New York City's Mayoral Hopefuls Weigh In On Transportation

Here's a handy graphic you can use to judge for yourself which candidate understands and will do the most for your commute

I made a graphic. Please do not share this without all of the caveats below!

Here’s my take, as of early May 2021, as to how each of our mayoral candidates will address 7 key transportation and infrastructure issues I care about. Here’s some caveats:

• I did my best to capture what each candidate has expressed on his or her platform. I also included takeaways from TransitCenter’s forum—one where Ray McGuire either was not invited or did not take part and one which Kathryn Garcia showed up late (for which I’m sure there was a good reason).

• These are my opinions and I did not really include lots of nuance in the assignment of Great/Meh/Bad. I have a much longer article (linked above, again) where I dive deep into each candidate’s plan. Instead, this is for you to use as a shorthand guide.

• Notice that there’s no specific section labeled “equity” or “environmental justice.” No, I didn’t forget this and I’m extremely interested in how we spend money and effort going forward to ensure we are centering marginalized members of our communities. But equity is not a separate goal and justice is not a concurrent need. These goals need to be baked into the fabric of our candidates’ platforms.

• If I missed something, I am glad to take an L and fix it. I did my best to go through each candidate’s stated positions twice. Occasionally, it was not obvious where I might have found a candidate’s position on East Side Access, say, or what we’re going to do with Sunnyside Yards.

Here’s a legend: