Taking Mamdani’s Revolution to the Streets

New York City’s streets have always been gritty. “A person upon arriving at home, after a day’s business, finds himself rich in landed property clinging tenaciously to his clothing, boots, and sometimes to his hands and face,” the New York Times euphemistically observed in 1874.

New Yorkers no longer have to wade through horse manure to get where they’re going (with the exception of those traveling through parts of Central Park). But they face a slew of other dangers and unpleasantries, from reckless drivers to slow buses to double-parked cars and trucks. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will come into office with a unique opportunity to address those challenges with bold transformations of the streetscape. 

Some of the streets policies Mamdani has endorsed, like neighborhood-scale pedestrianizations and a massive expansion of bus lanes, may at first blush seem like radical changes. And in the current climate, they’re likely to fuel no shortage of headlines about pedestrian-vs.-bike-vs.-vehicle culture wars, as previous streetscape changes have done. Anything that’s viewed as a further “attack” on cars will be framed as indulgent and elitist. 

But the history of the city’s streets reveals an ever-evolving urban circulatory system. New technologies and shifting political priorities have previously led to completely new uses of the public rights of way. Today, city streets are long overdue for redesigns that better reflect the needs and wants of contemporary New Yorkers. It would be difficult to cast a more fitting leader for this project than the Citi Bike-riding, bus-taking, halal-cart-dining avatar of New York City street life himself.

The changing role of the street

19th-century streets could be nasty places. Still, they had other things going for them, as historian Christopher Wells vividly describes in the book “Car Country.” Before cars, streets were public spaces akin to what we would today call plazas. Photographs and films of city life from this era show streets filled with vendors, kids playing stickball games and a whole lot of milling about in the middle of the road. There were no lane markers or traffic signals for horse-drawn vehicles and streetcars, which could travel only as fast as the pedestrian throngs would allow. Studying a 10-hour period in 1915 at the corner of Fulton and Broadway, researchers counted approximately 220,000 pedestrians and 10,000 vehicles of all types.

As car ownership increased, the role of the street in city life fundamentally changed. The auto industry understood that cars would never become the dominant mode of transportation if city streets retained their raucous mixture of activity. The industry launched an all-out public relations campaign, buying positive press coverage in newspapers, providing educational material to Boy Scout troops and schools and aggressively lobbying public officials. Their goal: to re-cast streets not as public spaces shared by diverse users and uses, but as thoroughfares for high-speed automotive transportation. Gradually, government and media latched on to the auto industry narrative.

The transformation of New York City into a more car-friendly metropolis is often laid at the feet of Robert Moses. That’s a terrible oversimplification. By the 1930s, in New York and cities across the country, streets were legally and culturally enshrined as the near-exclusive domain of cars, historian Peter Norton recounts in “Fighting Traffic.” Traffic signals, crosswalks and one-way streets were instituted to allow for the more efficient flow of vehicles, consigning pedestrians to ever-narrower slices of the public right-of-way. Newly deputized traffic cops were unleashed to fight the novel crime of jaywalking, derived from the derogatory term “jay,” a country bumpkin who arrives in the city and does foolish things like wandering into the middle of the road. Peddlers were banished from city streets, too, forced to abandon their trades or crowd into indoor facilities like Essex Market in the Lower East Side. 

Where they could, planners widened city streets to make more room for automobiles. On Midtown avenues like Second and Fifth, officials created new vehicle lanes by shrinking the sidewalks. On Park Avenue, the generous median went from a walkable promenade to a purely ornamental strip of green separating the speeding bi-directional traffic. 

The car-oriented consensus on street design held for decades, with a few notable exceptions. Greenwich Village activists led by Shirley Hayes successfully fought to liberate Washington Square Park from cars in the 1950s. Mayor Ed Koch established some of the city’s first bus lanes in the 1980s, which speed trips for riders to this day. He also built a handful of protected bike lanes, only to rip them out a few weeks later after they were mocked by Governor Hugh Carey. 

Restoring the balance

It wasn’t until the new millennium that city leaders began to test out a new approach to street design. As transportation commissioner under Mayor Michael Bloomberg from 2007 to 2013, Janette Sadik-Khan resolved “to restore the balance of the street and replace the vestiges of last century’s planning dogma, which ignored the human experience on that street,” she writes in her memoir, “Streetfight.” Times Square was a particularly egregious example. About 90% of the Crossroads of the World was dedicated to cars and just 10% to pedestrians, despite cars and pedestrians populating the intersection in roughly opposite proportions.

One morning in 2009, Sadik-Khan and her team rolled construction barrels onto the asphalt, marking off a stretch of Broadway as a pedestrian plaza. Instantly, the intersection was transformed. Even as the New York Post howled, commuters had room to breathe, and tourists could gawk at the digital screens overhead unperturbed. 

