Mayor Eric Adams pledged to create 150 miles of bus lanes in four years in New York City, home to the nation’s slowest buses. Then politics interfered.
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Eric Adams Promised to Be the Bus Mayor. Riders Are Still Waiting.
Mayor Eric Adams pledged to create 150 miles of bus lanes in four years in New York City, home to the nation’s slowest buses. Then politics interfered.
On Fordham Road in the Bronx, buses move slowly because of the heavy traffic.Credit...Thalia Juarez for The New York Times
By Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Ana Ley
Aug. 17, 2023
Early in Mayor Eric Adams’s first term, he rode a B41 bus through Brooklyn to cement his commitment to speed up New York City’s notoriously slow buses, part of
his campaign pledge to be an advocate for bus riders and bicyclists.
Bus riders thought they had their champion. A riders group presented Mr. Adams that day
with a jacket that read “N.Y.C. Bus Mayor” across the back and celebrated his vow to create 150 miles of new dedicated bus lanes in four years.
Then politics interfered.
The city, which has the
slowest buses in the nation — averaging eight miles per hour — is expected to add as few as 10 miles of bus lanes this year. In 2022, Mr. Adams’s first year as mayor, just shy of a dozen miles were added.
The Adams administration is drawing up plans for new bus lanes on half a
dozen more routes, including a three-mile proposal for a busy corridor along Fordham Road in the Bronx. More commuters rely on the bus in the Bronx, per capita, than in any other borough, and 60 percent of households
do not own a car, according to analyses of Census Bureau data by city agencies.
But now that plan seems in limbo, after local businesses objected and one of the mayor’s political allies, Representative Adriano Espaillat, raised doubts.
Richard Davey, the president of New York City Transit who oversees the city’s vast subway and bus system, said in an interview that Mr. Adams had been a “huge transit mayor for us,” citing the mayor’s focus on subway crime and support for discount MetroCards for poor New Yorkers.
But the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is powerless to speed up its buses unless the city creates more bus lanes.
Without urgently tackling projects, “the math won’t add up by the end of the mayor’s four years,” Mr. Davey said on Monday as he rode a Bx36 bus through the Bronx.
Richard A. Davey, head of New York City Transit, said he would paint a bus lane himself on Fordham Road to get the project going.Credit...Thalia Juarez for The New York Times
Transit advocates worry that other bus-friendly proposals could be in jeopardy, such as a major bus-lane plan for Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn that travels through the heart of neighborhoods that Mr. Adams won in 2021. Rita Joseph, the councilwoman who represents Flatbush, says she supports bringing a bus lane to her district.
“I have heard from my neighbors — both for and against, and now as an elected leader it is my responsibility to work with my colleagues to find a compromise that everyone can agree on,” Ms. Joseph said in a statement.
Transportation in New York City
With New York City mired in traffic gridlock and grappling with the impact of climate change, giving priority to buses seems an obvious solution.
London and Beijing have sped up their fleets by giving more street space to buses. But in New York, the voices of drivers and business leaders are often louder than those of the city’s 1.2 million daily bus riders, many of them working-class New Yorkers.
A spokesman for the mayor, Charles Kretchmer Lutvak, said in a statement that the Adams administration had improved commute time on many bus routes, including on
Northern Boulevard in Queens, and “continues to do everything we can to meet the ambitious goals that the mayor laid out in his campaign.”
But as Mr. Adams, a Democrat, gears up to run for re-election in 2025, his administration has been deferential toward powerful interests and local leaders.
One of the mayor’s closest aides, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, has
opposed street redesign projects and overrode the transportation commissioner in February 2022 to allow cars back onto an eight-block stretch in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, reserved for pedestrians.
Ms. Lewis-Martin also raised concerns about two bike lane plans in Brooklyn: one on
McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint opposed by Gina and Tony Argento, influential Democratic donors to Mr. Adams who own a local film production company; and another on Ashland Place in Fort Greene opposed by Two Trees Management, a major real estate firm led by an Adams donor, according to two people who were familiar with the matter.
Mr. Lutvak denied that Ms. Lewis-Martin had meddled in the Ashland Place project and said that it was moving forward. On Wednesday, he said the city was also proceeding with a scaled-back version of the McGuinness Boulevard project, a development first
reported by Gothamist.
Oswald Feliz, a local City Council member who is
part of Mr. Espaillat’s so-called Squadriano political alliance, is fighting the proposal for Fordham Road, which has 85,000 daily bus riders. He, along with other opponents like the Bronx Zoo and Fordham University, fear that the plan would snarl car traffic and push it to surrounding streets because cars would be confined to one lane in each direction.
Less than 6 percent of visitors who drive to the zoo and other nearby attractions use Fordham Road to access it,
Department of Transportation data shows.
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