2009 Council Law Keeps DOT Street Redesigns Stuck in Queens and Beyond

An arcane city law meant to placate sceptics has become a handbrake on New York’s street-safety efforts, with costly implications for mobility and public trust.

On a slushy December morning in Astoria, workers began the unedifying task of dismantling a half-built bike lane on 31st Street. The reversal did not stem from a sudden change in traffic science, but from a little-known City Council law, now entering its seventeenth year as a peculiar relic of the city’s “bikelash” era. Last week, Judge Cheree Buggs of Queens Supreme Court invoked the rule, decreeing that planners at the Department of Transportation (DOT) had failed to comply with statutory consultation requirements. The result: progress, quite literally, ripped out at the seams.

The “major transportation project” statute in question—adopted in 2009 during Michael Bloomberg’s mayoralty—initially sought to mollify wary car owners and local politicians. It requires that any city effort to add bike or bus lanes of more than 1,000 feet be subject to months of public review by community boards and sign-off from a grab-bag of city agencies. What once seemed a reasonable sop to “stakeholder engagement” has matured into a lawyer’s playground, repeatedly restraining the city’s attempts to modernise its streets.

The implications for New York are both immediate and lingering. In the short term, these procedural tripwires quash basic upgrades to street safety at a time when traffic fatalities still outstrip pre-pandemic norms—246 people died on city streets last year, a figure that has stubbornly resisted much further decline since Vision Zero launched in 2014. The 31st Street case exemplifies how a single lawsuit, anchored in outdated process, can stymie even well-established design approaches by wielding delay as a weapon.

Longer-term, the law’s enduring effect is to embolden opposition—especially vocal localities or commercial interests with means to litigate. Another protected bike lane, planned for Court Street in Brooklyn, now faces similar peril after shopkeepers alleged DOT did not conduct adequate consultation, even though officials made repeated presentations to community boards and solicited feedback on-site. For every plan that survives such gauntlets, new threats loom as precedent accumulates and procedural appetites grow keener.

To their credit, city planners have grown adept at surviving this bureaucratic jungle. DOT now performs exhaustive outreach, conducting meetings, posting surveys, and finessing designs to win over wary boards. Still, the system’s internal logic remains perverse: the bodies tasked with reviewing these projects—community boards—tend to skew older, wealthier, whiter, and more car-dependent than the district populations they ostensibly represent. Their feedback, though not strictly binding, can function as a veto by proxy when lawsuits highlight procedural lapses.

This is not simply a case of New York eccentricity. Across the United States, debates rage over the balance between local input and effective governance. San Francisco risks similar paralysis, having recently subjected its own “slow streets” programme to recurring referenda. European cities, meanwhile, have tended to centralise authority for street design, enabling swifter roll-outs. Paris, for instance, added over 60 kilometres of “coronapistes”—pandemic-era bike lanes—within months, a velocity that New York, handicapped by overlapping layers of review, can only envy.

Process as product

One might contend that open-ended public consultation is a virtue, not a vice—the participatory ideal in metropolitan decision-making. Indeed, engaging residents frequently improves the substance and acceptance of individual proposals. Yet here, the machinery of engagement has become detached from its intended purpose and openly subverted. Laws that were drafted to ensure accountability now serve as instruments for delay, if not outright obstruction.

The cost, both fiscal and social, is far from trivial. For each project tied up in litigation—requiring extra design hours, legal representation, and eventually, re-construction—city coffers bleed money better spent on improvements elsewhere. More corrosively, ongoing delays erode public confidence: backtracking on safety projects signals to New Yorkers that streets remain hostage to the loudest voices, not the best evidence.

At the heart of this predicament lies a classic governance tension: who, exactly, should control the evolution of the urban commons? The city’s transportation code still largely entrusts DOT with that power, but statutes such as the “major transportation project” law prise open loopholes for judicial intervention and endless review. For every increment of “community say,” there is an equal and opposite retreat from administrative effectiveness.

The politics are predictably muddled. Elected officials—keen to avoid the ire of entrenched interest groups—rarely hurry to repeal procedures that allow them to grandstand as defenders of local prerogative. The result is a kind of regulatory inertia, in which ambitious citywide visions (more bikeable and walkable streets, regulated curb use, bus lanes with teeth) stall amid thousand-foot increments and committee calendars. Planners adapt as best they can, but time and energy are finite.

Does this bode ill for New York’s future as a transportation innovator? Only up to a point. The city still leads the American pack on many metrics: more daily bus boardings than Chicago and Los Angeles combined, a Public Use Microdata Area with the nation’s highest bicycle mode share, and a dense urban grid well suited for incremental progress. Nevertheless, these procedural speed bumps fritter away momentum and, over the long run, may deter the very reforms that keep the city livable.

If there is a silver lining, it is the mounting recognition among policy insiders and some council members that the law outlived its usefulness well before the latest batch of lawsuits. Jon Orcutt, once DOT’s policy chief and now an advocate at Bike New York, captures the prevailing mood: “That lawsuit would not have prevailed without that legislation.” Repeal may not portend instant utopia, but it would at least lessen the city’s appetite for self-inflicted gridlock.

In New York, even progress must wade through paperwork—but when yesterday’s compromise becomes today’s crisis, it is sensible to recall that governance need not be administered in perpetuity by way of antique grievance. Reform, for once, may be the path of least resistance. ■