Betty Davis, 82, has compared Brooklyn’s transit overhaul to Nazi Germany.
The Bedford-Stuyvesant resident fired off the incendiary remark in a statement about plans to reroute her daily B65 bus and convert nearby Dean and Bergen streets into a “Bike Boulevard” corridor. Davis, who relies on the bus for regular travel, warned that forcing elderly riders to walk extra blocks amounts to a human rights violation.
“I don’t think anybody realizes what it means for someone at 82 years old to have to walk an extra five blocks to get to their bus,” she said. “Anytime you deprive any group of people — especially working-class, elderly and handicapped people — of public transportation, that is more than just an issue of civil rights. That’s an issue of human rights.”
“As an elder, this feels like Nazi Germany in 1933. What are you gonna do next? Kill me because I’m elderly?” Davis added.
The controversy erupted this past spring when Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that Bergen and Dean streets would be absorbed into a 10-mile “Bike Boulevard” project designed to prioritize cyclists and pedestrians without fully eliminating cars. The announcement reinvigorated opposition that had been simmering since the MTA first proposed shifting the B65 route two blocks north onto Atlantic Avenue in its 2022 Brooklyn Bus Network Redesign Draft Plan.
“We are developing a bike boulevard on Bergen and Dean so both school children and older New Yorkers can navigate these streets safely, with the joint goal of also supporting fast and reliable buses,” a City Hall representative recently stated.
City officials have insisted that the bus redesign and bike boulevard initiatives are entirely separate projects. Residents remain deeply skeptical of that claim.
“Someone’s selling us the Brooklyn Bridge,” said Kwasi Mensah, a member of Community Board 8 and Crown Heights resident of 27 years. Mensah, who has been active in the fight against the changes, characterized the combined effect as a “war on motorists.”
The neighborhood’s own community board flagged problems with the MTA proposal as far back as 2023. Board members noted that the area qualifies as a “naturally occurring retirement center” and argued that the draft plan seemed “counterproductive and arbitrary,” failing to address the route’s actual chokehold areas. The bus redesign remains in its workshop phase.
Peter Anekwe, 62, another Community Board 8 member, has pushed back despite being a lifelong cyclist himself. Anekwe contends that Crown Heights already has enough bike lanes and that the B65 reroute would create new dangers rather than solve existing ones.
“The elders and children have to cross the busy thoroughfare of Atlantic Avenue, which is where trucks are allowed to traverse. They have to now get caught up in that mix in order to utilize the B65,” he said. “This plan is an attack on elders.”
Local resident Stephon Richardson has framed the policy fight in explicitly political terms, accusing the Mamdani administration of using the plans to court newer, wealthier transplants at the expense of longtime black residents.
“It feels like Mamdani is talking from both sides of his mouth in the sense that he campaigned on keeping longtime black residents in their homes, not pushing them out,” Richardson said.
Richardson argued that the true beneficiaries live elsewhere. “These urban renewal policies aren’t going to state, ‘We’re doing this for these unsavory reasons to displace these people to bring in the professional folks who might make more money and align with us more politically,'” he continued. “They’re not for people in the immediate area of Crown Heights — it’s for the passer-by, the transients, the people who are gentrifying.”
The 2022 Brooklyn Bus Network Redesign Draft Plan first surfaced the B65 shift onto Atlantic Avenue, with the MTA pitching it as a speed and efficiency improvement. Community Board 8 pushed back almost immediately, and the workshop-phase project has yet to advance to implementation. The separate bike boulevard announcement this spring layered fresh anxiety onto an already tense local debate.
Davis’s Nazi Germany comparison represents the most inflammatory rhetoric to emerge from the dispute, amplifying a grievance voiced more quietly by numerous aging residents who depend on the B65 for basic mobility.
The bus redesign project remains in its workshop phase with no fixed implementation date announced.