On Tuesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani released a list of 100 ideas to make New York City streets safer and more livable, especially for pedestrians and cyclists.
These include pedestrian-only zones across the city, installing speed limiters inside the cars of the city's most dangerous drivers, daylighting 1,000 intersections, imposing new tolls on large trucks, and lowering the speed limit to 20 mph in parts of the city.
But the Mamdani administration gave very few specifics on any of these key initiatives, which were couched as "policy commitments." Where would the pedestrian zones be located? They couldn't say. When would construction happen on the daylighting of a thousand intersections? No answer. How long will it take the City to spin up the reckless driver program? It's not clear.
And the mayor's new Vision Zero plans also completely sidestepped the area of enforcing traffic laws for drivers, which is something the police department has apparently given up on. NYPD enforcement of moving violations like running red lights and speeding has dropped 41 percent since 2019. Meanwhile the NYPD continues a seemingly unrelenting crackdown on delivery cyclists and those who commute on two wheels—moving violations for two-wheeled devices are up 228 percent since 2019, according to NYPD statistics.