Episode 157: Political Courage with Brad Lander

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Doug: This is The War on Cars. I’m Doug Gordon, and I am here in the studio as always with my cohost, Sarah Goodyear. Happy September.

Sarah Goodyear: Happy September. It’s the re-entry. I love it.

Doug: You can tell it’s September in our neighborhood because the traffic is back.

Sarah: That’s right. The school drivers are back. It’s sad, but there are also a lot of nice kids and parents walking on the street.

Doug: That is adorable.

Sarah: Biking. And it’s lovely. I love that.

Doug: So real quick, we are on Patreon at Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod. You can also pre-order our book, which is coming in October. It’s called Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile. It’s available wherever books are sold. And we’re also going on tour.

Sarah: That’s right. You can go to LifeAfterCars.com and find out if we’re coming to a city near you. And we are adding new cities all the time.

Doug: And big news. We just announced our guest for our show in Brooklyn at the Bell House.

Sarah: Oh, yes.

Doug: Former New York City DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

Sarah: Yes. Like a superstar special guest. I’m so excited.

Doug: Rock star of the livable streets movement. Speaking of which, I think we have one here.

Sarah: We do indeed.

Doug: Brad Lander is the 45th comptroller of the City of New York. He has held that position since 2022. Before that, he was my New York city council member. And that was a position he held—not just mine, but a lot of people’s …

Sarah: [laughs] Yes.

Doug: … for 12 years in the city council. He co-founded the Progressive Caucus. He represented, like I said, me and my neighborhood, including the neighborhood we’re sitting in here in Brooklyn. A lot of you may know him as a candidate for mayor during the Democratic primary that just wrapped up in June. And Brad really distinguished himself in a very crowded field with his detailed platform, all of his policies, as well as his cross-endorsement of Zohran Mamdani, who eventually won the race. Also in June, mere days—I think it was a week out from the primary day—Brad was escorting a man out of an asylum hearing down in lower Manhattan when he was arrested by federal agents. And that became big news, of course. Brad is the highest ranking Jewish elected official in the city of New York. And it was a really shocking moment on, I guess, our country’s road to autocracy.

Sarah: Yeah. I have to say, though, I heard that Brad got arrested. I saw the call to action to go to Foley Square to show support. And I was in Foley Square with hundreds of other people when Brad was released and spoke to the crowd. And I have to say, it was an incredibly moving event and day in general, because there were just so many people there who had just run there out of a sense of urgency, the way that when bad things happen in New York, I feel like New Yorkers are very, very good at springing into action to try to repair and support and make things right. And so then when you came out, it was just—it was just really inspiring. And it’s a personal thing for me, too, because my grandfather, who is Italian, was arrested under the Alien Enemies Act in 1942, and was processed right there, that same court complex. And then he was taken to a cell on Ellis Island and interned for six months without access to counsel. So, anyway …

Brad Lander: Wow!

Doug: I think we should officially welcome Brad Lander to The War on Cars.

Brad Lander: All right. Well, I am thrilled to be here. Thank you for the invitation. I have wanted to join the war on cars for quite some time now.

Doug: You’ve been a member for a long time.

Brad Lander: So honored to be doing it. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you for being there that day at Foley Square. I will say that ‘Free Brad Lander’ signs were not something I ever imagined I would see—or really want to see again. But it felt powerful to have all those people out there saying, for all the things that are going on in the world, for all the ways this country is creeping toward fascism, New Yorkers know better, and we show up for each other. You know, I had tried to do that that day. Edgardo, who I was accompanying, and lots of other folks that I’ve been with since have been back personally pretty much weekly since then, are our neighbors, are New Yorkers. We show up for them. Thank you for showing up for me, and wow, to hear that story about your grandfather is pretty powerful. But that’s what New York City is all about, like, at this moment, with creeping authoritarianism. Fighting back by getting out in the streets and insisting on inclusive, multiracial democracy, by showing up for our neighbors is what we’re called to do.

Sarah: And I do think courage is required, and it’s nice to have you on. Not too many elected officials actually have the courage even to come on The War on Cars because they think perhaps that the New York Post will seize on that as evidence of their “radical tendencies.”

Brad Lander: They will. So they’re not wrong about that.

Sarah: Right. [laughs]

Doug: Look, that’s what we’re hoping will happen, right?

Sarah: But you’re here for it, so we really appreciate that.

Doug: Well, I wonder, Brad, like, have you reached a new stage of your political career where I don’t want to say you have no Fs left to give, but because you care very deeply about the stuff that you’re doing, and even though you—you know, I was recently saying to someone that, like, I don’t think a person has lost an election and come out as much of a winner as you did, because if you didn’t already have the respect of so many New Yorkers—which you do—so many people saw something that I know about you, which is your political courage, your ability to stand up for people in different coalitions, your ability to reach across different demographics and say, “We’re all one New York, and we do better together.” But have you sort of reached a new stage where you’re like, “Yeah, I’ll go on The War on Cars. I’ll do anything now.”?

Brad Lander: Absolutely. I mean, I would have—I think I would have been willing to come on The War on Cars earlier.

Doug: No, I’m just kidding.

Brad Lander: But I also think it’s fair to say, you know, I’m in my “I don’t give a fuck phase.”

Doug: All right, you swore. Not me. But that’s fine.

Brad Lander: Yeah. Well, the fact that Stephen Colbert not just had Zohran and me on earlier that week, but then let me say “Good fucking riddance to Andrew Cuomo” the next night was maybe the—you know, one of my favorite media appearances. But taking your question seriously. Look, when you do something like run for mayor, you worry a lot. You are thinking, “Can I control my message? I’ve got a set of things I want to say. What will the implications of this be?” And yes, your head goes to “Okay, yes. I, of course, want more livable streets and fewer traffic crashes, and people to be able to have outdoor dining and open streets, but I don’t want the car owners to think I’m coming actually to declare war on them.” And you spend a lot of time with your comms team in your head trying to calibrate in all those directions.

