It’s de Blasio … with the promise of steroids.
Mayor Mamdani chose the third full day of his tenure to announce that he will complete the full safety redesign of deadly McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint — a project that was created under Mayor Bill de Blasio, but watered down by Mayor Adams in a corruption scandal.
By reviving the originally proposed DOT plan, Mamdani said McGuinness Boulevard would be narrowed to one travel lane in each direction between the Pulaski Bridge and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to accommodate a parking-protected bike lane. Currently, only the southern portion of the stretch enjoys the benefits of a road diet; north of Calyer Street, the Adams administration maintained two car lanes in either direction of the dangerous stretch.
“The city committed to a redesign of McGuinness Boulevard … to deliver the safety and improvements that residents had been asking for until the prior administration bowed to big money interests, leaving the project incomplete and Greenpointers still at risk. Today, however, there is a new mayor in City Hall,” he said, evoking the “ax” swung by Robert Moses to widen a then-residential street into the McGuinness Boulevard highway we know today.
“The consequences of Moses’s acts have been measured in the human toll that this four-lane highway has incurred, and in so many other unseen but deeply insidious ways,” the mayor said, name-checking several victims, including Jimmy Battaglia, a boy who was killed by a driver in 1956, shortly after Moses’s grim work. “It is felt when parents don’t feel safe letting their children out of the house to play. It is felt when cyclists go on long detours because McGuinness is simply too dangerous to take the risk. It is felt when people dread going to the grocery store or getting a cup of coffee or just going on an afternoon walk because they fear that they will have to cross the street.”…