City Council speaker Corey Johnson’s latest victory in his battle to break car culture in New York City arrived with a bang last week as the City Council passed his streets safety master plan by a resounding vote of 35-10.

The legislation directs NYC’s Department of Transportation to create and follow a five-year transportation master plan that elevates the safety of all people on the streets while promoting mass transit and accessibility, and working to reduce vehicle emissions. As DOT has long prioritized car throughput and capacity at the expense of nearly every other mode of travel in NYC, this legislative directive is, for advocates of a more livable New York City, a very big deal.

“The piecemeal way we plan our streets has made no sense for far too long, and New Yorkers have paid the price every day stuck on slow buses or as pedestrians or cyclists on dangerous streets,” Johnson said in a statement shortly before last week’s vote. “We need faster buses, safe streets infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists, and more pedestrian space. We need to do everything we can to encourage sustainable modes of transportation, especially with the realities of climate change growing more dire every day.”

The new bill should be celebrated as a sea change in agency philosophy. It takes little more than a glance at the DOT’s NYC Bike Map to see how piecemeal its planning has been over the past decade. Protected bike lanes disappear at intersections, never to reemerge on the other side, while conventional bike lanes turn into shared streets which then turn back into conventional lanes, all in the span of a few blocks. Deep outside of Manhattan’s core, east-west connections between north-south bike lane pairs are non-existent for miles. To the extent DOT has planned a true network rather than piecemeal upgrades, the agency’s effort has been focused on facilitating leisure biking rather than commuting and transit.

Meanwhile, despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s rhetoric behind the Vision Zero initiative, drivers have killed 27 cyclists this year while pedestrian injuries and fatalities are up for the second year in a row. In early October, transit riders won a protracted battle for better bus lanes along 14th Street, but the mayor has not yet indicated he will pursue other busways or bus prioritization efforts elsewhere in the city (and has yet to ride a bus along the new busway himself).

By all appearances, DOT is an agency in need of a refocused imperative to plan for urban life, and Johnson’s proposal appears to deliver on the service. But will it work on its own? Or is it instead best understood as part of the Council speaker’s long game, one heavily dependent upon the city’s next mayor?

On its surface, the bill guides DOT in the creation of the master plan with unifying themes throughout. Through the first five-year plan, the City Council wants to realize 150 miles of bus lanes that are either physically separated or camera protected; bus transit signal prioritization at nearly 5,000 intersections; bus shelters, benches, and real-time arrival information at 500 stops per year; 250 miles of protected bike lanes; rethought street space, including more curbside loading zones, less focus on preserving free parking, and safer intersections; and an additional one million square feet of pedestrian space. The second five-year plan would build on these totals, ensuring pedestrian- and transit-focused improvements are standard throughout the entire city.

But the legislative history of this bill shows how politicians can manipulate the City Council’s best intentions. The version of the bill Johnson first proposed in May called upon DOT to produce a master plan by this October, but when DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg testified in front of the Council earlier this year, she claimed the deadline was unrealistic and fulfilling the bill’s mandate would cost $1.7 billion. Thus, to garner mayoral support, Johnson agreed to delay the delivery of the initial master plan until December 2021, after New Yorkers elect de Blasio’s successor and when realizing DOT’s new plan will be someone else’s responsibility (and, as some politicians may view it, someone else’s problem).

Running from good ideas because a small minority of New Yorkers may object has long been a de Blasio hallmark, and he is content to leave the legacy of his failure to dramatically reshape street space in New York City in his successor’s hands. That DOT has no common-sense pedestrian-focused master plan available now is an indictment of de Blasio; that he punted on the issue until the end of his tenure allows us to bring a second count against him in this court of public opinion.

As the chief executive of New York City, the mayor is in charge of DOT, and although the City Council can set policy through appropriations and legislative mandates, the mayor is in charge of implementing that legislation. If the mayor, whether de Blasio or the person elected to succeed him in 2021, wants to slow-walk safety, then DOT will oblige.

“Despite the fact that pedestrian, bike and transit projects are essential to the city’s future as we face the twin crises of congestion and climate change, it’s easy to imagine a mayor who sees them as fat that could be trimmed from the city budget in a time of scarcity,” Doug Gordon, a livable streets advocate, tells me.

The ultimate problem with the legislation is one of incentives and enforcement. Reframing DOT’s mission to focus on people rather than cars is long overdue, but it is, as Trottenberg noted, a costly proposition. Johnson’s initial legislation doesn’t include the funding needed to realize the ambitious scope of the bill, and if DOT fails to achieve these goals, either because city leaders don’t want them to or because New York’s tireless NIMBYs object (or both), the City Council can’t exactly toss Trottenberg or the next DOT commissioner into the Tombs for non-compliance. Until the Council also bolsters DOT’s budget, this bill is very much aspirational.

But there’s nothing wrong with aspirational legislation—particularly legislation that can be a building block for a decade’s worth of policy. After all, even with funding to implement the master plan still up in the air, DOT has to create the plan, and once a plan to achieve Johnson’s goals exists, the agency can easily move into implementation with the right leadership push and the right funding. In essence, then, the bill is a campaign promise from Corey Johnson. He wants to be the next mayor, and he is using his current office to set an aggressive agenda that will rethink New York City’s streets and reshape the streetscape. It’s one a mayoral campaign can build upon and amplify with ease.

Advocates cheering on Johnson’s plan echoed these thoughts. “The conversations around this legislation have helped further the idea that creating a comprehensive network of real bike lanes, bus lanes, and expanded pedestrian space should be an essential function of city government, and not extras pushed upon an unwilling city by pesky advocates,” Gordon says. “The piecemeal and largely reactive approach taken by the de Blasio administration over the past six years hasn’t really helped New Yorkers see or understand how their streets could function better. A master plan with clear benchmarks could go a long way toward changing that, even if the fruits of such a plan don’t pay off for years or hinge on such unpredictable nature of politics, budgets, and other unforeseen circumstances.”

Ultimately, de Blasio’s decision to punt on pushing for the master plan right now is disappointing but predictable. But the City Council has set the stage for the 2021 mayoral race a few years early, and the next mayor will either take the reins and run with it or frustrate the badly-needed reshaping of New York City streets. The fate of Corey Johnson’s master plan will very much be on the ballot when the de Blasio era draws to an end.

Benjamin Kabak is the editor of Second Ave. Sagas, where he covers all things transportation in New York City. You can find him on Twitter via @2AvSagas.