Gov. Hochul’s State DOT Bike-Ped Plan Is All Process, No Promises: Advocates

Advocates from across the state are calling foul on the Hochul administration’s efforts to update the state Department of Transportation’s guidelines for creating safe streets for cyclists and pedestrians — saying the agency’s new roadmap lacks the urgency needed to tackle issues of life and death on state-owned streets.

State DOT’s “Active Transportation Strategic Plan” marks the agency’s first update to its approach to walking, biking, wheelchair accessibility and micromobility in 28 years — but its roadmap for how the state designs, builds and maintains active transportation infrastructure on its roadways has no timelines or even benchmarks for implementation, advocates said.

“As currently described, the plan is focused primarily on procedure and process with no or limited commitment to verifiable actions,” groups including Parks & Trails New York, the New York Bicycling Coalition and Transportation Alternatives wrote in their letter to state DOT Commissioner Marie Therese Dominguez. “As described, the [Active Transportation Strategic Plan] does not commit to a fixed review cycle, measurable objectives, or public reporting sufficient to track its implementation, leaving the public with no visibility on progress.”

Representatives of pedestrian and cyclist advocacy organizations signed on from six of the state’s 11 DOT regions.

“Commitments to addressing structural changes to the agency, including staffing, to make safe, connected active transportation a core function of the state highway system were also missing from the presentation,” the leaders wrote. “While the data gathered as part of the plan illustrates the problems New York faces, measurable, accountable actions to address them have yet to be seen.”

In preparing the plan, which will shape how state DOT prioritizes projects and updates its design manuals for years to come, state DOT relied on two years of crash data, demand analysis and stress-level mapping across the state highway system.

But the state has not made any of the state available to the public, and held only four meetings for members of the public to weigh in one the document. In the letter, the groups also expressed disappointment in the limited public engagement process.

“The public cannot hold NYSDOT accountable to data it cannot see,” they wrote.

The letter highlight to a trip generation map, crash data, a vulnerable community analysis and an internal planning tool the department calls “AT2” as work that should be released publicly rather than kept in-house — echoing what advocates have said about DOT’s public process on other projects, which often keeps community members at arm’s length from the department’s internal analysis until late in the game.

That AT2 tool was on full display during a Sept. webinar, the fourth in a series of public meetings the agency held in Albany, Rochester and on Long Island.

During the call, Deb Nelson, director of state DOT’s Office of Policy, Planning and Performance, walked attendees through a GIS-based system that layers crash data, bicycle level-of-stress scores and trip-generation potential onto the state highway network to flag where investments are most needed.

The analysis identified roughly 500 miles of state roadway and 1,800 intersections that qualify as high-risk for pedestrians and cyclists, and identified 52 “greenway communities” that could benefit from better connections to networks like the Empire State Trail.

But Nelson was explicit about who gets to use it: state employees only.

“This is an internal-only tool for New York State DOT staff, but it does help our staff to really look at some of the existing conditions, prioritize needs, and to help select and scope those projects,” she told attendees.

That’s precisely the arrangement advocates want changed.

Their letter calls on the department to “publish the data and analysis used in the creation of the Active Transportation Strategic Plan, and publish a public-facing version of the ‘AT2’ tool,” alongside a searchable map of active transportation facilities on state-owned property and a public version of the CLEAR crash database modeled on the agency’s existing traffic-volume mapper.

State DOT needs to staff up to fulfill the vision set out in the proposed plan, they said.

“New York currently has no defined, published set of roles and responsibilities for its State and Regional Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinators, and responsibilities related to active transportation are layered onto staff already responsible for traditional highway engineering,” the groups wrote.

The signatories pointed to California’s Department of Transportation’s Complete Streets Branch, which maintains dedicated staff and a standing technical advisory committee, as the kind of institutional model New York should emulate. They want DOT to put an executive at the Assistant Commissioner level or above in charge of the work.

The staffing and transparency gaps are evident in DOT’s handling of major projects such as Route 9 in Westchester County and Route 17 in Orange and Sullivan counties. On Route 9, advocates have criticized the agency’s draft plans for falling short on walking and biking. On Route 17, meanwhile, the state is pursuing a $1.3-billion highway expansion even as questions remain about its underlying traffic and safety assumptions.

During the webinar, Nelson told attendees plainly that the Active Transportation Strategic Plan carries no regulatory weight.

“This is not a federally or state required plan. New York State DOT is doing this to help guide their future actions,” she said, adding that “it does not identify specific projects for future funding, and it does not provide asset-specific funding for active transportation.”

For advocates, that voluntary framing is exactly the problem — a plan built on real data but with no mechanism for action.

David Krulewitch, a former state DOT employee who helped develop the Request For Proposal issued to consultants tasked with the Active Transportation Strategic Plans Development, said that DOT’s actions thus far fly in the face of its initial goals in creating the plan.

The 2022 RFP stated that public outreach efforts should take place in all 11 DOT regions in New York, with special attention paid to New York City, the de facto cycling capital of the state. Instead, there were three public meetings in Rochester, Hauppauge and Albany, and a webinar.

State DOT should go back to the drawing board and focus more on engagement with the public, advocacy groups and local transportation agencies to make sure the plan actually meets the needs of New Yorkers, Krulewitch said.

“It has now been nearly five years since the RFP was released, and we still do not have an active transportation plan. That is particularly disappointing given what could have been accomplished during this time,” Krulewitch told Streetsblog. “The entire Empire State Trail was built in four years, and NYS DOT could have used this period to significantly expand New York’s trail network and advance critical pedestrian safety initiatives.”

For its part, DOT has framed the plan’s slower, voluntary rollout as a matter of building buy-in rather than dragging its feet.

“It’s important though that you realize that change takes time and it takes patience and it takes partnerships,” Nelson told attendees at the September meeting, noting the department expects to fold feedback from the meetings — including responses gathered through live Mentimeter polling — into a finalized plan this fall.

Whether that timeline leaves room for the 60-day public comment period on a published draft that advocates are demanding remains an open question. The letter frames the stakes in blunt terms: “As NYSDOT finishes a record $34 billion 5-year capital plan, communities across New York State are still without the essential active transportation infrastructure to get to work and school safely.”

Reps for state DOT did not immediately respond to a request for comment.