Brad Lander: And it helps a lot after going through all of that to see that what actually people respond to best is when you are able to be just your most honest, clear self and people could figure out who you are. And the fact for me that I spent millions of dollars trying to get people’s attention to a long track record of working to make city better, a whole bunch of detailed policies without a whole lot of success at drawing attention to me or to those things, but then down the stretch, when an arrest, just doing the simple thing of showing up to accompany immigrant New Yorkers who deserve due process and the rule of law, going after Andrew Cuomo on the debate stage for all the reasons I thought he would be a disaster in ways that showed yeah, being unafraid, but also just being willing to throw and take some punches, and then to do the cross endorsement and say yeah, implicitly I see it’s not that likely to be me, but I care more about the city and its future, that did put me in a space of saying what’s best to be able to do is just go out there and be who you are. And that really is both more fun, and people respond to it a lot better.

Doug: The fun part for me, even as someone who knows you but was experiencing this just as a New Yorker, was when you did that cross endorsement—and this happened before, but the love that you both have for the city, I don’t think we’ve seen a campaign based on “This is a great city and it can be better.” You know, Eric Adams ran on “New York City is a hellhole of crime and only I can fix it.” Andrew Cuomo’s pitch is like, “The city is terrible. I don’t even live here, and I’m telling you that it’s terrible.” But you guys just have this, like, buddy-cop energy that I really loved, especially in the cross-endorsement video where you were just ordering from a—you know, what’s more New York than ordering from a street—a food cart? I loved it.

Brad Lander: Thank you. Yeah, we felt it, which was nice. Now I’ve said this before, but I really did decide to do the cross endorsement in a more, like, ranked choice math sort of way—don’t want Andrew Cuomo to be mayor. Our voters have to—we gotta add our voters up to make sure that doesn’t happen. And I give credit to the—you know, the staffer, actually a lifelong resident of Park Slope, somebody born not too far from where we are, young staffer Arden Dressner Levy, who put the script together. And when I read that script, I was like, this is perfect. Like, it really does convey that love of New York. And it’s sad that our politics is at a point where people are so used to ego-driven, selfish, sour—you know, I thought it was pretty significant that on election day, both Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams went out of their way to let everyone know they were the only ones that they were voting for, right? They weren’t gonna have two, three, four or five. And for us to say no, there’s a vision of this city we love and share that so many New Yorkers do. And yeah, of course you’re frustrated with how unaffordable things are, or with ways that city government isn’t delivering and how it needs to. Absolutely. But what drives here is a love of this place.

Sarah: Well, I was gonna say, you know, I think that it can be so hard to build coalitions and to find solidarity. And I guess I wanted to ask you about that, because I think we’re at a point where it’s just incredibly important to figure that out, and who can you be in coalition with? And it’s not gonna be people that you agree with on every single point. So how do you approach finding people that you can be in coalition with, build solidarity with? What is that made of? What has to underlie those alliances?

Brad Lander: Yeah. I’m trying to decide whether to go from the love or go from the things we oppose. I guess I’ll start from the love, just because it’s a nicer place to start, even though being honest, like. this is a moment. You know, when people say “popular front,” right? Like, that’s maybe like this classic political—well, now I’m starting from the negative.

Sarah: [laughs]

Brad Lander: I said I wasn’t going to, but I actually think it’s useful. You know, people—I don’t know that everyone knows what “popular front” refers to, but it refers to anti-fascist coalitions that did include a pretty big range of people on the left. You know, in that case, this was Europe before the war, so broad groups of socialists, of liberals, social democrats, but also liberals and, you know, people more moderate in our context, who recognized that if they were going to block creeping authoritarianism and fascism in their countries, they would need these broader coalitions. You know, in a classic form in France, it brought, like, a Jewish socialist, Léon Blum to power.

Brad Lander: And they’re not easy coalitions to build, but I do think they need two things. One, that level—at this moment of clarity, like, we really do have all around the world, not just in Donald Trump, threats to the things we care the most about to, like, the rule of law, to democracy, to these core values. But obviously, you also have to be inspired by something in New York City. That’s not hard. You know, you mentioned it’s the first day of—you know, first day of—first week of school. And when you’re out on the sidewalks watching diverse sets of parents hold their, you know, kids walking—and their hands. And that’s such an incredible diverse set of people wherever you are. Even for as segregated as the city is, you know, the kids walking into neighborhood public schools are often pretty diverse. And here are these public institutions that got started—you know, most of the school buildings in this neighborhood are over a hundred years old, and yet they’re just the platforms for people’s hopes and dreams for their kids. So I guess what I’d say is that model of a belief in the idea that we all do better when we all do better, that there’s something foundational about the—not just kind of like democracy is separation of powers and some principles in a constitution, but the foundation for our shared life in common, in which we get to dream for our kids of a life better than the one we had in this city with people from all around the world who see the possibility of the things we build in common: our schools, our parks, our libraries, our streets, as a shared treasure that’s for our thriving and for our kids’ future success. Like, that is a vision of coalition. And then people really do view that differently. You know, we’re gonna have our factional fights within the Democratic Party, within New York City, within the livable streets movement, about what’s most important now, about where you can and can’t compromise. But okay, let’s get to it.

Doug: It felt like such a turn from the last election because last time out, Kathryn Garcia’s voters and Maya Wiley’s voters, they didn’t cross endorse, and so their voters, many of them left the other person off. And if they had cross endorsed, one of them probably would have won, we would not have been in this nightmare that we’re in with Eric Adams. This time around, the kind of purity test that I think sometimes the left—that’s very self defeating on the left, just didn’t happen. I felt like people on the left, this broad definition of that, understood the stakes better than I can recall in any other election. I think part of that is because you and Zohran communicated those stakes as well as you did, but something just shifted. I think maybe it was having Trump in the White House or something like that, but it was very different this time around.

