Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants fast, free buses, and his newest move tells you he is serious about it. On June 2 he recommended Janette Sadik-Khan and Melanie Hartzog to fill two vacancies on the MTA board, the body that actually runs the subways and buses. The catch is the part that does not make the press release: the mayor only gets to recommend four of the board’s seventeen voting seats, and Albany controls the rest.
Start with the pick everyone noticed. Sadik-Khan ran the city’s Department of Transportation under Mayor Michael Bloomberg from 2007 to 2013 and is now an adviser at Bloomberg Associates. To the transit-advocacy world she is close to a celebrity: Streetsblog credits her with installing the first parking-protected bike lanes in North America, launching Citi Bike, and pedestrianizing Times Square. Picking the person most associated with redrawing city streets for buses and bikes is the clearest signal yet that buses, not just trains, are where Mamdani wants to spend his energy.
Hartzog is the less flashy and arguably more telling choice. She was budget director and then deputy mayor for health and human services under Bill de Blasio, where she ran the city’s COVID-19 response, and she has led the child-welfare nonprofit The New York Foundling since 2022. That is the money-and-management side of the table, the person who knows how the city’s budget actually moves.
Here is where the ambition meets the wiring. The MTA board has seventeen voting members: six appointed by the governor, four by the mayor, and one each by the county executives of Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester. The governor, not the mayor, directly nominates five members plus the chairman, and every board member is confirmed by the New York State Senate. Even these two picks needed State Senate confirmation before the legislative session ended that week.
So the bus revolution Mamdani ran on runs through a board he does not control. His existing appointees, former City Planning director Dan Garodnick and Community Service Society chief David Jones, will keep their seats, which means even with Sadik-Khan and Hartzog confirmed, the mayor commands four votes out of seventeen. The MTA’s budget and its capital plan are largely Albany’s call. Mamdani said his picks would help ensure the city gets fast and free buses and that riders have strong advocates at the table. Advocates, yes. A majority, no.
That is the real story of these appointments. A mayor who campaigned on transforming how New Yorkers get around just put one of the most aggressive street reformers in the country on the MTA board, and she will arrive as one voice among seventeen on a board where the governor holds more cards. Whether free buses happen is less about who Mamdani names and more about whether Albany goes along.
You can watch this play out in public. The MTA board meets in open session and its committee meetings are where service and budget decisions get hashed out before they are voted on; the agendas and times are posted on the MTA’s site. And because Sadik-Khan and Hartzog still need the State Senate to sign off, your state senator is the person to call if you have something to say about who steers the system you ride.
Featured image: Metropolitan Transportation Auth / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
