Good morning! Today is Election Day in New York City!

Polls open at 6 a.m., and will remain open until 9 p.m. You can locate your polling site, confirm your registration status, and view a sample ballot at www.vote.nyc.

StreetsPAC's board has spent the past eight months evaluating responses to our detailed candidate questionnaires, analyzing policy platforms, and conducting in-depth personal interviews with more than 100 candidates. We've endorsed 28 candidates across New York City, for Mayor; Comptroller; Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn Borough President; Manhattan District Attorney; and for City Council seats in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. You can learn more about each of our endorsees below, and the safe-streets and transportation policies they'll champion in office.

We urge you to vote for all the StreetsPAC-endorsed candidates on your ballot! Read on below for our full voter guide; you can click the links below to jump to our endorsements in a particular borough. Council races are listed in numerical order by district.

Read more

Tomorrow is Election Day in New York City!

Polls will be open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. You can locate your polling site, confirm your registration status, and view a sample ballot at www.vote.nyc.

StreetsPAC's board spent the past several months evaluating responses to our detailed candidate questionnaires, analyzing policy platforms, and conducting in-depth personal interviews with more than 100 candidates. We've endorsed 28 candidates across New York City, for Mayor; Comptroller; Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn Borough President; Manhattan District Attorney; and for City Council seats in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. You can get to know each of our endorsees below, along with the safe-streets and transportation policies they'll champion in office.

We urge you to get out and vote for all the StreetsPAC-endorsed candidates on your ballot! Read on for our full voter guide; you can click the links at the top to jump to our endorsements in a particular borough. Council races are listed in numerical order by district.

Read more

New York City's 2021 general election is here!

Early voting begins this Saturday, October 23rd, and continues every day through the following Sunday, October 31st, in advance of Election Day, November 2nd. Polls will be open this weekend from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on both Saturday and Sunday, and times will vary by day during the remainder of early voting. You can locate your polling site, check early-voting hours, confirm your registration status, and view a sample ballot at www.vote.nyc.

Our board has spent the past several months evaluating responses to our detailed candidate questionnaires, analyzing policy platforms, and conducting in-depth personal interviews with more than 100 candidates. We've made dozens of general-election endorsements: for Mayor; Comptroller; Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn Borough President; Manhattan District Attorney; and City Council seats in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. You can learn more about each of our endorsees below, as well as the safe-streets and transportation issues they'll champion in office.

We urge you to get out and vote for all the StreetsPAC-endorsed candidates on your ballot! Read on for our full voter guide; you can click the links at the top to jump to our endorsements in a particular borough. Council races are listed in numerical order by district.

Read more

Early Voting Continues through Sunday

Early voting for New York City's municipal election continues through Sunday, with polls open today until 8 p.m., Thursday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m, Friday from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Polls will then open again on Election Day, Tuesday, November 2nd, from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.

You can locate your polling site, confirm your registration status, and view a sample ballot at www.vote.nyc.

You can also see the complete roster of the 28 candidates StreetsPAC has endorsed in our voting guide, which you can find here. Here's a preview:

Testimony to City Council on Vision Zero, Illegal Parking, Reducing Reliance on Motor Vehicles, and Improving Street Safety

Yesterday, we testified at the New York City Council's joint Transportation and Public Safety oversight hearing on the topics above. We told the Council that Vision Zero doesn't need to be rethought so much as it needs to be implemented properly, with significantly greater emphasis on street design and less reliance on often-lacking police enforcement.

We also urged the speedy passage of Council Member Steve Levin's Int. 2159, which would enable civilian reporting of illegal parking, along with bills that would ban the sale or distribution of license plate covers and decriminalize jaywalking.

You can read our full testimony here.

We testified today at the New York City Council Committee on Transportation's oversight hearing today regarding the shortcomings of the city's Vision Zero efforts, the epidemic of illegal parking, and related topics, and also voiced our support for bills that would prohibit the sale of illegal license plate covers and decriminalize jaywalking. Our full testimony follows below.