Brad Lander: Agreed. I mean, I said that a lot throughout the campaign. People would ask me about, okay, so what are you gonna do differently from last time? We’ve got ranked choice voting, but we had it four years ago, and that cross endorsement didn’t happen. And part of what I would say is, look, I’m controller because people who voted either for Kathryn Garcia or for Maya Wiley, voted for mayor, voted for me for controller four years ago. That is a coalition that makes sense to me. It is, in some ways, what I was trying to rebuild in my campaign, but it also requires openness to a team sport: politics. And of course, I went into it hoping that, you know, I would be the one that was emerging in first with that broader coalition. But that’s what it means to approach it as a team sport. Everybody thinks like that, but you better be willing. And of course, normal people do this all the time. People play team sports. You go out for the baseball team and you’d like to be the shortstop, and the coach chooses someone else to be the shortstop, and you get to play second base or right field, but you’re excited to show up again and try to contribute to the team’s winning. That is a very normal, human thing to do. Unfortunately, it’s not a very normal political thing to do.

Doug: That’s why I sort of said you were like a—like a buddy-cop sort of movie. Because I had an old improv teacher who would say, “You know, the goal is not to be funny. The goal is to make your teammate look like a genius.”

Brad Lander: [laughs]

Doug: “And if you all go out to make your teammate look like a genius, you look like a genius, and so does everyone else.” And I felt like you guys had that dynamic, you and Zohran, really—it was clear on the Colbert appearance. It was clear in the videos. Your goal was, “I’m gonna make this other person look good.” And it worked.

Brad Lander: I gotta tell you one funny story, though, that may be transition for talking about our livable streets infrastructure. Because one of the fun things we did during that week was to ride down the Prospect Park West bike lane. Actually, we were coming from my house in the South Slope where we had done the pre-interview with Colbert’s team, because we were going on a couple of days later. And we had decided after the cross endorsement, we would visit each other’s neighborhood. So I had gone the day before to Steinway Street, and we had gone to some of the Yemeni cafes there. And then he came over here, we did the Colbert thing, and then we jumped on Citi Bikes and rode up to the park and then rode down the Prospect Park West bike lane toward Grand Army Plaza. You know, I feel a lot of pride in that bike lane. So he was like, “All right, it’s your neighborhood.” And so I was riding in front, but as we came into Grand Army Plaza, all the press and people were there, so I was like, “Zohran, come on up.” And so we’re riding side by side. We reach Grand Army Plaza, he gets off in a very elegant rolling dismount. And then, you know, there’s some of the comments are about, you know, how, you know, sweet and buddy-cop movie it is, and how ranked choice voting is the cure for male loneliness. But honestly, most of the comments were about his rolling dismount. And like, “Dude, you even gotta look better than me getting off a bicycle?”

Doug: That was the moment he became mayor, basically.

Sarah: [laughs] That’s right. And considering the history of that bike lane, which we’re gonna get into, I think it would have been poetic if you had owned that moment. But these are the sacrifices we have to make. But yeah.

Brad Lander: But this kind of goes to Doug’s point. It’s like, sure, you think, “Ah, you know, I could do a rolling dismount.” And then you think, “The project here is bigger. The bike lane looks good, Grand Army Plaza looks good, Prospect Park looks good. We are trying to build a future for a politics that can do more of that. And what’s not important is how I get off a bicycle.

Doug: All right, so let’s talk about Prospect Park West. Sarah, I’m gonna put you on the spot here for a moment because we were joking—we just recorded the audiobook, and we each had a word or a phrase we could not pronounce out loud, and yours was “Prospect Park West.”

Sarah: No, it was “Prospect Park West bike lane.” It was the full …

Doug: Oh, okay. So I’ll take this. I’ll lead this part of the …

Sarah: See, I can say it now.

Doug: You did it. Yeah.

Brad Lander: But the language here is so significant because was it a bike lane or a bike path? And was it a trial period or a pilot project, turned out to be the subject of all the litigation.

Doug: All right, so we’ll back it up a little bit. So June 2010, DOT installs this bike lane, goes from a three-lane street down to a two-lane street with a two-way bike lane—much safer. But of course, let’s say a loud minority started making trouble about it. And this wasn’t your ordinary group of NIMBYs. This was some of the most powerful people in your district. You were then in your first term as city council?

Brad Lander: Just a few months. I had literally started in January of 2010.

Doug: Yeah, so—and you’re going up against a dean of Brooklyn College, a former deputy mayor under Giuliani, and the former DOT commissioner who happens to be married to Senator Chuck Schumer. This is a lot to take on. How did you navigate this? I know the answers to some of these questions, because this is how I kind of cut my teeth in the livable streets movement. It’s how I got introduced to you. And it really was a knockdown, drag out fight that a different city council person, a different elected official could have found a compromise. And we sort of know what those compromises look like, which is the status quo. How did you feel when that opposition started mounting?

Brad Lander: It really was my first big political battle. You know, I had run for city council in 2009. I hadn’t been in politics before. I had run two non-profit affordable housing groups, one in the neighborhood, the Fifth Avenue Committee and the Pratt Center. So I was already a part of the livable streets community. At the Pratt Center, we had supported the effort to bring congestion pricing into the city, and done a lot of work on bus rapid transit. And so I wasn’t a total neophyte, but I had been a policy wonk and a planner in the work, not an elected official or a political leader in it. I had been on Community Board 6 when we voted to ask DOT to bring the bike lane, and had voted in favor of that resolution.

Brad Lander: So I knew which side I was on, but I was in no way prepared for the level of backlash. I wasn’t surprised that there were opponents, but this wound up just exploding in a way that was surprising to me. And I was like, “Whoa!” We put up a web form, like a survey, and I remember it was like a 13-question survey with three open-ended questions about how people felt about it. Three thousand people filled out the survey.

Sarah: Whoa!

Brad Lander: And I mean, two thousand in favor, but a thousand opposed. So on the one hand, it was clear how people felt, which was really useful. And also it was clear there was a very strong—of course, if people lived—maybe not of course, but if people lived on or closer to Prospect Park West, they were more likely to be opposed, and clearly in a certain way to feel more strongly, like oppositional energy. Like that’s not that there wasn’t a huge amount of support, but there was an anger that it was clear people were gonna remember. And so yeah, I had some thoughts of maybe there’s a way to navigate, to compromise here. It’s kind of where you go if you’re an elected official. But I had a few things.

