In recent years, the redesign of McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint has emerged as a neighborhood flashpoint, sparking deep-seated debates about car culture, public space, gentrification, and environmental issues. Changing Lanes, a new documentary from Ben Wolf, traces the journey to implement the redesign and the impact it has had on Greenpoint.
Shot with only the gear Wolf could transport on a bike, the film situates the McGuinness fight within the context of city-wide transportation issues and features interviews with activists, former city officials, and even the musician (and noted cyclist-enthusiast!) David Byrne. The film largely covers the activists associated with the Make McGuinness Safe movement; Keep McGuinness Moving apparently declined to be interviewed.
Changing Lanes recently debuted at the Architecture and Design Film Festival. Greenpointers spoke with Wolf to learn about his experience making the movie.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
When did the issues surrounding McGuinness Boulevard first make it onto your radar, and how did you decide to pursue that as a documentary?
I believe it was mid 2023. I’ve mostly been working as a cinematographer for a few decades on other people’s projects, many of which have been documentaries, which is the genre of film that’s most interesting to me. Because the pandemic in particular really slowed down my work, I was sort of looking—and I had been wanting to do a project of my own for a long time—but I finally had the time to do it. I was searching for a subject that would be a good one to follow and aligned with my interests. I’m quite passionate about urban transportation, as someone that has been biking in the city for thirty years, but also driving in the city and a pedestrian—seeing it from all these perspectives, it’s a rich subject, something that’s often infuriating, also something where sometimes you see real improvement areas, and it’s exciting.
So, I was looking for a specific story to follow, also hoping that it could serve as a microcosm for bigger political issues that are of interest to me. I was shooting a bunch of different stories about the street, and then I arrived on the date when Broadway Stages held what they called a public meeting, but then locked out a big part of the community. I was there, and I thought, “Oh, here’s my story! This is absolutely nuts.” And sort of the degree of emotion and dysfunction that I saw that day really made me think this is a story that I want to follow.
The journey to conceive of and implement the road diet, albeit partially, was filled with a lot of ups and downs. As a journalist covering it, I found the constant change really stressful to relay to readers. How do you shape a narrative in a documentary when the story is changing so much?
Well, on the one hand, it’s kind of gold, because in movies you want to see drama and conflict, and we saw so many instances of that. It was challenging, as you said, because things kept changing, and I’ve been working with an editor named Kristin Bye, who’s fantastic, and yes, our edits kept evolving. While it was a bit of a challenge to incorporate the developments, ultimately, it was a gift because it made for an extremely compelling and interesting story. I would add, for most of the time I was making this movie, I thought it was going to be a sad story that ended in a not satisfactory change to the street, that wasn’t going to be safer. When we had this last minute change, not only was it, I think, overall good for the street and good for the community, it’s been great for the movie, and people are excited and surprised to sort of see this wonderful happy ending, which is not something that I anticipated.
When I would show up to shoot, people would always ask me, “Which side are you on?” And I feel it’s important as a documentary filmmaker that I’m not really on a side. I’m just trying to tell the story as it happened. Of course, I have my own personal views and interests, and I, for one thing, think that people not getting killed or injured is very important. Personally, I’m pretty happy with the way things played out, but I never wanted this movie to be sort of a partisan propaganda piece, and I was happy to talk to anybody of any view and try to understand why people felt the way they did and respect all the views that people have on the street, which obviously are varied, because people use the street in different ways and have different opinions that they’re fully entitled to.
I felt like McGuinness Boulevard became a proxy for some larger issues of discontent in the neighborhood, where it turned into “hipster transplants moving here from Ohio and changing everything” versus Greenpoint’s old guard, when actually, the truth is a lot more nuanced than that. What did you make of the neighborhood’s response to the issue?
I completely agree that this appears to largely be a sort of proxy fight about other grievances and frustrations, which is a bit maddening to me, and also says something about our larger politics, where people don’t necessarily fully understand the nuances of the issue, but they glom onto a certain position on the issues based more on identity politics. I saw that a lot here.
One of my goals in making this movie is to make a film that actually does have a bit of an educational component. I feel like in general, people, including myself, don’t really know the history of the streets. I think they act like the status quo is somehow the way it’s always been or something, when the truth is McGuinness has changed a lot over the years and, in fact, was only created in the 1950s, which involved huge destruction in the community. I think if people would actually take the time to learn about the history of the streets, and maybe learn something about the ways that street design actually works—a lot of which isn’t obvious—because a lot of the people who were against it were convinced that this would result in horrendous traffic. Well, people that study this seriously will tell you that probably wasn’t gonna happen, and in fact, it doesn’t seem to have been what happened. A lot of these easy assumptions that people make are wrong, and I feel like instead of doing the work of actually reading some books or talking to experts, they just sort of go with the tribal, “My group is against it” attitude. You end up with a really counterproductive fight. In a way, it wastes a lot of energy and often ends up with outcomes that are bad.
People are going to act the way they’re going to act, but it’s unfortunate that people have trouble seeing their neighbors as equally worthy and sure, maybe you don’t ride a bike, but you might show some concern for the people that do, and not just see them as unworthy of any serious consideration. That was frustrating to me also, the way these debates worked, cause there’s no nuance. I think a response could have been, you know, we think that having a bike lane in front of this particular studio on this particular part of this block is something that needs to be addressed, but it wasn’t that. It was sort of this all or nothing, we can’t compromise, we can’t talk, kind of attitude that ultimately doesn’t move us forward.
Bike lanes, congestion pricing, other street safety projects killed by the Adams administration, obviously transportation issues have really struck a nerve for New Yorkers in recent years. How do you contextualize these battles within Changing Lanes?
