Mayor Zohran Mamdani has spent nearly seven months unwinding Eric Adams’s decisions, but one three-block stretch of Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg keeps getting left out, and the city’s own numbers say cyclists are getting hurt because of it.
Asked at a press conference on Monday, July 13, why he still hasn’t followed through on his campaign pledge to restore the protected bike lane that Adams ripped out, Mamdani pointed to unspecified “legal requirements,” according to Streetsblog NYC reporter Sophia Lebowitz, who put the question to him. “We are following up on a lot of the different projects that were either paused or canceled by the prior administration,” Mamdani told Streetsblog. “And we are also looking to ensure that the way that we are going about doing so is one that is both in line with the legal requirements and also in line with ensuring that those projects will be durable.”
Streetsblog reported it was not clear what legal requirements are actually in play. The Department of Transportation installed the protected lane under Adams in 2025, then tore up the protection on three blocks between Willoughby and Flushing avenues after Adams changed course following meetings with allies in the Satmar Hasidic community of Williamsburg, per Streetsblog. Mamdani’s DOT, the outlet noted, could redo the lane at any time.
The removal made the street measurably more dangerous. DOT recorded a 47-percent drop in injuries on Bedford Avenue after the protected lane went in, according to Streetsblog. In the seven months the full project was intact, the city counted 31 crashes that injured nine cyclists. In the seven months after Adams deprotected the three blocks, it counted 34 crashes that injured 13 cyclists, a 44-percent jump in cyclist injuries, though Streetsblog noted the sample size is small. (An earlier version of the Streetsblog story cited an 85-percent increase before a correction to 44 percent.)
Mamdani has otherwise made reversing Adams’s street decisions a theme of his tenure. Since taking office he ended Adams’s push to increase criminal summonses for cyclists who break minor traffic laws, announced plans to finish protected bike lanes on Ashland Place and McGuinness Boulevard, and moved to put a bus lane on Fordham Road in the Bronx, Streetsblog reported. On Monday, the mayor said his administration “believes there should not be a hierarchy of safety,” but stopped short of applying that to Bedford Avenue specifically.
The fight over these particular blocks is political. Activists spent years pushing the city to run a protected lane along Bedford from Crown Heights to Williamsburg, a charge led most recently by Council Members Chi Ossé and Lincoln Restler, per Streetsblog. DOT installed the redesign in late 2024. Satmar leaders including Moshe Indig then pushed for removal on the three-block segment, corralled Adams to a May 2025 town hall, and Adams announced plans to rip out the protection days later, according to Streetsblog.
Indig, an ally of the mayor’s, recently told Streetsblog he was ready to sit down with the city to find a way forward. One political analyst told the outlet the mayor’s hesitation may be tied to Indig’s political value. Mobashra Tazamal, associate director of Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative and author of a report on Islamophobia and Mamdani’s rise, said Indig is one of the few Orthodox Jewish voices willing to defend the Muslim mayor against unsubstantiated accusations of anti-semitism. “Anyone who’s aware of these issues and aware of the campaign and what happened would immediately realize that identity is at the forefront of what is happening,” Tazamal told Streetsblog. “It is so much larger than bike lanes.”
Baruch Herzfeld, whose teenage son Rafe was the lead plaintiff in an unsuccessful lawsuit to stop Adams from removing the lane, told Streetsblog that plenty of people in the Satmar community bike around Williamsburg too. “Zohran Mamdani represents New York City’s future, and he should not manage neighborhood politics according to the old rules of Brooklyn,” Herzfeld said. “The Bedford Avenue bike lane is about recognizing where the community is going, not preserving assumptions about where it used to be.”
When Streetsblog reporter David Meyer asked City Hall about the delay in late June, a spokesman said the mayor “is proud to have restarted many street safety projects that were paused, cancelled or curtailed by the previous administration, and we will have more projects to announce in the weeks and months to come,” adding, “Stay tuned!” Streetsblog’s editorial board says it has pinned its “Mamdani-O-Meter,” which tracks days since the mayor last disappointed the livable streets movement, at zero until he restores the lane. Hell Gate flagged the same open promise in its June 29 Morning Spew newsletter, noting the mayor “bikes all over town” but still hasn’t brought back the northern portion of the Bedford Avenue lane.
