ALBANY — Is this a Transportation Committee or a Car Driver Bullshit Committee?
Streetsblog analyzed the 35 bills that the Assembly Transportation Committee passed during this legislative session. Only three would impact pedestrian and bicycle safety in New York City: the helmet law (A590), which would require 16- and 17-year-old Class 1 and 2 ebike users to wear helmets; A1077, which would make dangerous intersections and roadways safer for pedestrians and bicyclists through “complete street design”; and the “New York” stop, which would let cyclists treat red lights as stop signs and stop signs as yields.
What were all the other transportation bills about? Muffler and exhaust inspections, cracking down on speeding in highway work zones, rear occupant alerts, donation solicitations on state highways, window tints, parking violation defenses, and fines for failure to move over for an emergency vehicle.
The committee spends an enormous amount of effort on bills affecting places with populations of less than one million, which is legislative parlance for anywhere but New York City.
Streetsblog checked in on the committee, chaired by Assembly Member William Magnarelli (D-Syracuse) on Wednesday for its last scheduled meeting of the session. It "reported" (or passed) 13 bills — again, nearly all were related to cars, people in cars, people who work near cars, highways, and workers on highways.
Many of the bills on any given Assembly Transportation Committee agenda are about naming portions of highways in honor of people — common and non-controversial proposals that do nothing to improve road safety or even the roads. At that last meeting, other bills included those seeking to expand residential parking in Hempstead and to create special registration fees for vintage snowmobiles (think of the pain and suffering of those vintage snowmobile owners!).
Is it too much to ask that more than just 9 percent of bills passed by Assembly Transportation be focused on making roads safer in New York City, where 42 percent of the state’s residents live?
Apparently it is.
“Reforming hard things like driver accountability takes a lot of focus,” said Jon Orcutt, a former New York City Department of Transportation official under Mayor Mike Bloomberg. “so perhaps there are fewer bills on those types of issues.”
Orcutt said that “Most legislators drive and don’t like driver accountability. A chair with an agenda would cut through the crap and try to get actual things done.”
Magnarelli is not that guy. A few weeks ago, when Streetsblog asked him his priorities for the 2025 session, he cocked his head and said, “Priorities?”
He added that the committee was focused on safety. But he was unfamiliar with a major priority of street safety advocates this session, the Stop Super Speeders bill, sponsored by Sen. Andrew Gounardes (D-Bay Ridge) and Assembly Member Emily Gallagher (D-Greenpoint). Magnarelli's committee did not take up the bill in his committee (though it has passed the Senate Transportation Committee), a possible indication that this key bill is dead for this session.
Nor did Magnarelli’s committee vote on the bill reauthorizing New York City’s speed cameras, which will be required to be turned off on July 1 if the legislature does not act. (There remain several pathways for the bill to pass, as it is expected to do, insiders said.)
Across the Capitol, the Senate Transportation Committee does only a slightly better job, with 17 percent of its passed bills related to street safety. The vast majority of its bills were about cars: endangering highway workers, work zone safety, repair shop disclosures, Elks Association license plates, stretch limousine passenger safety, highway work area speed violation monitoring, and signage for EV charging stations.
But Senate Transportation Chairman Jeremy Cooney (D-Rochester) is as conversant in congestion pricing as in highway maintenance.
“We have a chairman who is from a city, an urban environment,” Sen. John Liu (D-Queens), a transit, streets, and cycling advocate, said of Cooney, “so he understands the needs we have.”
Perhaps it's just foolish to even be optimistic of the role state lawmakers — who drive or are driven everywhere with few exceptions — will pass laws that will make the city safer, because even when they do, they won’t get implemented properly because “broken institutions like the Department of Motor Vehicles and NYPD will still fuck it up no matter what you mandate,” said Orcutt.
So what’s the solution?
“Good leadership in the executive branch,” he said.
Over to you, Gov. Hochul.
Amy's Albany Addenda
The Transportation Committee wasn’t a total loss for safety.
On Wednesday, it passed a bill to create a school speed zone camera pilot in Schenectady, like a mini version of New York’s system.
Under the bill, A7669, nine school zones in the Capitol region city of around 70,000 people would get the cameras, which are triggered whenever a driver goes more than 10 miles per hour above the speed limit.
Due to the advocacy of Families for Safe Streets, New York State passed legislation allowing some local governments to lower speed limits to 25 miles per hour in 2022, but Schenectady did not lower its speed limit to 25 until February 2025. Albany also passed a 25 miles per hour speed limit this year for most city streest, and 20 miles per hour in school zones.
Schenectady Mayor Gary McCarthy, who recommended the pilot camera bill to the state legislature, did not respond to a request for comment by press time, but he told WAMC that Schenectady’s 2,300 average crashes per year are not “cheap events” and add up to "millions of dollars in expenditure." He said fewer crashes could lower insurance rates, an oft-cited rationale of speed camera advocates.
As Streetsblog has previously reported, data show that the vast majority of vehicles caught speeding do not receive a second ticket.
The Schenectady speed camera bill has not passed Senate Transportation Committee, which will not meet again this session, but it may have a chance of passage through the Senate's Working Rules Group. New York Focus has reported that this highly secretive group is the only way to get a bill to the floor that hasn't passed committee.
Stay tuned.
