Bus lane, bike lane projects killed by Adams coming back under Mamdani

Mayor Mamdani pledged Friday to re-start a slew of street improvement projects stalled by his predecessor, former mayor Eric Adams.

Standing behind a lectern in a bus parked at the MTA’s West Farms Depot, Mamdani pledged to restart four street redesign projects “that will save New Yorkers time and keep them safe.”

Those projects include offset bus lanes on Fordham Road in the Bronx, a two-way protected bike lane on a redesigned Ashland Place in Brooklyn, bike lanes along Brooklyn and Kingston Avenues, and a bike lane network in Flatbush and Midwood.

“The bus and bike lanes of our city are what connect so many of our fellow New Yorkers to one another,” Mamdani said.

The Fordham Road project, which would have replaced the current curb-side bus lanes with so-called “offset” lanes that allowed for private-vehicle parking, was kiboshed by the Adams administration in 2023 amid outcry from business improvement districts and institutions like Fordham University and the Bronx Zoo.

The southernmost block of Ashland Place in Brooklyn was left without a bike lane last year, effectively disrupting an otherwise uninterrupted stretch of protected cycling infrastructure from Sunset Park to DUMBO.

Mamdani’s pledge to re-start the bus projects comes after Adams came under fire for approving, then cancelling, several street redesign projects.

Adams’ top advisor, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, is currently facing charges she helped water down one such bike lane project in Greenpoint in exchange for taking bribes, including a bit role on Hulu show ‘Godfathers of Harlem’ from the owners of a local film production company. Both the production company owners and Lewis-Martin have pleaded not guilty.

Mamdani pledged on the campaign trail to finish other bike and bus lane projects that were either diluted or killed by the Adams administration, despite being greenlit by the city Department of Transportation.

“For too long our transit decisions in this city have been made off of well-placed phone calls rather than the needs of working people,” Mamdani said Friday. “That ends today.”

Asked when work on the projects would begin, a DOT source told the Daily News that a formal schedule was still in the works, but that the department intended to finish all four projects by year’s end.

The mayor has made buses a center pillar of his campaign, and continued to emphasize improving bus service and making progress on his pledge to establish free buses across the city as mayor — despite the decision-making power largely resting in Albany.

The News previously reported that the Mamdani administration is pushing for a free bus pilot.

“We have continued to have conversations about the importance of making buses fast and free,” the mayor said on Wednesday. “The city has the ability to make the buses fast through the changes we can make through the streetscape. The conversations around free [buses] continue with the governor and with the legislature.”