Nor were automobiles the “losers”: Collisions fell dramatically, and traffic moved slightly faster down Seventh Avenue after the closure as drivers no longer had to deal with a confusing oblique intersection.

Sadik-Khan went on to create new pedestrian plazas at dozens of less famous crossroads, reclaiming 180 acres of city streets for pedestrians and bicyclists. She added hundreds of miles of bike lanes, using parked cars to protect them from traffic. She also redesigned hundreds of intersections to force drivers to make sharper, slower turns and to shorten the distance pedestrians had to cross. 

Many of Sadik-Khan’s interventions began as “tactical urbanism” pilot projects using cheap, temporary materials. This way, she was able to sidestep arduous approval and review processes that surely would have doomed her ambitions. (Sometimes, as with a planned bike lane on Prospect Park West, approval was exceedingly slow nevertheless, thanks to a lawsuit.) Instead, she found that “the transformation of the street itself was the best example and catalyst for its approval.” 

In other words, people voted with their feet. Business boomed in Times Square after Sadik-Khan banished cars. During her tenure, traffic fatalities declined to their lowest level since 1910. By 2013, bike ridership was four times higher than it was a decade earlier. By 2023, the latest year for which citywide data is available, bike ridership in the city had doubled again, to more than 600,000 daily trips.

Much of that growth has come from riders on Citi Bike, which Sadik-Khan helped establish in 2013. Here, again, the transformation of the streets with bike racks and bright blue two-wheelers, deeply contentious at first, initiated a virtuous cycle. “More riders create demand for more biking infrastructure and invite more people to ride and to walk on increasingly safer streets,” Sadik Khan wrote.

After Sadik-Khan

Something fundamental shifted in the city’s conception of its streets following Sadik-Khan’s tenure. Elected officials and the public could no longer view streets as the presumptive domain of cars alone. Subsequent mayoral administrations and transportation commissioners continued the general trend that Bloomberg and Sadik-Khan had set in motion. In fact, bike lane installation accelerated under Mayor Bill de Blasio — whose Vision Zero plan set out to slash pedestrian and traffic fatalities — before declining again during Eric Adams’ term. 

The human-centric street transformations that New York City has undergone have moved the city closer to the original understanding of urban streets as shared public spaces. Yet the transformation has only been partial. Most streets, in most neighborhoods, retain their car-centric character from the middle of the last century. 

Dozens of miles of promised bike lanes and bus lanes remain unbuilt. Adams has cast aside street redesign plans. Anxiety over a dwindling supply of street parking quashed the city’s wildly successful outdoor dining experiment. So much excess road capacity produced by congestion pricing has yet to be reclaimed for people, bikes and transit. 

Mamdani has a chance to swing the pendulum back in the right direction.

All eyes on Mamdani

It would be a fitting mission for our mayor-elect to embrace. As much as any political or pop cultural figure in recent memory, Mamdani is a creature of New York City’s streets. He launched his campaign doing man-on-the-street interviews in the Bronx. Since then, he built his brand by speed-walking, Citi-biking and sampling street food across the five boroughs. The Friday before the primary, he walked the length of Manhattan in his suit and tie.

He’s proposed some boundary-pushing policy proposals in this realm. In his candidate Q&A with Streetsblog, he signaled his support for new pedestrianized neighborhoods, new bus lanes and an expansion of outdoor dining and open streets.

It’s difficult to predict how much political capital he will devote to these ideas while simultaneously seeking to make progress on his signature campaign promises. But his voter base should be a significant factor in his calculus. Mamdani won majority public transit commuter precincts by 29 percentage points, one of the biggest demographic cleavages in his victory over former Governor Andrew Cuomo. He has a historic mandate to prioritize alternatives to the car, should he choose to pursue it. 

There are three general areas that Mamdani has shown an interest in that could cumulatively represent a revolutionary leap in the city’s conception of its streets. 

1. Car-free or “low-traffic” neighborhoods. It’s not as wild as it sounds. Advocacy groups, business improvement districts and local electeds have been calling for such plans for years. Generally, the city’s oldest neighborhoods, with narrow streets and lots of foot traffic, make the most sense for these kinds of schemes. With congestion pricing creating a little bit of breathing room in Manhattan, there’s never been a better time to reimagine some of that space. 

The latest leader to echo the call is Lower Manhattan Council Member Chris Marte, who recently endorsed the pedestrianization of the Financial District. Similar plans have been floated for SoHo/Nolita, Downtown Brooklyn and elsewhere. The Times Square Theater District, the Lower East Side nightlife district, the Williamsburg shopping district, and the West Village brunch district are all logical places for at least part-time pedestrianizations, when crowds are at their peak. 

