On 5 November, Zohran Mamdani was elected New York’s mayor with more than 50% of the vote. The first mayor to receive over one million votes since 1969, Mamdani’s mandate of affordable housing, transport and childcare landed on hungry ears – some of which belong to cyclists.
The bicycle made a regular appearance in the 34-year-old’s mayoral campaign. In one viral video, a woman shouts “communist!” as Mamdani mounts a rental e-bike. “It’s pronounced ‘cyclist’!” Mamdani quipped back.
He inherited a city with stalled cycling infrastructure. Under the previous Eric Adams mayorship, biking boomed. Between 2023 and 2024, journeys taken by bike in the city increased by 33%, despite Adams’ withdrawal of support for street redesigns that would have made cycling safer for the city’s commuters – Mamdani has vowed to pick up where he left off.
But what do New York’s cycling masses want to see from the Department of Transportation under Mayor Mamdani?
“Whenever a street is repaved, add a protected bike lane to the street,” one Reddit user urged in the wake of Mamdani’s election. Another user would like to see pedestrians penalised for jaywalking into cycle paths – nearly all users wanted tighter control for cars parked in bike lanes.
“Caveat,” came at the head of a particularly long list of proposals, ”Mamdani is very open to our issues, but he can’t do it alone.” And this is the complex thing about making meaningful change at a mayoral level. Much of the city’s funding comes from federal and state governments, which govern alongside the city counsel and its myriad boards and authorities.
While Mamdani wrestles with the hurdles of bureaucracy – and forms his counsel to help smooth the way – he could perhaps take inspiration from his Parisian counterpart.
Anne Hidalgo’s 2021 €250 million Bicycle Plan promised to install 130,000 new parking spaces for bikes and over 180 kilometres of cycle lanes by 2026. In September, the city introduced a 30km/h speed limit for all vehicles (a similar move rejected by the previous NYC mayor), along with the pedestrianisation of the Champs-Élysées every first Sunday of the month, as well as the removal of cars from 500 more streets. Hidalgo’s vision is for her city to become “100% bike-friendly” by 2026 – for the first time, bikes outnumber cars on Paris’ streets.
If he needs encouraging, cyclists love Mamdani. Urban infrastructure blogger, Isaac Oates, compared data on the transportation methods of the city’s commuters from the American Community Survey with the areas that voted for Mamdani.
“The result was clear,” he wrote in a blog post, “tracts with higher bike-commuting rates were significantly more likely to support Mamdani. In other words, bike commuters weren’t just concentrated in Mamdani-friendly neighbourhoods – they were part of his coalition.”
Mamdani has already begun to assemble the team that will help him run the city’s $115 billion budget and 300,000 municipal employees. Among those chosen is the former NYC transportation commissioner responsible for the city’s bike lane network under Mayor Bloomberg, Janette Sadik-Khan – perhaps a positive move towards a more sustainable city?
Could New York go the way of Paris, and become – in the image of its own cycling millennial mayor – a ‘bike-friendly city’? With the weighty expectations of his 8.5 million fellow New Yorkers on his shoulders, time will tell.
But one, immediately implementable request from a passionate Reddit user asked one thing of their new mayor: “Please get a cooler bike than a Specialized Sirus Hybrid.”