Brad Lander: First, I had an amazing policy director named Michael Freedman-Schnapp, who already at that point as a pretty young person was a real leader on livable streets and really my most important educator on these issues. And we went back and forth about it a little, and what was clear to me here was, you know, there wasn’t actually going to be, even if we wanted, like, making everyone happy. That wasn’t a thing here. And so it would be better to just lean in and be clear with people about why I believed it was gonna be better when we got there. And, of course, let’s listen. We found a few things to do, like make sure the design of it echoed Prospect Park. A little thing like having aggregate concrete on the islands matching the aggregate concrete of the Prospect park West sidewalks. Like, fair enough. Let’s make it as nice as we can, but let’s also just have the courage to say this is gonna make the streets safer. Fewer people are gonna get killed in traffic crashes. It’s gonna be a lovely place to ride, it’s gonna enhance the public realm of our neighborhood. And the things people are afraid of are, in this case, mostly change. Change is not always easy, but if we do it boldly and do it together, it’ll work out better.

Brad Lander: And the nice thing for me is that really turned out to be true. I did get a lot of pushback, I took a lot of heat. I was the subject of, you know, a deposition in the lawsuit. And at the end of the day—not even at the end of the day, by the middle of the day, it was clear, it was beautiful, it was working, it was safer to ride. People liked it. The momentum was with us. And I think that helped me say, all right, as often as I can, that’s the right way to approach a fight.

Doug: I don’t think people who are outside of New York understand how important that fight was, because had that gone down, had you folded, had DOT folded, I think the New York City that we know today wouldn’t exist in the same way. It might have happened in fits and starts, but that really was a sort of crucible of the moment and of the movement.

Brad Lander: Agreed. You mentioned Janette Sadik-Khan coming to the Brooklyn book tour line here. And I urge people to go and to read her book, Streetfight as well as Life After Cars. She had taken the helm, and was doing a whole set of really important things—the Times Square redesign, moving towards Citi Bike. But this was the first place that she encountered as part of that livable streets work where there was huge and well-organized political pushback. And it is easy to imagine a world where the mayor or what had sided with the opponents against her, that lane had been stripped out as we’re still all these years later seeing that bike lanes can be stripped out when a mayor sides with a different political constituency. Whatever, maybe she would have quit. Who knows exactly how it would have gone? But the work that got done with the momentum that came at that moment is really critical still right now to people’s confidence in the city we can have if we keep pushing forward.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, you mentioned Citi Bike, which was one of the things that was coming into being at that time. You know, Citi Bike now we—it’s just so much a part of the landscape of New York. People use it as a really helpful part of our public transportation system. Tourists love it, it just makes pieces fit together in a whole new way. But that was another thing that in 2016, when the system was expanding into your district, that there were also complaints about stations eliminating parking. And you managed to thread the needle on this one, too. I mean, Streetsblog called your statement a pitch-perfect statement on bike share, and talking about the impact on parking, and it wasn’t going to be a catastrophe that we couldn’t recover from. Now of course, there are Citi Bike stations everywhere, and they are very, very well used, and people just accept it. But I guess my question for you is: At that first fight you were at the beginning of your term, did that experience help you to realize, like, “Oh, I can actually do the things that I stand for and stand for what I stand for?”

Brad Lander: It really did. And that, what Streetsblog was referring to there, was an email we put out more broadly. I think, the inclination of an elected official otherwise—so when something like that happens, Citi Bikes coming to your neighborhood, you know some people are gonna want it and like it, but then in each place where the station is coming and is gonna take a couple of parking places, people on that block are gonna reach out to your office and say, “Do you know how hard it is for me to find parking? I’m never gonna be able to find parking again. I’m gonna blame you every time. I’ll be circling around, cursing you.” And the impulse, you got some poor—it’s not that elected official who’s usually on the phone for that. You got some young staffer. And, you know, it’s quite often, “Well, we’ll take a look at that one. Maybe we can get them to move it to the sidewalk or move it to the next block over or kind of work out a compromise here.” And that’s not necessarily a terrible impulse. Some people will navigate this by saying, “Okay, we are gonna have Citi Bike come, but let’s see how much we can do to mitigate the anger. And the approach I took there was a little different. It was to say, “Let’s explain to people why this is a good thing. “Try to ask them to see the bigger picture: a tiny percentage of the parking spaces in the neighborhood were being, you know, transitioned into Citi Bike, and every one of those Citi Bike stations was gonna serve dramatically more people for their transportation needs than the two or three cars that were parked there. That’s a very different answer to give people on a block than, “okay, we know you hate this and you think it’s terrible, BUT We’ll see if we can get it moved around the corner,” to say, “Look, we respect you. We take your point of view seriously. Here’s why I believe this makes more sense for all of us. And I’m gonna ask you—I’m gonna take your point of view seriously, but also ask you to see the bigger picture, and your neighbor’s needs and all our needs seriously.” And I do think that came from the—you know, in part from the feeling that, you know, the Prospect Park West Lane, over time, everyone came to see that it was better for the whole community.

Doug: How do you cultivate that in elected officials? Because I think there’s like a Memento-esque attitude with some elected officials is that they never really learn “Oh, we had that fight before and it was fine.” And every time we approach these, you know, it’s New York is not Amsterdam, Manhattan is not Brooklyn, 51st Street is not 52nd Street. Like, we somehow forget that these things work out. It’s unfortunate that you’re unique in that sense. Like, there are other people. I think Zohran is a really good example of someone who’s been through a couple of street fights and understood this is better in the long run. But how do you balance that technocratic impulse of, like, “I’m gonna explain how this works,” with the empathy of, “I know parking is very difficult when you come back on a Sunday night or a grocery shopping trip or whatever,” with the long term view?

Brad Lander: Things are dramatically better than they were in 2010 or ’11 or 2016. So I do feel like something is working here. And, you know, some folks, I guess, go back to that, but maybe not everybody does. It was so different then. There were just a tiny handful of people. Janette would come to the city council, and almost all the council members, it was like they were still clinging to the steering wheel.

