Bureaucracy Killed a Bronx Busway… and Other Reasons Why We Created Civic Pulse.
A never-realized 2019 proposal to build a busway in the Bronx is the perfect allegory for everything that's wrong with New York City politics—and what we aim to challenge at Civic Pulse.
Broken bus lanes in Queens. This is the kind of policy failure we aim to challenge in Civic Pulse.
Dude, where’s my bus lane?
Six years ago, New York City officials set out to bring bus lanes to a .8 mile stretch of Fordham Road in the Bronx.
The value proposition was simple: The busway would allow MTA vehicles to zip past traffic on the second-busiest commuter route in the five boroughs, speeding up commutes for the approximately 85,000 locals who travel along the corridor every day.
But while the plan was simple, its execution —like most things involving New York City's bureaucracy—proved far more complicated.
Over the next four years, the proposal fell apart as it crawled through New York’s sluggish public engagement process. That process included an endless stream of community meetings, unfortunately, that seemed to amplify the voices of a loud and privileged few who wanted to kill the project.
Ultimately, Mayor Eric Adams scrapped the busway in 2023 at the urging of Bronx Council Member Feliz Ortiz and local business owners who raised concerns that the proposal would reduce parking spots (it wouldn’t) across a large swath of the Fordham Rd area—a sticking point that hardly mattered to the area's mostly car-less residents.
The busway brouhaha serves as an allegory for much of what is wrong with our local politics: Bureaucratic inertia and political posturing often kill good ideas, hurting ordinary New Yorkers and often making them feel like their voices don't matter.
That's why we created Civic Pulse.
We are starting this newsletter as an experiment in solutions-oriented journalism. We want to challenge the “no-we-can’t attitude” that pervades much of New York City's local government.
So, what should you expect to see from Civic Pulse?
We'll be churning out stories on some of the biggest issues impacting New Yorkers, including the city's housing and public transit crises and other manifestations of local political dysfunction.
Civic Pulse's digital news and audiovisual content will spotlight some of the more than 8 million people who call this city home. Our sources come from all walks of life—they're ordinary city dwellers and business owners; voters and pollsters; and policy experts and politicians.
With the 2025 New York City Mayoral Election on the horizon, we believe now is the time to publish stories that spotlight the importance of local government in our lives.
Those stories will ask questions, and they'll also demand answers.
What does Civic Pulse believe in?
Civic Pulse believes that New York can and should be a city where housing is affordable, trains show up on time, and economic opportunities are plentiful. We want a New York that can thrive in the new century—a city that can and does build for the future.
Good reporting and writing has the power to inspire, outrage and drive collective action.
We hope this newsletter can serve as a vehicle to bring together people who want to solve New York’s greatest challenges.
To learn about our mission, click here.