Photo: Adam Gray/Bloomberg/Getty Images
One of the first things Zohran Mamdani did in his inaugural week as mayor was to pave over the Big Bump at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge. The bump, notorious for launching cyclists into the air if they hit it too fast, is now gone. This is a tiny drop of asphalt in a big city but one that may signal the start of a new era for cyclist safety.
When Eric Adams took office, he too made a show of being a bike lover, riding a Citi Bike to meetings on his second day in office and promising to build 300 miles of protected bike lanes by the end of his term. But then he and top aide Ingrid Lewis-Martin spent four years ripping up protected bike lanes and sabotaging planned road diets — perhaps most infamously the McGuinness Boulevard bike lane, with Lewis-Martin charged for allegedly accepting a bribe (and a film cameo) to stop it. In the end, Adams fell 210 miles short of his promise.
Mamdani spent his first week in office undoing much of what Adams had wrought. On his third day, he and new DOT commissioner Mike Flynn announced they would be installing the original McGuinness road diet, reversing Adams’s reversal. The administration also announced it is working to finish Astoria’s 31st Street bike lane, a project that a judge halted in part because Adams hadn’t gotten the required certification from the FDNY and other agencies. “We are beginning the mandatory consultations and will issue the notices needed to restart the project, while also filing a notice of appeal of the court’s decision,” Flynn said in a statement. Over the weekend, Mamdani also said he would direct the DOT to “daylight” city streets, a commonsense safety measure that would keep intersections clear of visual obstructions like parked cars (a promise the Adams administration made but then backtracked on).
The Williamsburg Bridge Big Bump repaving was more than a photo op — the city is set to begin a full $70 million redesign of Delancey Street. Of course, there’s the rest of Mamdani’s ambitious transit agenda to get done, and we’ll have to see whether Mamdani carries through on his opposition to NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch’s heavy-handed approach to dealing with cyclists who run red lights or go the wrong way. But for the first time in a while, it feels as if the city isn’t at war with its cyclists.
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