Zohran Mamdani’s Transportation Plans: How Likely Are They to Arrive on Time?

New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s campaign message may have been clouded by detractors calling his transit plans unrealistic, but the Queens lawmaker may have been more practical in his thinking than critics gave him credit for.

Even if Mamdani fails at making buses free — the core plank of his transportation platform —  he will have authority over the streets themselves, speeding buses along and making their routes more efficient.

Mamdani’s biggest immediate impact on transportation will be who he appoints as commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT). (As of press time, that appointment was still up in the air.) 

Some potential names floating around include department veterans Ryan Russo and Nivardo Lopez, as well as Ben Furnas, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a street safety advocacy group.

“DOT is one of those agencies where the commissioner matters,” political consultant Jordan Barowitz told Commercial Observer. “The commissioner makes decisions every day that impact how the city moves. A poor choice can have disastrous consequences. The mayor’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) board appointees, while important, are not operational. I suspect you will see people who can articulate and advocate for free buses.”

Pressure from parties against street revamps was a major factor in political vacillation under the Adams administration and the leadership of current DOT commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez, whose projects include the McGuinness Boulevard redesign in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. 

In 2023 and 2024, DOT struggled to implement street safety improvements along the boulevard by appearing indecisive and siding both with proponents and opponents of bike lanes. The department seemed more inclined to give in to the demands of the former around the time that Adams was indicted for alleged corruption in the summer of 2024. 

In fact, the McGuinness Boulevard bike lane stalemate turned into a corruption scandal of its own when an aide to Adams was indicted for allegedly taking bribes from small business interests involved in the opposition.

The McGuinness Boulevard redesign had little to do with buses or mass transit, but it ignited backlash for a plan to exchange a lane of traffic and parking for bike lanes as part of an effort to slow down vehicles on the hair-raising roadway.

Under Mamdani, it may be a different story as the mayor-elect does not seem interested in squandering the opportunity to transform how New Yorkers move, having outlined his priorities to Streetsblog in a July interview.

“I would focus on pedestrianization and building protected bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes and other street infrastructure, particularly for high foot traffic areas in and around Times Square and the entire Financial District,” Mamdani said at the time. “Connecting approaches into the congestion relief zone should be similarly reimagined. We should also implement busways on all major east-west arteries in Manhattan, building on the success of the 14th Street busway.”

Mamdani spoke of an overhaul at DOT that would beef up staffing at the agency as well as boost pay and remote work options to attract talent. He also plans to create bus lane networks rather than one-off busways like the 14th Street route; a buslane shared with cars can only move about 8,000 people an hour, while a busway on a street with strictly limited private vehicle traffic can move 25,000, he said via Streetsblog

Indeed, the incoming mayor’s biggest transit idea has to do with buses. 

It’s controversial, but the notion of free bus systems isn’t completely outlandish considering the fact that Chapel Hill, N.C., launched a program 20 years ago that made it the first in the nation to offer free transit, with towns like Alexandria, Va., Fayetteville, Ark., Bozeman, Mont. (Streamline), and Breckenridge, Colo., following suit. Boston has three routes in its system where fares aren’t collected. (And during the pandemic paying bus fares was largely voluntary, not just in New York, but in cities like Los Angeles, too.)

Free transit just hasn’t been seen on the scale of a city of 8.4 million people, with daily commuters traveling far beyond city limits.

Polly Trottenberg, a DOT commissioner under Mayor Bill de Blasio and then the U.S. deputy secretary of transportation under President Joe Biden, said the city’s budget has enough stability that promises can reliably be made, but nothing is guaranteed at the federal level, where the longest shutdown in U.S. history recently came to a close.

“New York gets tens and tens of billions of dollars from Washington in a bunch of different ways,” Trottenberg said at a November New York University event discussing the new mayor’s policy proposals. “As we’ve seen in the case of this shutdown, [funds] can often be used as political pawns or put on ice, and, legal considerations aside, it’s pretty complicated to untangle that.”

This may not leave the DOT’s finances as vulnerable as it would for more regional infrastructure projects such as the Gateway Program linking New York and New Jersey via new rail tunnels, or the Second Avenue Subway extension from 96th Street to 125th Street, which has spurred some transit-oriented development.

“One thing I think will obviously be important for this new administration — this is easier said than done — but [having] a great team in Washington who can work with both sides of the aisle and try to get ahead of some of those unknown unknowns,” Trottenberg said. “I think it’s really going to be a challenging time on the federal relations front. We’ve heard it from the president on down.”