Doug: [laughs]

Brad Lander: And it really played out as though, like, the city council represented drivers and car owners, and Janette represented, you know, other people. And that has changed dramatically. And mostly it’s changed dramatically because people see the benefits because they love outdoor dining and because they’ve got Open Streets in their neighborhood or because they themselves are Citi Bike riders. Like, a whole lot more of our elected officials are today than possibly were then. So I guess I’d say a couple of things. One, I do think there’s a way in which courage is contagious. It is easy. I mean, unfortunately, we are, you know, evolved biologically to be motivated by fear. Like, that is just a thing we have, and you have to recognize it and kind of manage it in yourself and whatever, you know? Whether that’s mindfulness, or that you do to try to not be reactive to your fears. There’s that in politics, too. But nothing helps like seeing somebody else go out there and say something you think but that you were afraid to say. I think it’s like, why it’s great the podcast is called The War on Cars, you know? It helps—you know, the first couple of times I heard it, even being an ally, I’m like, “Oh, are we gonna alienate people?” And no one—people might not like the agenda, but no one thinks it’s meant literally. You know, it’s a good example of, like, “Okay, there’s something.” Courage is contagious, and it’s useful to have people out there. It’s useful to have been through a few of these battles yourself and get to the other side and see it’s gonna be all right. Better than all right. We’re gonna have some solidarity from having worked together with people, and then we’re gonna feel really proud of that thing we won. And then when you’re in that plaza or riding that bike lane or on that open street, you get both. This is awesome. like all these New Yorkers out here, and it was our courage that made it happen. And you’re seeing a lot of that amongst young elected officials these days.

Doug: Well, I was gonna say your successor, Shahana Hanif, has been an incredible partner on so many awesome bike lane—I wouldn’t even call them fights anymore, just a sort of—it’s almost like the bike lanes now are the default, and now we’re just arguing over the particulars of the design and where, you know, depending on the elected official.

Brad Lander: I still credit to her, like, extending—we did the first little bit of Kensington Plaza, but still closing the piece of East Second Street that they had to close to expand. It took a lot of courage, got a lot of blowback. So I, you know—and now she gets to have that same feeling in the neighborhood where she grew up of doing something that took courage that now both people love—it’s clearly right in hindsight—and that feels good because you risked something for it.

Sarah: We’ll be right back and hear more from Brad after this break.

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Doug: So Brad, you have a reputation of being a technocrat with, I don’t know, a good empathetic side as well. Like, not just by the numbers but, like, I think the Citi Bike example is a really good example of how you use, like, here are the numbers, here’s the percentage on parking. And yes, I understand that it kind of stinks if you’re looking for a parking space on your block. But let’s talk about something that was much more on the technocratic side and that’s the Reckless Driver Accountability Act. For years people were saying we have these tools to identify the worst of the worst when it comes to speeding drivers, reckless drivers. Why isn’t the city doing anything to at the very least reach out to these people and say, “Hey, we know you’re driving in a way that could endanger other people.” I wonder if you could explain the process that led to that. You know, it didn’t get implemented the way that you originally envisioned it, but we could talk about how that came to be.

Brad Lander: Like so many of these, unfortunately, it did start—the real political energy started from tragedy, not from technocracy. You know, and we were talking about Prospect Park West, but the move to, you know, reduce the speed limit comes from the death of Sammy Cohen Eckstein and the extraordinary courage and generosity of Families for Safe Streets to turn their pain into something that saves the lives of other people’s children. I mean, it’s just—it continues to be extraordinary to me that that set of folks can go through the worst possible thing imaginable. And that is part of what happened here.

Brad Lander: My office, when I was in the city council, was on Fifth Avenue between Ninth and Tenth Street. We were in the office the day this hideously reckless driver who should not have been on the streets went through a red light and killed one- and four-year-old Abigail Blumenstein and Josh Lew, and were all wrecked by it. And there was an engineering—a change—Ninth Street solution that we did work hard to fight for that led to the protected bike lanes on Ninth Street, but it was also clear that that was a driver who should not have been out on the road, and something had to change.

Brad Lander: So the energy that propelled it was that Families for Safe Streets, you must learn from those tragedies. But then we did get deep down into the weeds because okay, how do you know who the reckless drivers are, and what is the data, and how much is it running through speed cameras and how much is it running through red lights? And could you use insurance data? Our friend Aaron Naparstek said, “Let’s talk to the insurance companies,” and what else could we use?

Brad Lander: So we did a whole set of data analysis to try to say okay, what do we know about who are most reckless, what is predictive? Can we show that there’s a correlation between these things and dangerous crashes? Then we had some, like, okay, we think we can identify them, the speed cameras and the red light cameras actually now that we didn’t have before, and that people had had to fight a big political battle to get in place, tell us who the most reckless drivers are. But then the lawyers were like, “Well, cameras get the cars and not the drivers, and so you don’t have a framework and the state controls licensing.” But we had Steve Vaccaro and Adam White to say, “Actually, you could use nuisance law and say the vehicles themselves are.” Like, it’s true that people are driving them, but those people are—the owners of those vehicles are letting them be used like weapons aimed at their neighbors. And whether they’re driving them or their kids are driving them or someone they lent the car are driving them, you can regulate the harm causer, the nuisance: the car.

Brad Lander: And so that took a lot of work, but the combination of that legal in-the-weeds-ness with that data produced this Reckless Driver Accountability Act that then yes, unfortunately, the pandemic hit. It did not get stood up at first by the de Blasio administration as robustly as we wanted. The Adams administration never really cared about it, and so it was never implemented with fidelity. But it still can, should, and I hope will be, because we do know that if you take an escalating approach, the first times you start to show recklessness, you get an educational opportunity, but with escalation. And if you can’t stop using your car like a weapon aimed at your neighbor, then you can’t operate it. And whether that’s because it’ll be booted and towed, or whether that’s because your license will be suspended or some combination of those things, we can save more lives with that approach.