These concepts come with fraught logistical challenges, including access for delivery vehicles and people with disabilities. But these are challenges that cities in other countries have solved in their own pedestrian districts. There’s also a wide continuum of people-centric street plans ranging from larger-scale neighborhood pedestrianizations,to “low-traffic neighborhood” concepts that eliminate through traffic from narrow side streets. 

In the middle of that continuum is the “pedestrian priority district” taking shape in the Meatpacking District. The neighborhood now features a mix of Sadik-Khanian pedestrian plazas at oblique intersections, temporary shared streets protected by elegant movable planters, and extensive landscaping in the style of the nearby High Line. One could imagine more populist pedestrian streets filled with independent vendors and food carts, or free concerts and events. 

2. World-class bus rapid transit. Making buses free might marginally help improve bus speeds as boarding times shrink, though this is not guaranteed. (On routes in the city’s 2023 fare-free buses pilot, travel times increased as a surge in riders led to longer boarding times. As MTA chair Janno Lieber points out, if people shift from subways to buses to save money, bus service could easily become strained.) The much more effective method of speeding buses is through infrastructure in and on the street. New York City has made some progress with bus lanes and busways in recent years. But the reality is that these lanes go disrespected far too often.  

The best bus rapid transit systems around the world have physically separated rights-of-way, protected by concrete curbs or other barriers. They have dedicated boarding platforms, all-door boarding, limited stopping patterns, and transit priority traffic signals. Many even have level boarding for subway-style, wheelchair-accessible service. 

Mamdani has committed to bringing “true bus rapid transit” to New York, though his campaign platform is relatively light on the details. 

He’ll have a solid template with the Flatbush Avenue bus improvement project, which includes some of the attributes described above. In addition to offering better transit service than typical Select Bus Service routes, it should also work wonders on the streetscape, making the public realm much safer and more pleasant for pedestrians. After shepherding this plan to fruition, Mamdani could tout it as a demonstration project as he rolls out world-class bus service to wider thoroughfares across the five boroughs. Transportation researchers Annie Weinstock and Walter Hook already have a handy list of the most promising corridors. 

3. Comprehensive curb management. Car-free streets and widespread rapid bus transit will inevitably necessitate better curb management. To see why, consider how the Flatbush Avenue redesign will mean that a single double-parked delivery truck will block the sole traffic lane. Or consider the potential demand for ride-hail pickups just outside the future FiDi pedestrian zone. To use road space more efficiently, curb space needs to be used more efficiently, too.

The Adams administration has taken some initial steps in this direction by creating new loading zones, starting a trash containerization pilot and encouraging companies like Amazon to use electric cargo bikes for deliveries. What’s missing is a comprehensive citywide curb management strategy that accounts for the many users and uses of the curb.

Such a strategy could include providing dedicated curb space for taxis, ride-hail cars and delivery companies on every block, while also making them pay their fair share for that valuable resource. It would consider other uses of the curb, including year-round outdoor dining, electric vehicle charging, and secure bike parking. Paid curb parking outside of metered commercial districts, and residential parking permit programs would need to be part of that discussion as well.

Back to the future

Making a revolutionary leap in streets policy — akin to the automobilization of city streets a century ago — will be a difficult political fight, to be sure. But once plans are agreed upon, they can be accomplished cheaper and faster than many of Mamdani’s other priorities. 

Mamdani also has a chance to reset the political conversation around streets policy. Of course, safety is a central motivation, but it’s not the only one. Redesigned streets can better reflect the technological, economic, political and cultural realities of the contemporary city. 

E-commerce and ride-hailing (including robotaxis, which will probably arrive in New York sooner or later) are facts of city life that the transportation system needs to accommodate through both pricing and design. Those ride-hail vehicles have gummed up traffic, while also giving more people a compelling alternative to transit. To compete, buses need to be much faster, which can be accomplished through rapid bus transit.  

Bike ridership is already at historic highs, due in large part to the emergence of e-bikes and bikeshare. Those ridership figures can easily rise much higher, if people have safe places to ride in every neighborhood. 

In the age of online shopping, restaurants and bars are increasingly the lifeblood of commercial neighborhoods. Giving them some extra room to spread out by way of outdoor dining can help drive more foot traffic to corridors that otherwise would feel desolate.

Meanwhile, gathering in public has taken on a heightened significance in an era characterized by so much loneliness and mediation. Better street design can take us back to the future, when streets were true public spaces. We need more places to commune, to protest and just to hang out. Surely, that’s a vision Mamdani could rally the people behind.    

This essay is adapted from chapter 4 of "The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution," copyright © 2025, by Benjamin Schneider by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.