Read more

Brad Lander, Comptroller (Open Seat) – Brad Lander has dedicated himself to making streets safer since first winning elective office in 2009. He was an early supporter of the Prospect Park West redesign, and his refusal to waver in the face of some very politically connected opposition to the bike path was instrumental in facing down the years-long legal effort to remove it. In 2016, he patiently listened to constituents complaining about Citi Bike's expansion into his Brooklyn district, while firmly letting them know that the bike-share system was here to stay in a statement that Streetsblog called "pitch-perfect."

Mr. Lander was a vocal proponent of Fourth Avenue's road diet, pushing the Department of Transportation to speed up completion of the protected bike lanes that now span the four miles from Atlantic Avenue to 64th Street. He's fought for better accessibility at subway stations, and to restore the B71 bus.

Most notably, Mr. Lander's biggest safe-streets legislative accomplishment grew from a terrible tragedy that occurred just a block from his district office in 2018. Following the devastating crash that killed two young children at Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, Mr. Lander, in partnership with advocates, developed the Reckless Driver Accountability Act, working deftly and relentlessly to steer the bill through the City Council, overcoming a number of legal and procedural hurdles. What became the Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Program will, once fully implemented, require the city's most persistent dangerous drivers to take a safe-driving class or have their vehicles impounded.

For good measure, Mr. Lander also made sure that DOT quickly redesigned Ninth Street following that deadly crash, adding protected bike lanes and pedestrian refuges.

Mr. Lander has put forth a number of detailed plans for how he would manage the Comptroller's office. He'll oversee the city's capital-projects tracker, which he legislated in the City Council, and is intended to bring transparency and accountability to the billions of dollars the city spends each year on infrastructure. He plans to use the Comptroller's powers to make the financial case for street redesigns, and to create an audit unit dedicated to transit and transportation. He will use audit and contract-registration powers to push for fleet reductions, and track implementation of the Better Bus Action Plan.

For both his track record, and his commitment to promoting progressive transportation policies as the city's next fiscal steward, we enthusiastically endorse Brad Lander to be New York City's next Comptroller.

Eric Adams, Mayor (Open Seat) – Eric Adams, who emerged victorious from a crowded and competitive Democratic mayoral primary in June, has been a reliable ally to advocates of safe and complete streets for more than a decade.

Mr. Adams, who was elected Brooklyn Borough President in 2013 after serving in the State Senate for seven years, has often credited a 2010 walk he took in Park Slope with "20's Plenty" founder Rod King for solidifying his views about the importance of traffic-safety issues.

As New York City's next Mayor, he is determined to revitalize the city's Vision Zero initiative. No elected official has shown up more often for victims of traffic crashes than Mr. Adams since he assumed the Borough President's role, and he clearly takes traffic violence personally. Come January, he'll be in a position to get Vision Zero back on track – with a focus on equity that has at times been missing from the program to date.

He introduced legislation while a State Senator calling for better education of drivers, has supported Neighborhood Slow Zones, and, with an eye to promoting equity in the city's cycling infrastructure, championed the Flatbush Avenue bike path, which now connects Grand Army Plaza and Ocean Avenue.

Mr. Adams's "Moving Forward Together" transportation plan calls for building true Bus Rapid Transit corridors, especially outside Manhattan, focusing first on wide corridors with service roads like Brooklyn's Linden Boulevard, and for accelerating the rollout of electric buses. He's pledged to stripe 150 new miles of bus lanes and busways, citing the success of Manhattan's 14th Street busway as a blueprint.

He also intends to go to bat for improved transit accessibility, such as faster implementation of elevators and ramps in the city's subway stations, reopening of existing-but-closed subway entrances, expansion of the Fair Fares program, and broad implementation of the Freedom Ticket. He's called for the speedy rollout of the city's congestion-pricing program.

A strong proponent of active health and its many benefits, Borough President Adams can often be found riding his bicycle around Brooklyn, and he has for several years hosted a diverse Earth Day ride to call attention to the need for better street designs. In May, following a bike ride with members of our board, he announced his commitment to creating 300 miles of new protected bike lanes within his first four years in office, including bike "superhighways" running under elevated roadways and rail lines.