Doug: The cool thing about it, I think, also was that there was a restorative justice component to it. Too often in the livable streets movement, people get accused of, like, you just want to punish people. You know, that—we know that fines disproportionately affect low-income people. Rich people can afford that $50 ticket; it’s almost like permission to speed. But your vision of the Reckless Driver Accountability Act involves, like, taking a safe driving course, which the imposition there is time. Which really felt like, okay, that’s again, to Sarah’s point of threading the needle of like, okay, we’re gonna do this. We’re gonna do this in a way that isn’t gonna cause undue harm for people who can least afford it, but we’re gonna do something about that weapon: the car.

Brad Lander: And this is a place where people get it because they’ve been there. You know, if you’re a pedestrian or a cyclist and you’re out on the street, you want something more to restrain drivers. If you’re a driver yourself who’s pretty safe, you see that sociopathically reckless driver out there, and you have the thought in your head, “That guy’s gonna kill someone.” But you don’t feel like you can do anything about it. And look, this is a place for me to be honest. If you’re a driver who has sped, who has gotten speed zone violations, you know how you can drift into reckless action with no intention to harm anyone, but do something that statistically, over time, if it keeps happening, is gonna cause harm. And so yes, the system we need is one that can change people’s behavior, set some limits and boundaries, give you a chance to get right in your action. And I mean, not everyone should have to have, like, I had, like, accountability in the form of being on the cover of the New York Post.

Doug: Yeah, we should stop for a moment and say Brad—we should explain to our listeners, like, the New York Post reported that you had accumulated some number of speeding tickets on your personal car. And that—yeah, that was a big, tough moment for us in the livable streets movement, and obviously for you personally.

Brad Lander: This was really hard. Like, I feel like one of the times I had most disappointed allies and people who I trusted and disappointed myself, too. You know, this was the time when I was fighting for and advocating for and winning that Reckless Driver Accountability Act, and also driving all over the city as I was running for comptroller. And I sped through school speed zones, not as many times as would get you held accountable by the Reckless Driver Accountability Act, but a lot more than I should have. And the form of accountability that I wound up facing was yes, the New York Post put that on the cover just at a time when I was working with again, these same families who have lost loved ones in traffic crashes, who I’d gotten arrested in civil disobedience with outside State Senator Marty Golden’s office because he was holding up the speed zone and red light camera program in the state legislature in Albany.

Brad Lander: And I had really deeply let down not just an important set of allies, like an important set of allies who I had stood with, who had lost loved ones to traffic violence. And yes, like, that was very painful, but it—in a certain way, it actually functioned to show that accountability can be a way of changing your behavior. This is different from you have to take a safe driving class or risk losing your vehicle. But still, it’s like a form of accountability that comes from data and an inconsistency between the values I had and the actions I was doing. And that was now five years ago, and I have gotten one speed camera violation over the last five years. So, you know, full disclosure, I’m not perfect on it, but that’s a lot better than I had been before. And hard, but actually makes me hopeful that if we take accountability seriously and give people an opportunity to get right in which their actions match their values, that does take, like, boundary and limit setting. It takes using data and transparency. It takes some clarity together on what will keep people safe. And, you know, I wish I hadn’t done it. I don’t want to tell it as, like, a just-so story, but it also helps me believe, like, change is possible, accountability matters. The answer was not to stop there and say, “Okay. Yeah, fair enough. I was a hypocrite, and so I’m gonna go hide under a table.” The answer was to say, “No, the values I was expressing were the right ones. I gotta change what I’m doing here. Let’s keep moving forward.”

Sarah: And that’s part of what truly being in community does, right, is it creates an environment in which you are held accountable by a community that then also understands we all make mistakes, and we all need to watch out for each other and call each other out and then repair together the damage that’s been done.

Brad Lander: When I had to make the cross-endorsement decision, which wasn’t an easy one, I mean, in many ways it was effectively saying, “Okay, I see that I’m not winning this race,” I talked to a lot of people, and what I discovered was this extraordinary community of people I had the good fortune, the blessing to build up over time, who on the one hand had my back, cared about me, thought protectively about me, and on the other hand counted on me to find my way to do the right thing with a form of accountability—sort of parts love and part accountability. And yes, that’s what solidarity actually is. And it’s not easy, it’s not saccharine, it’s not, sadly, as nice as, just can’t we all have, you know, candy canes and rainbows? It’s like, there are gonna be hard things in your life, whoever you are, whatever advocacy you’re doing, whatever role you have to play. And if you’re fortunate, you will have built relationships up with people who—yeah, who care about you a lot, who share values, who know you’re gonna make mistakes and so are they, so that can’t be the thing at which you throw somebody overboard or cancel them. And instead who say, “Let’s keep oriented to what the right thing to do is here,” and who believe in each other enough to keep pushing for that. And yeah, like, I found that to be just an amazing blessing at that moment when I most needed it to help me get on the right path.

Doug: I’m gonna get a little Jewish for a moment because Brad, you know my wife Leora from youth group activities in the Midwest and summer camp stuff from the Midwest. And I think she would, as I’m channeling her, you know, the Jewish concept of teshuvah, of repair. I do remember when the tickets happened, you called people and apologized to them directly—including me—for letting us down. And that was such a gracious moment. I feel like a lot of elected officials would issue a quick statement and that would be the end of it. And, like, “Don’t you see what I’ve done for you people?” and move on. And you did the necessary work of repair. And I thought that was—you know, that’s why we have your back, because you do that kind of stuff. And that was a good lesson for me as an advocate. If you remember, I wrote, like, a big long thing of, like, hey, we gotta hold our allies to a higher standard than we hold our enemies, and when one of them lets us down, we won’t be taken seriously if we don’t take this seriously. And I really appreciated that call, and the work that I know you take calling probably Lord knows how many other advocates and those members of Families for Safe Streets, I’m sure. And I do think it’s just one of those hidden signs of sort of your—I don’t know, your empathy, but your toughness, because it takes some toughness to have that happen to yourself and to sort of take the punches that you’re gonna get.

