Nydia Velázquez

Last week, Reps. Nydia Velázquez and Dan Goldman (among dozens of others) celebrated the opening of the 20-block section of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, running through Sunset Park. It’s a genuine reason to celebrate, and an early and very encouraging indication of the Mamdani administration’s commitment to developing the city’s greenway system.

However, this greenway was promised by Mayor Mike Bloomberg in 2012. Fourteen years, four mayors, and more than a decade of community advocacy separates that promise from the ribbon-cutting.

A child who was in kindergarten when this project was first committed has now graduated high school. Entire neighborhoods have transformed. The climate crisis has deepened. New Yorkers have continued to breathe car exhaust and navigate crumbling bike lanes. And the city has been, in theory, working on it the whole time.

It takes far too long to deliver the active transportation infrastructure that New Yorkers desperately want. Greenways are critical public infrastructure: arteries for daily commuters, corridors for climate resilience, open space lifelines for communities that have too little of it. And right now, across all five boroughs, there are dozens of promised greenway connections sitting in the same purgatory that this key link between Red Hook and Sunset Park just escaped: planned, desired, funded in part — and stuck.

Building a NYC greenway means navigating a labyrinth of agencies — Parks, Transportation, the Economic Development Corp., Environmental Protection, even FDNY — each with its own priorities, timelines, budget cycles, and bureaucratic culture.

A single greenway segment might cross jurisdictions multiple times. That means a simple maintenance gap on a bike path could fall into a gray zone between Parks and DOT, where it doesn’t get fixed because neither agency is sure whose job it is. A waterfront access project might require sign-off from EDC, environmental review from DEP, and capital planning from DOT before a shovel goes in the ground.

Every single one of these agencies is approaching their job with appropriate urgency and focus. The problem is that no one is doing the job of making them work together — quickly, efficiently, and with a clear mandate to finish what the city has started.

That’s why the NYC Greenways Coalition is calling on Mamdani to establish a Greenway Task Force, housed in the mayor’s office and overseen by a deputy mayor with the authority to convene and direct all relevant agencies. Such a taskforce would cut through bureaucratic logjams and hold agencies accountable to schedules that respect the years communities have already waited.

The task force model works. When City Hall decides something is a priority and gives a senior official the mandate and the power to make it happen, things move. The agencies respond. Projects get unstuck. And this 20 block greenway — to the Mamdani administration’s credit, eventually got there. But eventually isn’t good enough when the window for climate action is narrowing and New Yorkers are still waiting for basic infrastructure.

Mamdani has spoken about building a greener, more livable city (call it “Greenway Governing,” an ancillary to Pothole Politics). Here is a concrete, achievable way to make good on that promise — not in 14 years, but now. Many of the greenway connections New Yorkers need require no new legislation and minimal new spending. They require what City Hall alone can provide: coordination, commitment, and urgency.

Celebrate — and more importantly, use — the new greenway. Then ask: who’s the next community that will wait 14 years for something they were already promised? And decide that the answer should be no one.