Mamdani’s 15 mph speed limit plan threatens to turn NYC into city that never moves — just like London

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is seen at the Saint Patrick's Day Parade on March 17, 2026 in New York City. GC Images

Don’t do it, New York.

Don’t let Zohran Mamdani slash your speed limit to 15 mph.

Take it from a Londoner: We’ve had a 20 mph speed limit on most of our roads for years.

And the impact of this Stalinist car-phobic madness has been disastrous.

Our once-buzzing city has ground to a halt.

It’s agony driving in London now.

You feel like you’re in quicksand as cyclists zoom by.

Even little old ladies with shopping bags sometimes waltz past.

A 2024 survey of 387 cities in 55 different countries ranked London as the slowest city for drivers.

A 6-mile journey in central London now takes on average 37 minutes and 20 seconds.

You’d be better off on a scooter.

And woe betide the frustrated driver who puts leather to the pedal — hefty fines await those who break the commandment of snail-like driving.

Drivers are mere cash cows to what one UK columnist calls “the 20-mph gestapo”: In 2024 alone, London rinsed motorists of $3.2 billion for the sin of driving over the limit.

Now Mamdani’s plan threatens to turn the city that never sleeps into the city that never moves, just like London — a famously bustling metropolis brought to a standstill by a wave of a mayor’s hand.

But his dystopic dream doesn’t surprise me.

Because Mamdani just loves to mimic our crazy mayor, Sadiq Khan.

Khan, now in his third term, is the pint-sized woke overlord of London.

For 10 years, we’ve suffered under his motorphobia, eco-quackery and poisonous identity politics.

And it looks like Khan-clone Mamdani wants to inflict the same lunacy on NYC.

Alongside importing our state-mandated traffic jams, Mamdani is eyeing up Khan’s broader green agenda.

He’s a noisy supporter of congestion pricing, brought in before he became mayor, which charges drivers $9 or more to enter Manhattan below 60th St.

It echoes London’s hated congestion charge — an £18 ($24) daily levy to drive in the city center.

Both Mamdani and Khan fantasize that such policies will “save the planet.”

In truth, they only irritate and immiserate Joe Motorist.

Mamdani dreams of making New York a Net Zero city: He’s launched a priestly crusade to slash carbon emissions.

Khan has an eco-Stalinist Five Year Plan, too: He wants a “Zero Carbon London” by 2030. 

That will mean more fines for drivers and businesses for their “sins” of pollution.

Can we talk about how crazy it is to think you can turn such teeming cities as New York and London into “zero carbon” places?

These are sprawling metropolises where millions travel and work and produce and invent every day.

May I humbly suggest that if you want to live in an emission-free zone, you should bugger off to the countryside?

Mamdani’s crime policies — or lack thereof — also echo Khan’s catastrophic failures.

Both come from the “Defund the Police” school of thought, wherein the silver-spoon sons and daughters of the credentialed classes essentially give a green light to crime so long as it never impinges on their own cozy, gated lives.

As Londoners have seen, crime soars in such conditions.

Under Khan, knife crime has risen, phone-snatching by thugs on bikes is rampant and shoplifting is routine. 

Being “soft on crime” means being hard on the law-abiding — it makes life miserable for decent people.

Khan and Mamdani are as one on identity politics, too.

Both are far more comfortable gabbing about trans and race issues than they are with solving real problems faced by working people.

How much easier it is to smugly yelp “Trans women are women!” than it is to fix the roads or cut crime.

And one of the most striking things they share is their virulent Israelophobia.

Both frequently go beyond their brief and imperiously hold forth on foreign policy — especially regarding the Jewish homeland.

Both accuse Israel of committing genocide, a libel masquerading as a critique.

Both love to titillate the bourgeois keffiyeh mob with florid condemnations of the “evil” Jewish state.

It’s a dangerous game: They’re playing to the Islamo-left, that unholy union of Islamist nutters and smug socialists.

And in doing so they brush aside the legitimate safety fears of New York’s and London’s Jews.

By anointing themselves as high priests of “anti-Zionism,” our narcissistic mayors make that principle the litmus test of morality. 

It might not be a literal ghettoization, but it feels like moral ghettoization — shunting Jews and those who support them from “decent” society. 

And a mayor who’s more interested in winning brownie points from intifada-loving hipsters than in representing all constituents is not worthy of the office.

Khan has turned London into his personal fiefdom, a platform for him to roll out woke idiocy, pocket-hitting green policies and toxic identitarianism.

I fear New York is about to experience the same.

Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer for the British online magazine spiked.