In terms of free (and fast) buses, Trottenberg pointed to the busway on 14th Street, which she launched under the de Blasio administration in 2019, and the existing Fair Fairs program in which the city subsidizes reduced fares for qualifying New Yorkers.

“The city can cover the cost of some of the things that it might want to do in the transit space, but it will come out of the city’s budget — either the city has to find the revenue for it or make some tough choices,” Trottenberg said at the Nov. 12 event. “You can find ways to expand that group [that is eligible for Fair Fares]. It gets more complicated to track whose income is where. . . . Therefore there comes a point where you say, ‘Let’s just make it free for everybody, and we’ll get out of the business of trying to do income verification and creating complicated programs to decide who gets what.’”

If buses become free, the subway system could suffer as commuters on a budget shift away from trains to buses. That could take money from the MTA’s coffers while pressuring the agency to meet those shifting demands with investment.

Danny Pearlstein, policy director for transit advocacy group the Riders Alliance, believes that the Trump administration can hurl threats all it wants, but White House officials haven’t been very successful in attacking New York’s transportation programs or funding for major projects thus far. 

“As we’ve seen with congestion pricing, the federal bureaucracy is proving hostile to New York’s way of life and efforts to improve it,” Pearlstein said. “Shutdown politics and [the Nov. 4] election returns show just how unpopular that approach is with Americans generally. New York’s uninterrupted success in court this year is also a critical backstop against threats from D.C.”

The federal government was successful in halting the 34th Street busway in October. The Adams administration complied with a request from the U.S. Department of Transportation out of concern for emergency response units and trucking, another possible example of city leadership buckling on commitments under political pressure. (Mamdani and Trump did have an apparently chummy first meeting at the White House two weeks after the former’s election.)

As chair of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, City Councilmember Selvena Brooks-Powers knows a lot about the topic.

In hearings with DOT over the last four years, Brooks-Powers has been unable to get an explanation for why the Adams administration has not executed its goals, whether it was because of understaffing or if the deadlines in the Streets Master Plan were realistic. 

The five-year plan adopted in 2019 requires the mayoral administration to follow the Streets Master Plan to install 30 miles of bus lanes every year. However, in the last three years of Adams’s administration, Adams and DOT under Rodriguez fell short.

“It needs to be a commissioner that wants to center the voices of the community,” Brooks-Powers said of Mamdani’s DOT pick, “but at the same time understand that they have a responsibility to push forward the priorities that are established in law, such as the Streets Master Plan, and being able to work with the council and ensuring that the agencies are fully staffed and equipped with the resources necessary to be able to deploy bus lanes, to be able to monitor performance and to be able to be responsive in a timely fashion.”

Brooks-Powers’s southeast Queens district would benefit from improved bus transit considering the scarcity of subways. Brooks-Powers said she also hopes there will be greater focus on making the NYC Ferry more affordable for those on the lower end of the income scale, which has not been the case for the water routes since they were laid out by the de Blasio administration.

A better flow of commuters through these transit improvements could provide a major stimulus for the real estate industry.

“I think the access to talent becomes an opportunity for businesses to get people to their jobs quicker and in the office a little more. I think that will be exciting for the private sector,” Travis Terry, founder of consultancy firm Immortal Strategies, said. “If there’s a real focus on utilizing technology for enforcement purposes, to make buses quicker, an expansion of Citi Bike and the improvement of commercial delivery flow . . .  I think there will be a lot of opportunities for the private sector.”

While transit-oriented development is a term typically used for projects at critical rail hubs or where new subways and trains are in the works, Spencer Levine, president of developer RAL Companies, sees buses as equally critical in  considering where to build.

“We’re looking at a project right now in a great neighborhood in Queens where we were excited to see that there were bus stops — an express bus and express bus lanes almost adjacent to the project — because that does make it a transit-oriented development,” Levine said. “It does help in trying to analyze and understand a project and what we need to provide, as far as parking versus what we can leverage off of the [existing transit infrastructure].” 

A bus stop is the next best thing to a subway as the first connection for people getting to work on the train to Manhattan.

“Typically, we’re looking in areas that have a mix of both rail and bus, not only bus transit, but it does make a difference,” Levine said.

New York City may need more mass transit if Mamdani’s housing plan to add 200,000 new units of publicly subsidized, permanently affordable homes to the housing stock over the next ten years holds up, something that could eliminate off-street parking requirements for private developers building housing or commercial space. (Eighty-sixing the parking mandate is something from the Adams administration’s City of Yes Mamdani plans to keep.)

