Halted bus lane and bike infrastructure projects restart in the Bronx and Brooklyn as a new DOT era begins
Projects That Should Not Have Been Stopped Are Starting Again
The Streets Master Plan is a five-year city commitment, adopted in 2019, that requires the New York City Department of Transportation to install 30 miles of bus lanes every year and deliver a comprehensive program of street redesigns for safety and mobility. Under former Mayor Eric Adams, the plan was frequently honored in the breach. Projects were approved, designs were completed, community processes were completed, and then the projects stalled, halted, delayed, or quietly abandoned for reasons that were never fully explained. Mayor Mamdani restarted four of those stalled projects in February 2026, and the announcement was notable for what it revealed about what the previous administration had actually been doing.
The Four Projects and What They Will Deliver
The administration announced four projects that DOT will implement beginning in spring 2026. The first is the Fordham Road bus and bike corridor in the Bronx, one of the busiest and most dangerous commercial corridors in the borough, used by tens of thousands of bus riders daily. The project will install dedicated bus lanes and bike infrastructure along a stretch that has seen multiple pedestrian fatalities. The second is a Tremont Avenue corridor redesign, also in the Bronx. The third and fourth projects are in Brooklyn: a Flatbush Avenue redesign and a bike lane network across the Midwood, Flatbush, and East Flatbush neighborhoods, which will deliver parking-protected bike lanes to Cortelyou and Dorchester roads and standard bike lanes to 14 additional streets. According to the NYC Department of Transportation, the four projects will deliver faster bus service to 130,000 daily riders and improved safety infrastructure for pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers across two boroughs.
Why the Adams Administration Stopped Them
The Mamdani administration has described the stalled projects as the product of political interference with technically justified infrastructure decisions. DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn, a Mamdani appointee who served at DOT earlier in his career from 2005 to 2014, has said that projects were blocked because of politics, not engineering or community opposition. The specific political dynamics are not fully documented in public records, but advocates and Council members who followed the projects noted that several were halted after opposition from outer borough community boards and local elected officials who prioritized parking preservation over bus reliability and street safety. The Adams administration, which maintained strong ties to outer borough car-owning constituencies, repeatedly deferred to those objections.
What Protected Bike Lanes Actually Do
The data on protected bike lanes is unusually clear for an infrastructure policy question. Protected lanes, which use physical separation from traffic rather than painted lines, reduce traffic deaths and serious injuries by approximately 18 percent for all street users, not just cyclists. That figure, consistent across multiple study designs in cities around the world, reflects the fact that protected lanes slow vehicle speeds, increase driver awareness, and restructure traffic patterns in ways that benefit pedestrians as well as cyclists. Transportation Alternatives, which has advocated for the Flatbush and Midwood bike lane network for years, has documented the specific crash history of the corridors being redesigned and the projected safety gains from protected lane installation.
The Bigger Pattern
The revival of the Streets Master Plan is part of a broader pattern in the Mamdani administration’s approach to transportation: move quickly on things within the mayor’s unilateral authority while negotiating with Albany and the MTA on things that require state cooperation. Bus lanes and bike lanes are within DOT’s authority. Free buses are not. Congestion pricing is not. The administration has been notably aggressive in using the tools it actually controls while pursuing the larger structural changes through legislative channels. The MTA’s Janno Lieber called the Fordham Road project a Valentine to the tens of thousands of bus riders who cross that street every day. For advocates who spent years watching projects get approved and then shelved, watching them actually start construction is the more important signal.