He intends to expand Citi Bike, and has cited development of a citywide network of electric bike- and scooter-share, especially in underserved areas, as a priority. Mr. Adams has also called for significantly increasing safe and secure bike-parking options for New Yorkers. He's a champion of the Harbor Ring, and will advocate for improved bike access on state-managed bridges beyond the Verrazzano-Narrows. He has a vision of a city in which it's safe for kids to bike to school.

Borough President Adams has also spoken frequently on the campaign trail about inequity in the city's built environment, and he plans to expand the Open Streets program, especially in lower-income communities of color. He's embraced Transportation Alternatives' 25x25 Challenge for reallocating the city's public space from cars to people, again with an eye to underserved corners of the city.

Mr. Adams has also talked often about his experience in European cities, and the creative ways in which they allocate street space and promote alternatives to driving. New York City has fallen behind a number of its peers when it comes to smart street design, but as Mayor, Eric Adams will have the opportunity to lead our transformation into a pedestrian-, bike-, and transit-friendly city that is the envy of the world.

As we head into the holiday weekend, we wanted to provide a brief update on where things stand with the results of the June 22nd primary election.

As many of you surely know, the New York City Board of Elections released preliminary results of in-person ballots on Tuesday, only to rescind those results a few hours later when it was discovered that the tally included some 135,000 test ballots that it had failed to clear from its system.

The corrected tally, released on Wednesday, showed Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams with a lead of 14,755 votes over StreetsPAC's endorsee, Kathryn Garcia, with about 125,000 absentee ballots still to be counted. An initial tally of those absentee ballots, which had to be received by NYCBOE by June 29th, will most likely be reported on July 6th.

Garcia gained votes steadily as other candidates were eliminated in the ranked-choice process, edging Maya Wiley by just 347 votes in the eighth round of rankings.

So the race still appears to be a contest among Adams, Garcia, and Wiley, with a fair possibility that absentee ballots will alter the outcome. We'll know more next week.

In the other competitive citywide primary, City Council Member Brad Lander holds a lead of about 21,000 votes over Council Speaker Corey Johnson in the race for Comptroller (Public Advocate Jumaane Williams easily won his primary with about 70% of the vote).

Manhattan District Attorney's Race

With runner-up Tali Farhadian Weinstein having conceded, StreetsPAC-endorsed Alvin Bragg has won the Democratic primary for Manhattan District Attorney (as a state office, the primary for DA was not conducted with ranked-choice voting). Given the overwhelming registration advantage that Democrats have in the borough, Bragg is almost certain to be the next Manhattan DA. We're proud to support him, and congratulate him on his victory.

City Council Races

The Board of Elections has not released any tally of ranked-choice results in City Council races to this point, and a number of races in which we endorsed are very close after the preliminary count of in-person votes. So again, we'll have to wait until next week for clarity.

Have a safe and enjoyable holiday. And no, we have not endorsed in the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating contest.

Today is Primary Day in New York City, and polls will be open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.! If you're registered with a political-party affiliation, you are eligible to vote in your party's primary.

We spent the past several months evaluating responses to our detailed candidate questionnaires, analyzing policy platforms, and conducting in-depth personal interviews with more than 100 candidates. We've made dozens of endorsements: for Mayor; Comptroller; Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn Borough President; Manhattan District Attorney; and City Council seats in all five boroughs. You can learn more about each of our endorsees below, as well as the safe-streets and transportation issues they'll champion in office.

This primary is likely to continue the trend of low-turnout elections, which means that your vote for a candidate who supports safe, complete and livable streets, and reliable, efficient and affordable public transit, could make a real difference in a close race.

To check your voter-registration status, find your polling location and hours, see a sample ballot, and learn more about Ranked Choice Voting, please visit vote.nyc. Remember that under the new ranked choice system, you may rank up to five candidates in a particular race in your order of preference.

We urge you to get out and vote for the StreetsPAC candidate of your choice! Read on for our full voter guide. Click the links at the top to jump to our endorsements in a particular borough. Council races are in numerical order by district.

Read more