New York City needs a transit mayor. Zohran Mamdani’s primary victory and continued support to date has underscored how much New Yorkers care about affordability, namely housing affordability. Housing affordability has understandably taken center stage, but without investments in new transit capacity, it will be difficult to unlock housing development in lower density neighborhoods that are beyond the reach of the subway.

As Election Day approaches, we need to elect a mayor who will champion policies that make using transit faster, easier, and more reliable because that’s how we make housing more affordable. Since at least the 1970s, New York’s mayors and municipal leaders have tended to block or water down policies designed to speed up buses and have been largely silent when it comes to the subway.

This has been a generational mistake. Transit makes it possible to capture the benefits of density — a diversified economy and thriving neighborhoods — while mitigating the bad stuff, namely congestion and its attendant maladies: pollution, car crashes, injuries, fatalities, property damage, noise, road repairs, and more.

Any city that hopes to grow its tax base by adding population and jobs without expanding its physical footprint needs a high-capacity transit system that enables anywhere-to-anywhere connectivity without succumbing to density’s negative attributes.

The problem is that New York is not set up to have a transit mayor. The MTA, the state authority that builds, operates, and maintains the buses and subways is famously run by Albany. The governor and the state Legislature, ultimately, determine the shape, scope, and size of the city’s transit priorities and funding.

As any New Yorker knows, transit is one of the very few services that touches all of our lives on a daily basis regardless of income, race, gender, or religion. And rather than being a contributing factor to the city’s affordability crisis, transit is a big part of the cure because it enables denser land development than a transportation system based solely on automobiles and surface parking.

Despite the governor’s power to shape transit policy, there is........

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