Brad Lander: I mean, look, that was one of the hardest things I have ever gone through, the calls, especially to those Families for Safe Streets members, yeah, were some of the hardest I’ve done. And it felt awful. And it, over time, works out a lot better, at least in my experience, to try to act like that hard in the moment. But then when you get to the next thing like that—and there’s going to be a next thing like that—partly you just have the confidence that you can go through it that way. You got the muscle memory of being willing to try to take accountability, of being genuine in it. And at least for me, it has paid off enormously. It’s not just like a kind of trying to do the right thing. It’s like a much richer life for having made some mistakes, tried to own them, built relationships that moved through them. You won’t all—you don’t save every one. Like, some people might just say, “This is too much for me,” but enough people will be there. And you wind up—I don’t know, my life has been much, much richer for finding ways to do that.

Sarah: So that’s one kind of toughness that you have learned in your career, and as you say, you have that muscle memory now. There’s another kind of toughness that you’ve been called on to demonstrate as comptroller as the Trump administration has mounted a series of attacks on New York as part of its anti-urban agenda. And that anti-urban sentiment has a long history, as I’m sure you’re aware, in the United States of America. You can trace it back to Thomas Jefferson and his memorable words, “I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.” Okay, so this anti-urban strain in American public life is now being brought into the fascist machine of the Trump administration. And right as soon as he got into office, one of the things that he said he was gonna do is stop congestion pricing, which was talk about the long game. You were talking about playing a long game with the Reckless Drivers Accountability Act, but the real long game has been congestion pricing, because that has been going on since—basically since I started covering this beat in 2006. You know, I mean, we’ve …

Brad Lander: Yeah, I started supporting it in 2007.

Sarah: So yeah. I mean, it’s been a long, long road. We finally got it in there, and then they want to take it away right as soon as we got it. So maybe you could talk about specifically your efforts to protect what has turned out to be an excellent policy that is hitting its marks. And policies aren’t often as effective as this one is, so talk about your work defending that, but also what is called for on a broader scale that we have to defend our cities against these attacks. And how can we do that effectively and build those coalitions that are needed to do that?

Brad Lander: So I started supporting congestion pricing in 2007 with Janette Sadik-Khan as bold leader. Mike Bloomberg proposed it as part of his big plan, YC Sustainability Initiative. I wasn’t familiar with it before that and, you know, that was another time when this was something bold that was proposed and a few people got out. And, you know, a lot of people were like, “Oh, that’s weird. There’s gonna be opposition.” But I had some good tutors—here, I’ll give a big shout out to Joan Byron, who was at the Pratt Center at the time and doing some amazing work in the South Bronx.

Brad Lander: And so we get on board, you know, then I’ll skip the 15 years of fighting for it, you know, and whatever Andrew Cuomo’s being against it before he was for it before he was against it. And of course, it was tied to the summer of hell on the subways, which you gotta kind of roll yourself back to, but there was that summer of just real catastrophe on the subways, which did come in part because Cuomo and other leaders had starved the MTA of the resources it needed, and it was mired in debt. And that was finally part of pushing it over the finish line.

Brad Lander: But even then when they pushed it over the finish line, they dragged its implementation out. It was always gonna take a little while because it needed federal approval and pretty complicated. But still, it was years added to it for politics as well. But the amazing community that had kept pushing for it, and in this case, it’s able to come together. It’s not always—you know, it’s a pretty rare case when a good livable streets step is also a good transit financing step. That’s, you know, what the sort of the beauty of congestion pricing is is it really brings those together. Kept pushing, got it implemented, all that work done. And dogged because yeah, like, getting it through the federal government and, you know, navigating the city-state dynamics, you know, kept being work. And so when that was put in jeopardy because Governor Hochul, who is now a good, strong supporter of it, put it on pause, believing it was gonna be bad politically, not only for her, but for Democratic congressional chances.

Brad Lander: And I never agreed with that assessment of the politics, but it wasn’t crazy to worry about. There was that same suburban animus towards the city that was being weaponized by Republicans. We knew we couldn’t pause, that we had to be pushing forward. And, you know, it got put on pause in the summer of 2024, and of course, there was this concern, “Oh, my God, if Donald Trump is elected, he’s gonna prevent it.” But I also just think there was this, if it gets paused, will it ever get unpaused, regardless of what happens? So we reached out to advocates to say, “Look, you know, we’re happy to play a supportive role here. Let’s talk about what’s going on.” And there was good organizing, and people were out in the streets, but no one had brought together the stakeholders for lawsuits. And it wasn’t exactly clear what the lawsuits should be, because there were a few different grounds to be considered, a few different laws. There were some lawyers who were interested, there were some potential plaintiffs, so we said, “Great. Well, we’ll convene the coalition of legal experts and stakeholders who can then do the work to figure out who should be the plaintiffs, who should be the lawyers. Should it be one suit or two suits or three suits?”

Brad Lander: And that’s what happened in our office. It led to the two lawsuits that propelled energy forward. I think we’re pretty clearly gonna be decided in the favor of the plaintiffs for congestion pricing. And that led to a settlement in which Governor Hochul agreed to take it off pause, get it implemented before Donald Trump could be in office. And yeah, then lo and behold, that put the state and the MTA in a stronger position to defend against federal lawsuits when they tried to roll it back. And I think we all knew it would be a success, but honestly, it’s more successful than I even believed it would be in terms of reducing traffic, easing congestion, and producing revenue for mass transit.

Brad Lander: So that says one, like, stand up and fight, which was necessary here through organizing and litigation and implementation. I mean, credit to the MTA and Janno and everyone who did the work to implement it, as well as the lawyers, as well as the advocates. And I think it also just speaks to, in addition to fighting back against authoritarian overreach, which uses cities as its targets, part of why I am still optimistic, why I’m excited about Zohran’s mayoralty, I mean, if the line of conflict turns out to be Donald Trump versus New York City, which I think is how it’s very likely to shape up, you know, increasingly after Zohran is elected. I mean, we don’t want that. We wish we didn’t have National Guard or federal troops coming, that we weren’t fighting these stupid retrograde battles against lawlessness. But to the extent that that’s how it lines up, we are the ones with a place people love to live. The fact that people want to be here from all over the country and all over the world, that people are so creative, that the artistic scene, that the business scene, that the creativity, that our vibrancy, like, we’re gonna win that fight over time because we have a model which is creative and economically generative. And people could just see it with their own eyes. So partly it’s stand up and fight, and then partly it’s lean into what a joyful, generative, creative, economically successful place we occupy, and let’s just show that to the world, keep carrying it forward. And I believe that’s part of how you fight fascism and win.