The prominence of transportation as a topic in the mayoral election and the attention to who will be chosen for the role of DOT commissioner are testaments to how important the issues were at the polls, according to Ross Moskowitz, partner of New York real estate at Hogan Lovells.

“You can put someone who clearly has a certain bent based on prior experience — how does that lens show up at a huge agency that is well beyond a Transportation Alternatives focus and has to be thinking much greater than that, and how does it overlay?” Moskowitz said. “That in itself doesn’t bother me, even if someone is coming to the table . . . I think you have to not just give people the benefit of the doubt, but you have to understand that when someone shows up at the head of an agency, they’re wearing the whole city. It’s not a neighborhood-specific lens. It has to be citywide goals and citywide policies taken into account and weighed against everything else.”

Ultimately, the success of the next commissioner will depend on the person’s ability to navigate political tension within communities, which some sources have said boils down to holding firm against opponents of non-car-centric roadway improvements.

“I think that you need someone who has a strong vision, who’s willing to sort of work through the politics of advancing some of these projects, who’s an advocate at heart who really cares personally about making the city safer, about making the city easier to get around in without a car,” Kate Slevin, executive vice president at Regional Plan Association, said.

“There’s been local political pushback to some of the projects, even projects that New York City DOT has advanced,” Slevin said. “The next mayor has an opportunity to continue those projects and address local community concerns or political pushback and say, ‘Look, this is a vision for the city overall. We’re going to implement the vision. I want your input on how we do it, but we need to improve mobility for residents in the neighborhood.’”

Two stalled busway projects under the Adams administration include Fordham Road in 2024 and Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, which was halted suddenly and inexplicably in August just as the paint was about to hit the pavement.

“What we need is a commissioner who would develop, fund and fully implement a Streets Plan 2.0 that moves from an incremental addition of bus and bike lanes to a complete transit network,” Elizabeth Adams, deputy executive director of public affairs for Transportation Alternatives, said. “The impetus behind the law was that we were moving away from these kinds of piecemeal, one-off projects that took all this kind of trench warfare [to complete] to a large-scale interconnected network of transit options.”

In the last year, for example, the Adams administration only rolled out about three of the 30 miles of bus lanes required under the Streets Master Plan, according to Elizabeth Adams.

“We saw this repeatedly [under the Adams administration], and it’s time to get political interference out of our streets,” Adams added. “There’s a lot of economic opportunity at the curb that we should be looking at. We give away free private parking when there are better options for curb usage, and those are things that stimulate the economy through outdoor dining, metered parking and addressing placard abuse.” (There have been perennial allegations of the overissuance and usage of city-issued parking placards by police and officials.) 

Mamdani does have experience in transportation matters, having run a 2023 pilot program with the MTA to study bus fare reductions and eliminations along several routes, which led to the conclusion that ridership increased by 30 to 38 percent.

MTA Chairman Janno Lieber has not exactly been on board with free buses,but he does see an opportunity to work with a transit-oriented mayor to keep fare increases at bay and at least discuss the topic.

“We’re going to work through the issues of the specifics,” Lieber said in a Nov. 18 radio appearance. “But I love talking about more riders and more service and more affordability on mass transit. I think we have a lot in common.”

Mamdani’s proposal to eliminate the fare at the city level is to reimburse the MTA for missed revenue — estimated between $600 million to $1.4 billion per year, depending on who you ask — if it agrees to stop charging a fare. The funds would come from the city’s annual budget. Making that fare cut could have major benefits for hyperlocal economies throughout the five boroughs, according to Riders Alliance’s Pearlstein.

“Free buses are a key affordability measure for low-income workers in many essential sectors including health care, child care, retail and more,” Pearlstein said. “With rising rents, many New Yorkers have moved farther from the subway. Making the bus free will not only ease the commute to work, but also put money into people’s pockets that will circulate within neighborhoods and across the city.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul may have endorsed Mamdani in the general election, but she is not putting her stamp of approval on the free buses proposal, and, as activists said during predecessor Andrew Cuomo’s time in Albany, it’s the governor’s MTA. In other words, the governor is responsible for the fiduciary’s success or failure.

“I cannot set forth a plan right now that takes money out of a system that relies on the fares of the buses and the subways,” Hochul said at the Somos political conference in Puerto Rico earlier this month. “But can we find a path to make it more affordable for people who need help? Of course we can.”

Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.