You can only do so much in a single documentary, and I think Changing Lanes is primarily focused on this specific story, and I’d like to let the audience see it as a microcosm for something larger. Congestion pricing is super important, and it’s mentioned in the movie—you can easily make a whole documentary about congestion pricing. I do think what happened in McGuinness is very similar to things that have happened all over the city where, unfortunately, you have a government that seems willing to compromise safety projects or projects that are helping with congestion or whatnot, just because a particular donor doesn’t want it. That seems pretty dysfunctional.
A thing that the movie does is we look at history…I think it’s increasingly clear to me the importance of leadership in progress, and we can see over the years how different administrations have either done incredibly little or made huge strides forward, depending on who is in charge and how serious they were about actually addressing problems versus just maintaining the status quo and kowtowing to existing powerful interests.
What do you hope audiences take away from Changing Lanes?
A few different things.
One, some broad understanding of the history of the streets, to understand that they’ve changed dramatically over the years. There’s an assumption that the way things are in this moment is what they’ve always been…and actually we can see that, no, they’ve changed dramatically over the decades and it could very well be that what we’ve got right now has gotta change again because the world is changing. Global warming, congestion, the fact that we have more people using the streets and many different types of vehicles that we didn’t used to have, we’ve got to make accommodations for that. It seems to be pretty common sense.
And maybe a beginning of an appreciation about transportation design and understanding that there’s a lot to learn. A lot of this stuff is not obvious. The obvious thing to say is, “Oh, take away a lane, and you’re going to make congestion horrendous, and it’s already bad.” Well, it turns out that that assumption is generally wrong. But you wouldn’t know it if you don’t actually study the field, and this is why it’s so important to listen to people who are experts. So those would be two particular things I would focus on.
I also think an appreciation for the importance of leadership and the importance of activism, for people that stand up when leadership isn’t addressing problems. I think this movie is a really inspirational piece about the community coming together, at least large parts of the community, and standing up for what they believe and actually getting something done, despite the odds.
Where can people check out your film?
In New York, the next opportunity will be November 8, at the Bicycle Film Festival. It’ll be showing in downtown Manhattan. I’ve created a website for the film that will list screenings, and at some point, hopefully in the not too distant future, there will be streaming and distribution.
Also, it’s playing in other cities. It’s gonna be in Los Angeles this Sunday, then it’s going to play in Vancouver, Toronto, Chicago, might even be playing in Mumbai which is fun….I’m curious how the movie will play in other cities, like Los Angeles this weekend, I grew up in California, and it’s a very different urban landscape that’s far more car-centric, so I am curious how people [will react].
Anything else you’d like to share?
I would just close in saying it was a real privilege. So many people in Greenpoint were generous and open to letting me film there. I know it can make people uncomfortable, but I did my best to be a fly on the wall and tell the story of the community. You can’t make everybody happy all the time, but I hope people feel that I captured the story and was fair to the community.
BEFORE ….we only had to worry about being run over by an errant car or truck on McGuinness. NOW ….we need to worry about cars and trucks AND irresponsible bikes AND speeding e-biked AND souped-up semi- motorcycles, all zooming past us …or into us. This is progress? At least we can usually see hulking cars & trucks coming at us and try to avoid them. And usually we can expect them to obey traffic signals, have proper lights and be licenced. But ubiquitous, unregulated, unlicensed. unlighted, and often irresponsible e-bikes are upon you before you know it. They speed crazily down the boulevard, all too often with little regard for either traffic reflations, pedestrians or even cars. There’s a recent ridiculous City Council proposal to greatly expand street dining sheds (and reverse many sensible current regulations placed on them). Why not plant those new dining sheds all along McGuiness so that NOBODY moves? We could then play musical chairs, using real chairs, as we try to cross the boulevard. Vulnerable pedestrians are the vast majority. In a sane political world their safety & interests should be paramount. Stop playing to the special interests, those with the loudest bullhorns. Instead, move bikes & e-bikes someplace where they will only smash into each other, not into us.
I am on the fence re this. I am all for safety but bikes and vehicles of all types conventional and electric zipping down the bike lane is not exactly safe.
Here is what I have observed since the change.
1-At peak times McG. has now became the LIE, ie the longest parking lot. It can take 15 minutes to go from one end to another whereas it only took a few minutes.
2-There was a ton of parking taken away. Any spots left are mostly confusing re how to park.
3-Tranfering the B62 to McG. is now a moot point since it is as congested on McG as Manhattan Aves.
4-Any type of stoppage with one lane could back up the area for hrs.
5-Since there is no parking, it is hurting businesses.
However Casanova and the cold ice cream stores did open. It remains to be seen if safety has improved.
All the mouth-breathing dullards complaining about the changes have themselves to blame. If you didn’t treat McGuinness Blvd. like a freeway, there wouldn’t be a need to change it.
I was involved in this community issue from the start, way before 2023. I hope (but doubt) the film talks about the way our elected officials chose to align themselves with Make McGuinness Safe instead of de-escalating what was becoming a highly divisive and toxic community issue. I hope the filmmaker mentions how the McGuinness redesign was awarded $39 million dollars — a nauseating amount of money for an already well-heeled part of the city that could have certainly gone to grossly underserved neighborhoods. Surely the movie mentions how community members who were opposed to the stated redesign — not opposed to improving pedestrian and cyclist safety — were gaslighted and harassed. The McGuinness redesign is a fascinating study of hyper local politics, community activism and gentrification, but it sounds like this film is just one more mouthpiece for the Make McGuinness Safe organizers instead of a truly objective look at a unique community flashpoint.