On 5 November, Zohran Mamdani was elected New York’s mayor with greater than 50% of the vote. The primary mayor to obtain over a million votes since 1969, Mamdani’s mandate of reasonably priced housing, transport and childcare landed on hungry ears – a few of which belong to cyclists.
The bicycle made an everyday look within the 34-year-old’s mayoral marketing campaign. In a single viral video, a girl shouts “communist!” as Mamdani mounts a rental e-bike. “It is pronounced ‘bike owner’!” Mamdani quipped again.
He inherited a metropolis with stalled biking infrastructure. Below the earlier Eric Adams mayorship, biking boomed. Between 2023 and 2024, journeys taken by bike within the metropolis elevated by 33%, regardless of Adams’ withdrawal of assist for road redesigns that might have made biking safer for town’s commuters – Mamdani has vowed to choose up the place he left off.
However what do New York’s biking lots need to see from the Division of Transportation underneath Mayor Mamdani?
“Every time a road is repaved, add a protected bike lane to the road,” one Reddit consumer urged within the wake of Mamdani’s election. One other consumer want to see pedestrians penalised for jaywalking into cycle paths – almost all customers needed tighter management for vehicles parked in bike lanes.
“Caveat,” got here on the head of a very lengthy record of proposals, ”Mamdani could be very open to our points, however he can’t do it alone.” And that is the complicated factor about making significant change at a mayoral degree. A lot of town’s funding comes from federal and state governments, which govern alongside town counsel and its myriad boards and authorities.
Whereas Mamdani wrestles with the hurdles of paperwork – and types his counsel to assist clean the best way – he might maybe take inspiration from his Parisian counterpart.
Anne Hidalgo’s 2021 €250 million Bicycle Plan promised to put in 130,000 new parking areas for bikes and over 180 kilometres of cycle lanes by 2026. In September, town launched a 30km/h pace restrict for all automobiles (an identical transfer rejected by the earlier NYC mayor), together with the pedestrianisation of the Champs-Élysées each first Sunday of the month, in addition to the removing of vehicles from 500 extra streets. Hidalgo’s imaginative and prescient is for her metropolis to develop into “100% bike-friendly” by 2026 – for the primary time, bikes outnumber vehicles on Paris’ streets.
If he wants encouraging, cyclists love Mamdani. City infrastructure blogger, Isaac Oates, in contrast knowledge on the transportation strategies of town’s commuters from the American Neighborhood Survey with the areas that voted for Mamdani.
“The end result was clear,” he wrote in a weblog put up, “tracts with increased bike-commuting charges have been considerably extra more likely to assist Mamdani. In different phrases, bike commuters weren’t simply concentrated in Mamdani-friendly neighbourhoods – they have been a part of his coalition.”
Mamdani has already begun to assemble the workforce that can assist him run town’s $115 billion price range and 300,000 municipal staff. Amongst these chosen is the previous NYC transportation commissioner chargeable for town’s bike lane community underneath Mayor Bloomberg, Janette Sadik-Khan – maybe a optimistic transfer in direction of a extra sustainable metropolis?
May New York go the best way of Paris, and develop into – within the picture of its personal biking millennial mayor – a ‘bike-friendly metropolis’? With the weighty expectations of his 8.5 million fellow New Yorkers on his shoulders, time will inform.
However one, instantly implementable request from a passionate Reddit consumer requested one factor of their new mayor: “Please get a cooler bike than a Specialised Sirus Hybrid.”