Sarah: I’m basically a lifetime New Yorker, pretty much. And when I was growing up in the ’70s and ’80s here, things were rough. And there was the almost universal opinion that we could not have nice things. Then we got a few nice things, like Bryant Park was one of the first nice things. And it was like, wait, maybe we can have some nice things. Looking at the scene now, you’ve been in public life in one way or another for 20-plus years in this city. You’ve seen a lot of change in terms of the appetite and the understanding of how our streets can change, what they can be used for, how they can serve our residents better. Has your sense of what is possible changed? And are you optimistic about the pace of change and the momentum of change? Could we have even more nice things than we ever dreamed of?

Brad Lander: I’ll start by saying the challenges are real. I feel very hopeful—and I’ll get back to that in a minute—but I don’t want to do it in a Pollyannish or naive way. New York City faces a lot of very serious challenges, and we gotta see them and be honest about them. You know, the affordability. When I started, we had an abandonment crisis and, you know, the housing—I started renovating a Fifth Avenue Committee. Like, the streets were abandoned. Now they’re so expensive that people can’t imagine how they’re gonna be able to put down roots and live and stay here. And that is a big challenge. And the city will not be itself if we can’t address it. There is so little trust in government to deliver and to build broader community and solidarity. And that keeps getting eroded by partisan political polarization, but also when you have corrupt government like Eric Adams. And so that, and putting that back together and fixing it is hard work. And you got this debate between the pundits and the populace but, you know, that does—everyone’s gotta figure out, all right, how do we make government work better to deliver? Donald Trump is a giant thread in all kinds of ways that we could go on and on about, but everybody sees. And a whole new set of threads, you know, like, what is—how’s AI gonna work? And what do we do all distracted by our devices? Like, so that’s a lot of problems. And so I don’t want to short shrift them. We do have the capacity to confront them, and New York is one of the most brilliant places to do it. And you can see it in—like, some days you think, “How could this city work at all?” And then you walk out of your house. I mean, this morning I literally, like, walked from my house to coffee about 10 blocks away, and I went by three public schools. And the kids coming into them are just like, oh, my God, that’s the future of our city. And it’s because we got some things right in the past of our city. And at PS118, there’s a set of people out defending the open street and saying, “We need volunteers to make it work.”

Doug: That’s my kid’s school. Brad was there for the ribbon cutting of our bike corral, actually. So yeah.

Brad Lander: It is that sort of like resolute, optimistic courage. And yes, can we have nicer things? Like, we have to if we’re gonna make it work. The things that they’ve done in Copenhagen or in Barcelona that make it lovely to live in this city. And, you know, sometimes you get those things that push you forward aggressively in the way that outdoor dining emerged in the pandemic. And you’re like, “Whoa! What this city can be is so much nicer in a way that actually really works.” And then it gets retrenched and then you gotta go push forward again. Like, it’s gonna keep being some steps forward, some steps back. And sometimes you’re making progress and sometimes unfortunately, it’s times of backlash. Politically, these are times of backlash. But I think here at the dawn of the, kinehora, Mamdani administration, at a moment when congestion pricing is working and, you know, 34th Street, even Eric Adams is gonna help that become a busway. And we’ve got the momentum to pedestrianize big swathes of lower Manhattan, and think about what that looks like in the outer borough. And momentum on buses and making them move through the streets of the city. This is a great moment to make progress and stitch those things together. I think people do get that they’re not rarefied things separate from the fight for inclusive, affordable, multiracial democracy. They’re deeply woven together and it’s our responsibility to prove it.

Doug: Can’t top that.

Sarah: Nope. No, I think we can end there.

Doug: Brad, thank you so much for joining us, and for all you do. You know, I think sometimes I think of safe streets and the fight for them as the canary in the coal mine of larger political struggles because they’re really about power, who deserves space on the street, who matters, who’s weak, who’s strong, who gets harmed and who stands up for those people who get harmed. And I don’t think anybody in city government—there are more and more examples these days, but I don’t think anybody has your track record of standing up for people who need help, whether that’s on our streets, in our courtrooms, in city government in general. And I just appreciate that you approach government as a force for helping people’s lives. And I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next, as you said, hopefully under Mayor Mamdani, and wherever you wind up next, too. So thank you for joining The War on Cars.

Brad Lander: It’s been great to be here.

Doug: That’s it for this episode of The War on Cars. Thanks again to Comptroller Brad Lander.

Sarah: Remember, you can support us and get exclusive bonus content, pre-sale access to live show tickets, free stickers and more by signing up on Patreon at Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod.

Doug: A big thanks thanks to everyone who supports us, including our top contributors: Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, Mark Hedlund, Virginia Baker, and new this month, Brandon DeCoster. Thanks, Brandon!

Sarah: And please pre-order our new book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, because pre-ordering is really good for us.

Doug: It helps build excitement for the book. It helps get us into more bookstores. Let’s spread the message so—we really appreciate it.

Sarah: You can do all of that at LifeAfterCars.com.

Doug: We also want to thank our friends at Cleverhood. Listeners of The War on Cars can save 15 percent on everything in the Cleverhood store now through the end of September with code LIVABLECITY. For the best gear for cycling and walking, you can go to Cleverhood.com/waroncars.

Sarah: And thanks to Upway. For a great deal on a certified, pre-owned e bike, visit Upway.co and save $150 off any e-bike order over $1,000 with code WARONCARS, now through the end of September. Again, that’s Upway.co.

Doug: The War on Cars is produced with support from the Helen and William Mazer Foundation. This episode was edited by me. It was recorded by Justin Fernandez at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio.

Sarah: Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Transcripts are by Russell Gragg. Our logo is by Dani Finkel. I’m Sarah Goodyear.

Doug: I’m Doug Gordon. And this is The War on Cars.