday.

“It shows that there’s a real groundswell of support for making this happen,” said Ken Coughlin, chair of the Manhattan CB7 Transportation committee. “It’s sweeping the city, community board by community board.”

Tuesday’s CB7 vote came after community boards in western Queens, so-called Brownstone Brooklyn, one Bronx community board 6 and several other Manhattan boards had similarly demand 20-mile-per-hour speed limits across the entire district, not just a few blocks here and there. The Department of Transportation has carried out Sammy’s Law in Manhattan south of Canal Street, before that neighborhood’s community board held a vote on the matter. 

Meanwhile, a veritable “Who’s Who” of elected officials has called for Mayor Mamdani to act faster to slow down car drivers, sending a letter highlighting the need for reduced speed limits “so that more New Yorkers make it home safely today, tomorrow, and for generations to come.”

“We can’t afford to wait,” added the letter, which at the time was signed by four borough presidents (sorry, no Staten Island), 25 Assembly members, 12 state senators, 23 City Council members and Rep. Jerry Nadler, of national fame.

The letter points out that from 2022 through 2025, nearly 1,000 New Yorkers were killed and another 12,055 were seriously injured in traffic crashes — or eight serious injuries every single day.

Mamdani has moved more briskly than his predecessor to use Sammy’s Law, increasing the number of eligible streets from 2 percent to 6 percent of the city since he took office.

Such slow zones typically take the form of lower speed limits on street segments in front of public schools, where speed limits can be even lower than the 20 mile-per-hour state mandate. The Mamdani administration is installing 800 of those by the end of the year, which will bring the total to 1,300 of the 15-mile-per-hour zones across the city. (The administration is promising to do 2,300 by 2029.)

But the mayor claimed he lacks the power to simply reduce the city speed limit across the board.

“To change the citywide speed limit in one fell swoop … requires a change to the city administrative code [by the City Council], and that is a change that I would support,” the mayor told Streetsblog in March. Hizzoner declined to discuss his negotiations with Council Speaker Julie Menin — and there has been nothing said publicly since.

Some drivers object to lower speed limits on the mistaken belief that they will get more speeding tickets — but the city’s school-zone speed cameras only issue violations to drivers going 11 miles per hour or more above the speed limit, or 31 miles per hour in a 20-mile-per-hour zone. Travel speeds in the community boards demanding the lower speed limits rarely exceed 20 miles per hour anyway, Coughlin pointed out.

Plus, there’s a larger benefit to slowing down cars and SUVs even by five miles per hour, he4 added.

“Given the amount of damage that a thousand-pounds vehicle can do to a person [at] 35 miles an hour, a reduction to 30 or 25 or 20 [is] going to be extremely beneficial for all street users — car occupants, pedestrians, and cyclists,” he said. “So it can’t happen too soon.”

A spokesperson from the DOT said the agency is reviewing the resolutions.