Stuff like the continued ADA station rollout, contactless payment, and signal modernization were things that he spearheaded. The trains in 2017 were an absolute shitshow, and he managed to turn it around. He wasn't a magic bullet—the MTA remains a terribly inefficient organization, and fact that Cuomo could effectively strip him of authority to undermine him demonstrates the limits of what he was able to accomplish—but the city would absolutely be worse off without his term here.

Hindsight is 20/20. Not going to blame the city in the middle of a massive pandemic for not fast-tracking road fixes (especially since you'd need workers in a time before vaccines and high Covid lethality to do it.)

Could absolutely have been a succession of trees. City living is tough on trees, they don't live all that long compared to the boonies. I've seen trees that can get as big as the present one in 30-40 years.

There was at one point going to be a train that ran from Bay Ridge across the narrows. They even started on the tunnel before the Second World War and funding cuts killed it, and we got the Verrazano Narrows Bridge instead.

Staten Island really needs a northern rail line, and a rail connection into Brooklyn would be good too, but it's still a very remote place. Few people are going to want to commute two hours by train through Brooklyn into Manhattan.

There's the entire north side of Staten Island that doesn't have rail transit. It's going to stay red and underdeveloped without mass transit.

It's still an issue that extending the train would only get you to south Brooklyn, so you still would realistically need to focus on connecting to the ferry, but there's absolutely an opportunity for transit in Staten Island. You only break the stranglehold of cars being the only option by providing other options.