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Mayor Mamdani has expressed his willingness to tinker with the MTA bus system seemingly ever since he launched his first homemade videos on YouTube. He has had no luck delivering on the “free” bus service front, but he held a press conference in the Fordham section of the Bronx on Friday to discuss “faster” bus service by announcing he wants to create more miles of bus lanes and bike lanes in the city. However, the speech was short on key details, such as where the lanes would go and how they’d be funded. Yet those key details are more than political minutiae; they are the cogs that make a neighborhood a smooth-operating machine. Peter Madonia is the chairman of the Belmont Business Improvement District and a former chief of staff for Mayor Bloomberg; he appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to dissect Mayor Mamdani’s pending “problem to a solution”.
Madonia told host Ken Rosato, sitting in for Larry Mendte, that foisting a new bus lane on Fordham Road would create headaches for several Bronx neighborhoods and the people that live and work in them: “It’s going to force what is now a two-lane road for cars into one lane, stretching all the way back to Pelham Parkway. Pelham Parkway turns into Fordham Road, and it’s not just Little Italy that’s going to be impacted by this. It’s the whole Fordham Road further west, their business district. It’s the (Bronx) Zoo, it’s the (Botanical) Garden, it’s Fordham University, it’s St. Barnabas, all of whom have thousands of employees that come by car. That neighborhood is in a transit desert; the nearest subway is a half-hour walk, either up to Pelham Parkway or the Grand Concourse.”
Madonia questioned whether the results of a bus lane would be worth the minimal return on service improvements: “Bus speeds are now at 9 miles per hour. I don’t know how fast you want a bus to go that’s going to stop every three blocks… And to totally disrupt an entire central business district and cultural center, with a university, with a hospital, for two miles more an hour, is just bad public policy.”
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